20070812 Ver 2_Emails and the environment_20101215

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E-mails and the environment
RALEIGH
When an administrative hearing hit the
wall and stopped last week over revela-
tions contained in a-mails that Alcoa
Power Generating Inc. (APGI) surely didn't want
to see the light of day, it reminded me: we're been
here before.
And those joyful noises soaring over the Cap-
ital City were not the hosannas of the yuletide
season. They were a lawyerly chorus celebrating
juicy tidbits that entirely changed what had been
a long, hard slog through the tedium of environ-
mental rules and technical state and federal reg-
ulations dull enough to make anyone's eyes glaze
over in despair.
The last time was six years ago when some
damning a-mails turned up that undercut the U.S.
Navy's credibility in trying to create a jet landing
field in Eastern North Carolina near the East
Coast's most important winter refuge for migra-
tory waterfowl.
This time around it was the discovery of e-
mails that prompted North Carolina's leading en-
vironmental agency to revoke a water quality per-
'mit it had issued Alcoa.
Lawyers for Stanly County and several environ-
mental groups discovered that Alcoa had, at best,
not told everything it knew or, at worst, shame-
lessly hidden from state regulators' eyes the fact
that certain water quality standards in the Yadkin
River were not, after all, in compliance with the
company's assurances when it sought the critical
state permit.
Without that permit, Alcoa cannot be reli-
censed'by the Federal Energy Regulatory Com-
mission (FERC) to operate hydroelectric plants
at four dams along the Yadkin River in the state's
central Piedmont. Alcoa got a permit to operate
the power plants back in the late 1950s to provide
power for its aluminum smelter at Badin. One
reason the state supported that application back
then was that Alcoa employed a lot of people at
very good wages in Stanly County - as many as
1,000 workers in its heyday.
But the aluminum business has changed and so
has Alcoa; it shut down most of its operations at
Badin but continues to generate electricity that it
sells on the market. Gov. Bev Perdue, Secretary of
Commerce Keith-Crisco and some key legislators
want FERC to reject the license so that North
Carolina can eventually operate the hydro dams
and use the revenue to benefit
the state economy.
%- The e-mails that resulted in
the state's revocation of what's
known as a 401 certification in-
volved dissolved oxygen levels
on the Yadkin. The state cited
the a-mails in its revocation no-
Jack Betts tice, quoting a June 2, 2006, e-
mail from Alcoa's Gene Ellis
that, "The draft tube does not
work" when a unit at the Narrows Dam operates
at less than 20MW (megawatts) and notes, "the
state does not know that.... If we even begin to
suggest to DWQ [the N.C. Division of Water
Quality] that the enhancements proposed by AP-
GI for Narrows and High Rock may not allow
those tailwaters to meet state standards, DWQ
can't issue us a 401."
An e-mail to Ellis from another official in 2008
said he was "certain that NCDWQ would have a
problem if they knew" about dissolved oxygen
problems and asked, "Will it be enough to `hide'
the fact that aeration valves are not on? Who
knows."'
These a-mails, wrote DWQ director Colleen
Sullins, show that Alcoa "intentionally withheld
information material to determining the project's
ability to meet the state's water qualify stan-
dards" and made it clear that the state's certifica-
tion was based "on incomplete or inaccurate in-
formation." She revoked the permit.
Alcoa has 60 days to appeal or to file a new ap-
plication. The company believes it did not with-
hold any material information, but its credibility
in this case is badly fractured because of the e-
mails.
This is the second major environmental case in
recent years where the emergence of old a-mails
seriously undermined the credibility of a major
institution. They are what someone once wrote
of legal advisory opinions: Ghosts that slay.
In late 2004, the Navy was proceeding with
plans for an outlying landing field (OLF) where
jet pilots could practice nighttime aircraft carrier
landings. The site was in rural Washington
County near the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife
Refuge, where large migratory waterfowl such as
tundra swans and snow geese posed the threat of
collisions to costly aircraft and highly trained pi-
lots. The Navy wanted to change the nature of
the area and scare off the waterfowl. It insisted it
had made an objective decision based only on the
data.
But when environmental groups sued and law-
yers began going through thousands of Navy re-
cords during the discovery process, they found
the same kinds of damning a-mails that stopped
the Alcoa hearing.
One e-mail indicated the Navy had made a
highly political decision and ordered staffers to
fabricate reasons to support it. A staffer wrote an
officer that he had a "very uneasy feeling about
our criteria and the process" and Cmdr. John Ro-
busto replied, "Very uneasy.... Now we have to
reverse engineer the whole process to justify the
outcome."
A footnote: The Navy, six years later, is still
looking for an OLF site. And Alcoa is consider-
ing where, and how, to appeal. Both have a tough
job ahead of them.
Jack Betts Is a Raleigh-based columnist and
associate editor for The Charlotte Observer. He can
be reached at jbetts@charlotteobservercom.