After a full day cleaning a local high school in May 2026, Ana hustles through her last tasks so she can arrive early at the local produce market. Ever since September 2024, when the remnants of Hurricane Helene hit the small mountain town where she’s lived for more than 20 years, Ana has relied on the free weekly market, housed in a defunct church, to feed her family. As she enters the sanctuary on that spring day, sunlight filters through stained glass, and at the bottom of one window a pomegranate glows. Ana leaves carrying bags full of vegetables and a loaf of bread.

The high school that Ana cleans became a relief center after the storm. Across the street, all the houses on two separate cul-de-sacs were destroyed. Nearly two years later, Swannanoa, North Carolina, continues to navigate Helene’s aftermath. The storm demolished the mobile home that Ana shared with her husband and then-teenage children. They made it out unscathed, wearing pajamas and the small blanket Ana’s kids grabbed, losing everything else. “El cascarón,” a shell, was all that was left of the home, she said.

“In that moment, our world caved in,” Ana said in Spanish.

There’s a richness in her voice, delicate and deliberate, as her eyes, rimmed with blue eyeliner, fill with tears that gently spill over. 

Ana witnessed her community wash away that week. Mobile homes raced down a river of stormwater like “barquitos,” little boats, she said.

Outside the market, operated by the nonprofit Bounty & Soul, she gestures toward U.S. Highway 70, the road that had transformed into an unrecognizable flood during that fateful week. It cuts through the rural town of Swannanoa as its main thoroughfare, flanked by the eponymous river on one side and Interstate 40 on the other. 

Ana and her husband, hometown sweethearts from Mexico, were among the first immigrant families to establish roots in their pocket of Swannanoa more than two decades ago. In addition to her work as a school custodian, Ana runs her own event decorating business, working extra nights and almost every weekend on weddings, quinceañeras, and other celebrations in her community. Her husband works as a house painter. 

In the aftermath of Helene, the family spent 53 days without potable water,and Ana’s husband was without paid work for a full year. The family moved into their renovated mobile home on the same lot in June 2025. But for them and their fellow immigrant community in these mountains, the economic and emotional impacts of the storm linger profoundly. 

Their mobile home, where they started and raised a family, is one of more than 100 mobile homes parked on the same circular drive. Plots of land are small — about 30 by 80 feet — and neighbors live in compact proximity to each other. Each home is unique, distinguished by an array of colorful flowers and lush cacti that grow along their perimeters. Cats claim different porches, rushing indoors to peek through colorful patterned window curtains. It’s a neighborhood full of long-established immigrant families, mostly Latino, with a few non-immigrant neighbors in the mix.

The park sits near the river. As floodwaters rose, nearly every home in the neighborhood was flooded or severely damaged. Ana’s home sat at the bottom of the hill, and it was completely destroyed.

The map below shows NCEM floodplain extents across different storm scenarios, along with the buildings at risk within each area. Hurricane Helene is classified as a 1,000-year storm event.

North Carolina is home to an estimated 460,000 undocumented immigrants, according to 2024 data from the Center for Migration Studies and the University of Minnesota. Because many of these community members don’t self-report their legal status, the data remains a rough estimation. The Latino population makes up 6% of Swannanoa’s population, or just over 1,000 people of approximately 17,000 total, as of 2023. 

Tight-knit neighborhoods of immigrants, mainly from Latin America with the majority from Mexico, are scattered across North Carolina’s mountain region. Many of which take the shape of rural mobile home parks. 

Buncombe County data shows that Helene hit single-family and manufactured housing (like mobile homes) the hardest. Combined, these dwellings make up the majority of housing in the town of Swannanoa. According to the county’s property assessor, there are 19,000 mobile homes in Buncombe County. 11,000 of which are fixed in place while the rest are a combination of single- and double-wide manufactured homes not on permanent foundations and other fixtures ranging from airplanes to campers and boats. Most of these homes are owner-occupied, while 28% are inhabited by renters. Swannanoa includes at least 940 mobile homes, which made up 16% of the town’s total occupied housing in 2023.

For many, mobile homes are a pathway to homeownership for working-class people, especially immigrants, who can purchase them with cash and avoid the rental market. In the face of a federally declared climate disaster, mobile homeowners qualify for FEMA aid if they are also U.S. citizens. Undocumented homeowners, however, do not qualify for any type of FEMA financial assistance. 

