Vectren offering to buy homes by coal ash pond

Randee Thomas was at his job and the call on his personal cell phone caught him off guard.

“I said I was right in the middle of a remodel. He said go ahead and stop the remodel ‘we’re going to buy your house,’ ” Thomas said.

The caller worked for Vectren. The electric utility’s generating station is visible from Thomas’ front yard.

Thomas is one of several homeowners on Welborn Road near the A.B. Brown power plant in Posey County who Vectren has approached about selling their houses.

The company’s interest in the properties has generated curiosity among

area residents. The homes are located directly across the road from the pond where much of A.B. Brown’s waste is disposed. Vectren officials say they are interested in the properties because they anticipate it may be necessary for eventually closing the power plant — and its ash pond.

Two of the homeowners, including Thomas, told the Courier & Press they were approached unexpectedly and felt compelled to sell. Only Thomas has sold so far.

“The way I take it, I didn’t have a choice,” he said.

Vectren officials told the newspaper the company is only seeking to acquire the properties if the owners are interested in selling or when homes come on the market.

The company’s long range plan, updated in December 2016 and approved by the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission, calls for retiring the coal-fired A.B. Brown plant in Posey County by 2024.

The homes Vectren is interested in are directly across from the power plant’s ash pond — a 156-acre repository of waste left over from burning coal. In 2016, the Hoosier Environmental Council raised concerns about the potential for groundwater contamination near the ash pond.

There is no documented water contamination linked to the A.B. Brown ash pond, although it is decades old and has no protective liner.

“The pond is in compliance with all the applicable rules,” said Natalie Hedde, a Vectren spokeswoman.

However, some groundwater contamination has occurred near a dry landfill there for the waste from pollution scrubbers, according to records on file with the Indiana Department of Environmental Management.

Acquiring land adjacent to the power plant is in anticipation of its eventual shut down, said Lisa Messinger, director of environmental affairs at Vectren.

“It makes sense for the eventual closure of that (ash) pond,” she said.

Messinger said Vectren already owns properties west of A.B. Brown and other nearby parcels.

Thomas eventually accepted the utility’s offer, but not without some wrangling over price. He said he is still perplexed about Vectren’s motives, which the representative he dealt with didn’t share.

“Before we closed he said they would just knock it over and plant grass,” Thomas said.

He said the sale contract initially called for him to vacate the house immediately but that he insisted it be amended to give him 30 days.

William Birdwell, another homeowner living near Thomas, said he received a call from Vectren too and was told they would send out an appraiser.

Unllike Thomas, Birdwell said he always viewed his house as a beginner home. However, he said had no specific plans to sell the property when he was called by Vectren.

“He asked if I had thought about selling and said it depends on the offer,” Birdwell said.

Birdwell and Thomas both have experienced problems with coal ash blowing onto their homes from ash piles at the power plant.

Thomas recalled once calling Vectren about soot covering his yard and being told it wasn’t harmful.

“It wasn’t too bad most of the time but some days it smelled bad, like burning sulfur,” he said.

Birdwell recalled driving home from work on a winter evening through what looked like a blizzard but was really a cloud of ash.

“Vectren came over and sampled it. They told me it wasn’t harmful and to just hose it off,” he said. “It was like a powder, a gray ash and it turned into a kind of mud when it got wet.”

Coal ash encompasses several different types of byproducts left from burning the coal power plants use to generate electricity.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which regulates its disposal, says coal ash contains contaminants such as mercury, cadmium and arsenic that are associated with cancer and other serious health effects.

It is disposed in both dry landfills and in wet form in large surface impoundments called ash ponds.

When coal ash is stored without proper protections, the contaminants can leach into groundwater and potentially migrate to drinking water sources, posing public health concerns, the EPA says.

Among the contaminants detected by groundwater monitoring wells near the dry landfill at A.B. Brown are chloride, sodium, sulfate and boron, according to Vectren monitoring reports filed with the IDEM.

However, levels of the contaminants in many of the monitoring wells are stable or decreasing and it appears the contamination has remained close to the landfill boundary, according to a May 2017 report.