| Many thanks to Barbara Lawrence for sharing her story. For a clean healthy future, please visit www.cleanuptexasnow.org, take action to support a strong coal ash rule, and as always, be sure to follow us on twitter @texassierraclub My name is Barbara Lawrence and I live in Freestone County Texas. My husband and I moved here when we retired for the peace and quiet of the country. The outdoor lifestyle. The clean air. What a surprise awaited us. Freestone County is home to a very old, and very dirty coal fired power plant, Big Brown. Across the county line is another of the dirtiest in the country, NRG Limestone. But wait, there’s more. Because we are a rural county many of the laws that apply to urban areas don’t apply to counties with populations under 100,000. So they just keep piling on the polluters, because there’s nothing to stop them. Can’t build somewhere else. Come to Freestone County. You can’t spit in this county without hitting a gas well. Or a compressor station, or a power plant, or a cement plant. Apparently we don’t have enough voters to matter so our health and safety is not as important as those in larger counties. They can just throw us under the bus. Many of my neighbors are retirees. I guess we’re going to die sooner anyway. There’s a local legend that when you get cancer and go down to Houston and MD Anderson they say to you–“you’re from Freestone County, you must live near that coal plant.” I can’t say that it’s true, but I hear it said a lot. My dentist told me that on the street where he grew up everyone has had cancer. Since we moved here my husband sleeps with an oxygen tank and has a home breathing machine. He can’t spend too much time outside because the air quality is frequently unfriendly. I’ve just learned about coal ash and the possible contamination of our drinking water. Given the high incidence of cancer in Freestone County, the poor air quality and the fact that we have multiple recreational lakes here that risk contamination we must implore the EPA to clean up the coal ash problem. I never realized before that those mountains over by Big Brown were piles of toxic waste, and they’ve been burying it without strict regulations for 40 years. Enough is enough. Give this county a break. Send a message to the EPA here. Sign up to go to the hearing here. Visit www.cleanuptexasnow.org to learn more about coal ash and fight for a cleaner, healthier future. |