North Carolina’s undocumented immigrants bear one of the largest burdens of loss and displacement post-Helene. In interviews with The Margin, immigrants in mobile home parks relayed numerous difficulties, including barriers to FEMA funding, targeting from xenophobic vigilantes, the threat of eviction and an increased federal ICE presence in small-town immigrant enclaves that previously went under the radar. 

While the ground under many homes has long since dried, these hardships persist for many immigrants like Ana almost two years after the storm. 

“I feel like I’m living in a different place,” says Ana.

How FEMA shuts immigrants out of recovery

Commotion woke Hermila Contreras in the early morning hours of Sept. 27, 2024, when the remnants of Hurricane Helene barreled through North Carolina. Contreras’ mobile home sits on the same street where Ana lives, except at the top of the hill. No one knocked on her door (like a firefighter did at Ana’s) to order them to evacuate. So Contreras decided to wait out the storm as water rushed down the hill.

She and her teenage daughter were crouched inside a bedroom when a large tree toppled and crashed through the roof. Rain fell through a gaping hole directly into the kitchen, living room, and the back bedroom as Contreras tried to save important belongings from getting soaked. She looked out the window to see the water rise and rise, engulfing her car. The rain persisted for days. More trees fell, and mobile homes eventually crumbled into the stream of water. Roads became impassable. The family lost power for four months. 

Mobile homes are referred to as “manufactured housing” in federal data terms. Purchasing a double-wide mobile or manufactured home in Swannanoa, N.C., can cost up to $75,000. Additional costs of up to $50,000 can be incurred for moving the structure, preparing a new site, and installation.

Mobile homeowners at parks pay rent for the plot of land where their homes sit. Contreras said her rent is $600 a month, which was due just four days after the storm, on Oct. 1. Even when they own their homes, residents of mobile home parks can get evicted. North Carolina law requires that landlords provide at least 60 days' notice. 

Contreras said she applied for a FEMA offer of $750 three times; The Margin verified that the agency denied her the last time, in November 2025, because her application lacked specific documents including identification and receipts of purchases lost to the storm, including items she’s owned for several years.

Originally from Mexico, Contreras did not yet have legal permanent residency or a driver’s license when she purchased her mobile home 22 years ago and parked it at the Swannanoa park. For this reason, the home was technically in her oldest daughter’s name when Helene hit, though Contreras had paid it off.

Purchasing a mobile home requires a driver’s license, something that does not necessarily apply to standard homeownership. Undocumented immigrants qualify for a driver’s license in only 19 U.S. states, and North Carolina is not one of them. A common workaround is to purchase these homes using a relative or friend’s name, which can complicate applications for FEMA aid.

Contreras obtained permanent residence in the U.S. in 2017. But even a retroactive transfer of the deed in her name after the natural disaster would not qualify her for FEMA assistance. She thinks this discrepancy in paperwork disqualified her for much of the aid she applied for in the early stage of recovery. She even tried to receive aid from Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian international relief organization, which also told her she did not have the proper documents.

A 2021 report by expert advisors to FEMA cited equity issues with several disaster-relief application processes. The FEMA National Advisory Council ultimately recommended that “alternative forms of documented ownership should also be accepted for instances involving loss of a mobile home.” That recommendation has not been taken.

Like many mixed-status families, Ana said she applied for and received FEMA financial aid through one of her adult, U.S. citizen children. FEMA awarded her family $25,000, meeting only a fraction of their need. Ana estimates total costs for the new home reached $60,000. Her husband didn’t work for a year to oversee the entire project, and did as much as he could himself. They received additional support, such as construction supplies from CORE, a nonprofit humanitarian organization that responds to disasters around the world, now with a team in Swannanoa led by Antonio Garcia, a Salvadoran who immigrated to the U.S. at age 16. Garcia said CORE helped reconstruct 25 mobile homes in Ana’s neighborhood.

As recovery began in the wake of Helene, the end of the month and its various due dates loomed. On Sept. 30, 2024, Contreras said various volunteers who were helping out all day in her neighborhood convened with the on-site park manager, a Spanish-speaking Latino, and a few residents. It wasn’t a planned meeting, but “we took the opportunity to ask about the rent,” she says. That’s when they were told it was still due the very next day.

