Alabama Power Company has agreed to pay $222,046 in damages and penalties for a chemical spill and fish kill in March about 30 miles northwest of Birmingham. The spill happened near the company’s coal-fired power plant on the Mulberry Fork of the Black Warrior River.
The agreement, negotiated between Alabama Power and the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, includes a $50,000 civil penalty and $172,046 to compensate for the fish killed in the incident, which occurred just outside the William C. Gorgas Electric Generating Plant in Parrish, Walker County.
Plant Gorgas, as it is commonly known, closed earlier this year after more than 100 years of operation.
The proposed consent order was posted on ADEM’s web site Wednesday morning and is currently up for public comment for 30 days.
“We take our responsibility to protect the environment seriously,” Alabama Power spokesman Michael Sznajderman said of the consent order. "This was an accident, and when an accident takes place, we try to make it right.
“We intend to comply with all elements of the order, including paying the fine.”
The fish kill is believed to be related to a spill of a fire suppression chemical into Baker Creek, on March 23. Alabama Power says about 650-700 gallons of the chemical spilled, along with 22,000 gallons of water, after a fire suppression system malfunctioned.
Alabama Power reported the chemical spill on March 24, but the fish kill was not reported until March 29, when a fisherman on the Mulberry Fork reported seeing a large number of dead gar and blue catfish, according to the incident report filed by the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.
After a fish kill in Alabama, ADCNR is responsible for counting, measuring and estimating a value for the fish killed, while ADEM attempts to determine a potential cause for the fish kill.
The ADCNR report for the incident notes that the tally of fish killed in the incident, a total of 503, “is considered to be conservative and underestimates damages.”
The ADCNR report notes that six days passed before the fish kill and that “it is very likely that many fish, especially the smaller fish, disappeared through decomposition or predation by scavengers and were unaccounted for by the fish kill investigators.”
ADCNR investigators also reported that they were asked by Alabama Power personnel to leave the premises of the power plant when they first arrived because they were not carrying their official state identification. According to the report, when they returned approximately two hours later, “many” of the dead fish from the water had been removed and were not included in the final tally of fish killed in the incident.
Sznajderman said the company did remove some dead fish after the spill, but that other fish were observed swimming normally in the area.
“When we saw dead fish in the immediate area, we removed them so they would not become a nuisance or potentially affect human health, which is possible if they remained in the water,” he said. “We disposed of them properly.”
ADEM says the consent order is not an admission of liability by Alabama Power, but is intended to “resolve the violations cited herein without the unwarranted expenditure of state resources in further prosecuting the alleged violations.”
Since the power plant is now retired and the fire suppression system that malfunctioned completely removed, ADEM said in the consent order that the violations would not be repeated.
Riverkeeper: Fine is a ‘slap on the wrist’
Black Warrior Riverkeeper Nelson Brooke said the proposed consent order failed to account for the removal of fish by Alabama Power Company or other factors that could have increased the amount of the penalty.
“The $50,000 ADEM penalty is a mere slap on the wrist that Alabama Power was happy to agree to, without any admission of wrongdoing,” Brooke said. “This is not ‘timely and effective enforcement’ - it took ADEM well over 6 months to reach a compromise agreement with Alabama Power, well after Plant Gorgas was shuttered on April 15.”
Brooke also criticized ADEM for not investigating immediately after Alabama Power reported the chemical spill and said that ADEM’s narrative in the consent order simply restates the information from Alabama Power’s March 26 letter to ADEM reporting the spill.
“ADEM only performed their investigation after ADCNR informed them of the fish kill six days later,” Brooke said. "ADEM failed to sample for chemical constituents that are indicative of the chemical product spilled.
“There is no ADEM report with findings or conclusions in this document, just a compilation of analytical data, blurry photos, and a penalty calculation sheet.”
Public comments accepted
ADEM’s public notice said written comments on the consent order, including a request for a public hearing, can be submitted over the next 30 days to hearing.officer@adem.alabama.gov, or the following address:
Alabama Department of Environmental Management
Attention: Jeffery W. Kitchens, Chief of the Water Division
P.O. Box 301463
Montgomery, Alabama 36130-1463
The full text of the consent order is embedded below: