Environmental Quality Raises Public Health Concerns

Wheatfield, IN – Since the 1970s, the citizens of this small town in rural Jasper County have lived, worked, and played next to the towering smoke stacks of – and under the clouds of pollution pouring from – NIPSCO’s massive R.M. Schahfer coal-burning electric power plant.  

On Saturday, more than 30 of those residents sounded off about their industrial neighbor – deemed one of 22 “super polluters,” the worst air-polluting coal plants in the nation in a report by The Center for Public Integrity, USA Today, and The Weather Channel. Indiana is burdened with five super polluters, more than any other state.

“Residents are fed up living under a plume of toxicity. For generations, people have been told not question the coal plant – that the smell of pollution is equated with that of freedom and prosperity,” said Ashley Williams, organizing representative for the Northwest Indiana Beyond Coal to Clean Energy Campaign, which sponsored the event.

“The reality is our communities are hurting, and people are dying because of that fallacy,” Williams said. “With the blows to the Federal Clean Power Plan and Coal Ash Rule, super polluters like NIPSCO’s Schahfer plant will continue to pollute at-will while treating Wheatfield and other poor and working class communities as sacrifice zones.”

Lynn Housman has lived for years about a mile and a half up river from the Schahfer plant, but most often, given prevailing winds, downwind from it, too.  

A decade ago, she said, she remembered often having her car and yard doused with ash. Such fallout has abated in recent years, she said, but as a cancer survivor, 5 years in remission so far,  she’s known four other women, all younger and with children, who’ve had cancer, too.

Houseman said she’s worried about the future of the children and grandchildren of area residents and called on her neighbors to stop putting “their heads in the sand” about what the plant is doing now and the environmental legacy it will leave behind.  

The Wheatfield meeting was the last of three community conversations hosted by the campaign -- the others were in Michigan City and Gary -- to solicit input from NIPSCO neighbors and customers. The campaign aims to encourage NIPSCO to more rapidly shift from coal and other fossil fuels for electricity generation to renewable energy sources such as wind and solar.

Attendees who gathered at the Wheatfield Public Library also heard from physician and environmental toxicologist Dr. Indra Frank about another environmental threat posed by NIPSCO after decades of burning coal at Schahfer – toxic coal ash stored on the plant site.  

Earlier this year, in a preliminary review of the first-round of data from EPA-mandated groundwater monitoring, Hoosier Environmental Council (HEC) reported finding elevated levels of radium, molybdenum, lithium, arsenic and boron in groundwater samples taken at the Schahfer site.  Frank said the data showed some levels were many multiples above clean drinking water standards.

Frank is the environmental health director for HEC  and an adjunct faculty member at the Indiana University Fairbanks School of Public Health.  

HEC has recommended any residence with a well located within a mile of the plant should have its water tested. That’s about 60 to 70 homes, according to published reports.

“If it were my well, I’d want it tested,” Frank said.

Another Wheatfield resident, Jean Hunter Schroeder lives Southeast of the Schahfer plant.  She is is one of 4 citizens that received a notice about undrinkable water. Jean’s daughter,Kelly Hunter Schroeder,   said “My Mom has been told not to drink the water by Jasper County Board of Health because the levels of Manganese were way out of limits.”

Jasper County has some of the highest incidence of cancer in the entire state, particularly prostate cancer. Harm to human health from breathing and ingesting coal ash toxicants contribute to these statistics.

Long- term exposure to Manganese can cause permanent brain damage. Inhalation irritates nose, throat, and lungs, causing coughing, wheezing and shortness of breath. It may cause harm to the liver and testes and decrease fertility in males.

Finally, in 2016, two of the Schahfer coal ash ponds were listed by the EPA as “high hazard,” meaning a failure of their retaining walls will likely cause loss of human life. The Schahfer plant sits in the floodplain of the Kankakee River just north of town.

Co-sponsoring the event was Northwest Indiana Medicare for All.  By covering all Americans under a national health insurance system, “we’re trying to improve public health,” said Joseph Conn, the group’s co-founder, just as Beyond Coal is by pointing out environmental health risks.