Through her community and established “confianza,” Contreras connected with community organizer Dulce Mirian Porras-Rosas, who had been advocating for rent forgiveness with a mobile home park in nearby Candler, to no avail. Porras-Rosas told The Margin that she doesn’t personally know of any mobile home park landlord who forgave rent or offered an extension post-Helene.

For almost two years, Contreras has been living with flood damage and a hole in her roof that neighbors helped cover with tarp. Contreras was out of work for months—ironically, her job is in construction. Today, visible signs of black mold have appeared along the ceiling, which has been temporarily patched. 

Fortunately, Porras-Rosas connected Contreras to resources, which eventually led to a successful application with Renew NC, the state’s revamped 2025 home recovery program. Contreras expects a new mobile home by December.

Evacuations and evictions 

Porras-Rosas, who lives in a mobile home in Asheville, has spent years in community activism throughout the Carolina mountain region. She co-founded the Asheville group Semilla de Vida, an organization that began as a way to teach and promote food justice. When the storm hit, the group took action. In a mostly immigrant neighborhood, they distributed generators, water, food, and tools. Organizers also raised and distributed $9,000 in immediate rental and relocation assistance following Helene, money collected from neighbors and friends.

The hurricane not only changed the ecological panorama of the region, but also the economic and social dynamics. Many people had to relocate after having been woven into the fabric of this community.

Buncombe County never implemented a moratorium on evictions and foreclosures despite persistent advocacy from community leaders and housing advocates. In March 2025, a group of state senators introduced Senate Bill 395, the Disaster Relief Eviction Moratorium Act, in the North Carolina Legislature. The bill stalled after going to committee and has not come up for a vote. 

While the federal government can administer programs to prevent evictions through HUD policies and, in some instances, federal aid, the eviction process itself is largely governed by state and local policy. Moreover, there is no federal mandate to disclose eviction data.

“Finding more detailed data on other characteristics, like country of origin, income, or immigration status, can be almost impossible,” said Juan Pablo Garnham, communication and policy engagement manager for The Eviction Lab at Princeton University. This means the actual scale of Helene's displacement of North Carolina's immigrant communities is impossible to track, since these communities typically don't qualify for federal disaster assistance.

When demographic information is documented in eviction court records, a court clerk typically enters it manually or a tenant self-reports, making the data neither systematic nor reliable. Even outside of climate disasters, Black and Latina women are more likely to be evicted than their male counterparts. For Latina women specifically, the risk of eviction is approximately 9% higher than it is for Latino men. 

“On top of that,” said Garnham, “we know that there are a large number of people who experience evictions informally and avoid going to court. Local experts and anecdotal experiences point in the same direction that undocumented tenants tend to be part of this group, and it’s extremely difficult to quantify their experiences.”

Burdened with back rent and the looming possibility of eviction, many Swannanoa renters and mobile homeowners sought help from Swannanoa Communities Together, the organization founded by a group of local women in Helene’s wake.

“What we have witnessed here in Swannanoa, starting in the immediate aftermath of the storm, is people who were displaced by the storm, who were living in their cars or tents or RVs, or sometimes if they could get a motel,” said Beth Trigg, co-founder of Swannanoa Communities Together.

To date, Trigg said they have provided almost $1.1 million in financial assistance to almost 1,000 households from October 2024 to May 2026. 

Paulina, who chose to only use her first name, is one of two bilingual Latina leaders at Swannanoa Communities Together. Before the storm, she and her family rented a large swath of land in Swannanoa on a tall hill. At first, only a couple of mobile homes occupied the land. One belonged to Paulina, where she lived with her family, and the other was occupied by the landowner. 

Over the next decade, Paulina slowly purchased more mobile homes to rent out to community members, while she managed leasing the land. By 2024, she collected rent from six households, the majority Latino, some including her family members.

In the early morning of Sept. 27, 2024, at the first sign of danger, Paulina began knocking on her tenants’ doors, every single one.

“We woke up the last family at 2 a.m.,” she said, in Spanish, of the last home they alerted. Within an hour, the two families evacuated to a nearby hotel together. Paulina recalls the electricity going out at 4 a.m, and that by the time the sun came up, everything had flooded. Paulina’s home and all of the mobile homes up on the hill where she lived had been destroyed.

Two weeks later, bouncing from shelter to shelter, Paulina and her team at Swannanoa Communities Together began receiving calls from people desperate to find help paying rent. It dawned on her that, as a landlord, she never collected rent. Neither did the landowner from whom she leased the rental plots.

“There was absolutely nothing left,” she said in Spanish. “How are you going to charge rent?”

When North Carolina mobile home parks evict residents, a landlord or management company can eventually obtain a writ of possession, which could result in the landlord possessing  the property until the debt is paid.  

“If you get evicted from a mobile home park, you will have to choose from the least bad of three options,” said Garnham of The Eviction Lab. “Abandon your property outright, sell it for pennies on the dollar, or try to move it to another location.”

According to an analysis of county court records by NC Eviction Watchdog, a project of the North Carolina Tenants Union, at least 391 evictions for mobile homes were filed in western North Carolina since Helene.

Another tricky reality for mobile homeowners is forced displacement due to the sale of the mobile home park land, often to developers. Dating back to the COVID-19 pandemic, when there was a federal eviction moratorium, some park owners selling their property would give residents a few months to find a new place for their homes. This type of upheaval continues today for hundreds of families in mobile home parks across the state.

In March 2025, three state senators proposed Senate Bill 518, the Mobile Home Park Act, to better protect mobile homeowners. The bill was referred to committee, but did not come up for a vote. As a housing reform bill, it would provide stronger protection for tenants and require park owners to register with the North Carolina Human Rights Commission. Owners would have to comply with health and safety rules while adhering to new standards that limit rent increases.

‘The house of my dreams is gone’

Monica, a fast food worker, and her husband, who works landscaping jobs, felt excited when they found a beautiful home that they could afford in 2014. For 10 years, the homeowners grew their family on a quiet, friendly street. Five children grew up there, where they played on the swing set in the backyard, hanging piñatas from a large oak tree on their birthdays. The brick house boasts a secluded courtyard entrance leading into a cabin-like interior that, before the storm, warmed the home in natural wood paneled walls, floors, and ceilings. 

Today, the home has been gutted down to the wooden studs. After Helene, people cut the electricity and stripped the copper. The now-naked interior is a sight the family thought they would never see. In 2021, Tropical Storm Fred battered and flooded the home. Monica and her family lost all of their belongings. They worked to prevent similar disasters in the future by raising all of their power outlets by six inches. FEMA flood insurance, which the undocumented couple secured after Fred through one of their children who is a citizen, was also running out, with only two months left of coverage. Following Helene, Monica said they did not qualify for further FEMA aid, like the buyout,  due to previous assistance they’d received.

FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program purchases flood-damaged properties from homeowners for up to 75% of the costs, with the remaining portion typically being funded by state or local governments. Properties are assessed at pre-disaster market value and are restricted by limits to future development in flood-prone areas. However, an undocumented immigrant homeowner cannot apply for this type of buyout.

The family needs funds to raise their home off the ground, Monica said, an expensive effort they cannot afford on their own. And they are still paying a mortgage on a home they cannot live in.

Monica walks out of the house, stepping over a wooden door that she does not recognize, splayed out in the yard, “carried by the water” from a stranger’s home. She rounds the corner to find her Knock Out roses in full bloom, creating a luminous reflection in a large puddle of water on the street.      

The house of my dreams is gone.

                                      ***

The storm hit the same year that President Donald Trump was elected for a second term. 

Historically, undocumented immigrants have been wary of federal disaster relief because FEMA is housed under the Dept. of Homeland Security, which includes both Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. After any natural disaster in the U.S., it is common for Border Patrol agents to be deployed to assist in recovery. A CBP spokesperson confirmed to The Margin that agents were on the ground in western North Carolina after Helene. 

“For us [as immigrants] it’s a double whammy,” said Porras-Rosas in Spanish. “We’re living in really complicated times. It’s immoral, this corner they have us backed into. And it’s unnecessary.”

Reports of militia groups in the immediate aftermath of Helene became a snapshot in international media of the compounding crises of disaster recovery, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. Locally, they amplified fear, especially in immigrant communities. These militias seemed to track far-right criticism toward federal aid. 

In 2021, the Biden administration designated places for disaster or emergency response as “protected areas,” where immigration agents would not engage in enforcement actions. However, in January 2025, the Trump administration rescinded that policy, the clearest indication that disaster victims might potentially become enforcement targets. ICE can use what it calls “common sense enforcement” in sensitive locations where those operations were previously prohibited. This previously required a judicial warrant but advocates warned that now enforcement can happen without one, instead only needing an administrative order by the agency

Reports of intimidation continue. In a video obtained by The Margin, a traffic cone with a U.S. Border Patrol ballcap was placed outside of a predominantly Latino mobile home park in Buncombe County in May. CBP told The Margin that they were not in Buncombe County in May 2026. 

It’s an image that feels symbolic. In June of this year, North Carolina passed a law, known as "North Carolina Border Protection Act,” that requires the state highway patrol and the Department of Public Safety to collaborate with ICE, which killed two more people in the U.S. in July. Neither person was who the agency was looking for. The legislation also effectively ends any sanctuary policies in the state. The bill passed after the state House of Representatives overrode Governor Stein’s veto. 

On July 26, sheriffs in Caldwell County, 65 miles east of Buncombe County confirmed collaboration with ICE and the U.S. Forest Service at a checkpoint at Wilson Creek park. The federal immigration enforcement operation resulted in the ICE arrest of 13 people.

Housing on the horizon

There are parts of Swannanoa that feel forgotten. Down the road from Ana and Contreras’ mobile home park, several residential cul-de-sacs are dotted with houses that remain desolate. Large X’s are graffitied on the garage doors and remaining siding. Homes are surrounded by overgrown brush and wildflowers.

Along U.S. Highway 70, a bright yellow sign stapled to a telephone pole beckons for the post office to return in thick black handwriting: “USPS WHERE ARE YOU.” Blocks of empty parking lots are surrounded by locked fences. A lot off the highway was home to the original Athens Pizza, operated by the same family for more than two decades. The business was renamed Athens Grille and has since moved into a smaller gas station alcove. Another lot housed the ACE Hardware, formerly a well-equipped store for construction workers, landscapers and homeowners, now void of any sign that a building once stood there.

If you drive too fast, perched beside the parking lot of a former beauty salon, you might miss a makeshift roadside marquee exclaiming “WE CAN DO IT! SI SE PUEDE.” Upon opening the door to the inconspicuous building, people are met with cozy couches and armchairs, big smiles, and lively chatter in Spanish and English. 

Swannanoa Communities Together transformed the space as their hub, with the intention of being a comfortable and communal haven for people seeking resources. A small food pantry in the back offers fresh produce and packaged foods, along with baby formula, diapers, and general toiletries. The bathroom is stocked with free menstrual products and pregnancy tests. 

Trigg helped found the multi-racial and multilingual organization with other women who had already been working in the community. Many have backgrounds organizing around the myriad issues in local policy, while others are specifically trained through economic justice models.

Other community members shouldered new roles in service of their neighbors. They are translators and interpreters, drivers and case managers who checked on families and helped neighbors navigate assistance systems. With local government agencies and nonprofits offering little Spanish-language information during immediate recovery operations, bilingual volunteers became translators and conduits for recovery information.

“Many stepped forward because they knew official information might not reach everyone or that some families might feel afraid or uncertain about asking for help,” said Carmen Ybarra, director of systems and engagement at Swannanoa Communities Together, via email.

One thing that instantly became clear to these advocates post-Helene is that current aid models limit access through eligibility requirements. As residents of Swannanoa Valley, the team knew that not everyone could show proof of a formal income, provide a Social Security number, present a credit history, or pass a criminal background check. Swannanoa Communities Together, thus, offers assistance to anyone who walks through the door. Folks get help paying bills, rent (even back rent) and more.

But the number one priority continues to be housing. And the long-term sustainability of future affordable housing plans presented by local governments makes Trigg and her cohort wary.

“We can help people by ensuring that they have a roof over their head for emergencies, but the actual transition from that to housing stability is really challenging and takes a long time, even with support from us, because of the lack of low-barrier affordable rental housing,” said Trigg. From 2019 to 2023, the median gross rent increased 58%, from $908 per month to $1,438 for a three-bedroom unit. 

Buncombe County is considering public feedback until August 15, for what’s dubbed the Swannanoa Small Area Plan, its proposal for the town’s future as part of the county’s 2043 Comprehensive Plan. A steering committee that Trigg served on met this year to assess the terms. Initial plans focused heavily on tourism and building out areas in Swannanoa that have already begun to transform. One strip includes a coffee shop, a now-closed brewery, and a food store.

Separate from the official steering committee, the women of Swannanoa Communities Together said they submitted a list of recommendations to the county with suggested revisions to the plan and solutions. The group included a five-year moratorium on short-term rentals like Airbnb, and an emphasis on affordable housing. 

On June 15 in a public session, the county agreed to explore a moratorium on short-term rentals. The motion received almost unanimous support from the steering committee.

Ybarra’s mission is to continue bringing Latino residents and other residents of color into the conversations around recovery and its decision-making process. Her work prioritizes “access, trust, dignity, and making complicated systems understandable.”

“Swannanoa’s recovery should not be judged only by repaired buildings, new development, or rising property values. It should be judged by whether the people who were here before Helene are still able to call it home,” Ybarra said.

***

Plumes form from burning coal for electricity at the Mill Creek Generating Station, the last utility-scale coal-fired power plant in Jefferson County, Kentucky. The plant operates between the banks of the Ohio River and a low-income neighborhood called Valley Station less than 15 miles southwest of downtown Louisville. The city has repeatedly failed to meet the EPA’s air quality standards for ozone, becoming one of the 25 smoggiest cities in the U.S., according to the American Lung Association’s 2026 State of the Air report.

Air pollution is a known problem for Hendricks’ community. What’s more obscure are the health risks from the waste left behind by combusted coal, known as coal ash. Proposed federal regulations coming from the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency could make finding and cleaning up that waste even more difficult.

Walking barefoot along the horseshoe of her driveway in May, Hendricks said she’s long worried over the health impacts from the plant.

People are dying of cancer left and right in this subdivision.

That waste, known as coal ash, has been dumped within at least six sites across Mill Creek’s 544-acre footprint, enough to fill more than 6,200 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Contaminants within the ash can cause cancer and other serious health effects. But for decades, coal ash was poorly regulated by the federal government. The grey sludge, often kept in place by mixing the featherlight dust with water, leached from unlined pits into groundwater, surface water, and soils. Meanwhile, dried ash took to the air and traveled for miles into the surrounding communities, landing on windowsills and migrating into children’s bedrooms. 

Coal ash contains higher concentrations of contaminants compared to the original rock. According to a January 2026 report filed by the plant’s owners, Mill Creek’s coal ash sites are leaking heavy metals like arsenic, molybdenum, and lithium. Arsenic is a known carcinogen; molybdenum can cause achy joints and lead to liver and kidney damage; and lithium is a metal associated with multiple health risks, including neurological damage. 

For decades, electric utilities avoided monitoring and cleaning up their waste. Then came a pair of disasters in 2008 and 2014 where coal ash broke from a dam at the Kingston Fossil Plant in Tennessee and a pipe at the Dan River Steam Station in North Carolina, clogging waterways and leveling homes.In 2015, President Barack Obama’s administration finally took action to protect communities from coal ash, requiring groundwater monitoring and cleanup plans. 

The industry’s own data, compiled by Earthjustice, an environmental nonprofit that has litigated numerous coal ash cases, showed that coal ash at nine out of every ten power plants polluted groundwater. In 2023, the EPA announced that cancer risks from arsenic and radiation in soils containing coal ash were high enough to require further regulation. Under President Joe Biden, the EPA doubled down, adding the protection of communities from coal ash contamination to a national priority list as one of its most critical charges. 

But the heyday of federal coal ash oversight has atrophied, and long-fought-for improvements are under threat again. Most states, including Kentucky, rarely regulate coal ash beyond permitting facilities and largely rely on federal oversight for enforcement. 

“Team Kentucky’s focus is to make sure our communities and our natural resources are protected from any adverse effects of coal ash storage. We do this by working with our utility companies and property owners, but also within the constraints of federal and state laws,” Robin Hartman, spokesperson for the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, the state agency responsible for environmental and natural resource regulatory enforcement, said in an email. 

Five days before President Donald Trump was sworn in for the second time, 10 utility executives, including the owner-operator of Mill Creek, asked Lee Zeldin, a fossil fuel evangelist and then-nominee for administrator of the EPA, in a letter to overhaul environmental laws, including nascent regulations on coal combustion residuals, a wonky name for coal ash. The last signator, John R. Crockett III, is president of Kentucky’s two companies that form the state’s largest utility, Louisville Gas and Electric Company and Kentucky Utilities Energy, LLC, or LG&E/KU.

The EPA acquiesced in April, first proposing a new rule that would allow states and utilities to bypass standing regulations for coal ash cleanup, and then reopening a case for a new permitting system that could further weaken requirements. In an emailed statement to The Margin, an EPA spokesperson described the proposed changes as “a major improvement over the Biden-era rule.” They continued, “Under the proposed new compliance pathway, permit authorities could tailor requirements to site-specific risks and incorporate advances in monitoring and corrective technologies.” 

In late June, LG&E/KU filed comments supporting those amendments, highlighting the need to delegate the federal coal ash program to state authorities, enhance flexibility for compliance options, and remove provisions for specific sites called Coal Combustion Residuals Management Units. Earlier that month, the Trump administration doubled down, announcing $700 million in taxpayer funding to keep coal alive. The budget included $124 million on upgrading three coal plants in Kentucky, which is home to eight operating coal plants, the majority of which line the Ohio River. 

“The two things are part and parcel of one another,” said Gavin Kearney, deputy managing attorney for Earthjustice’s clean energy program. “Eliminating coal ash protections is a way of helping coal plants prosper.

Now, the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, the state agency responsible for environmental and natural resource regulatory enforcement, is seeking approval to self-implement permits and efforts to clean up coal combustion residuals (CCR), another name for coal waste.   

“The EEC has been developing new regulations for (CCR) that, if approved, would protect Kentuckians’ public health, ratepayers, and the environment by enabling additional oversight from the state and allowing the cabinet to evaluate each facility individually,” Hartman said in an email. “The proposed regulation would require CCR owners to get a permit similar to those acquired by landfills and require the facility to conduct a comprehensive investigation of the structural stability, groundwater quality, and all remedies for coal ash impoundments."

Advocates warn that under new coal ash proposals, utilities could potentially close coal ash ponds that are in contact with and contaminate groundwater, which the current rule forbids, without first cleaning them up. The rollbacks also relax some monitoring requirements for cleaning up contaminated groundwater. In addition, the proposals could exempt hundreds of large piles of ash from any oversight by rolling back a 2024 rule that expanded the definition of coal ash sites. This proposal could allow state regulators to shortcut or eliminate coal ash protections, leaving citizens to challenge a utility's plans for its coal ash cleanup on a site-by-site basis. This would be a Sisyphean task. In Kentucky, there are at least 87 coal ash sites; across the country there are more than 1,000, according to Earthjustice. Experts said they estimate the weakened rules to be finalized by the end of this year. Mill Creek likely has at least three Coal Combustion Residuals Management Units (CCRMU’s), according to data collected by Earthjustice. 

Folks like Hendricks, who often had multiple jobs at a time while raising two kids and caring for ill relatives, don’t usually have time or resources to play watchdog to powerful utilities. She inherited her house from her mother, who died three years ago from lung cancer, and lives in it with her sister. Her daughter lives in a house Hendricks owns on Rainbow Drive, the last line of homes before the green lawn of the plant property begins. Most families like hers living near coal ash sites depend on federal regulators to ensure their safety from toxic and sometimes unstable ash impoundments.

LG&E told The Margin the utility would publish a report defining its CCRMU sites, in compliance with regulations, which LG&E has asked the EPA to rescind. During the licensing process for two new gas units at Mill Creek, one proposed and one under construction, LG&E disclosed the plants would be built on an old storage site for Posotech, a low-grade concrete material manufactured with coal ash, LG&E/KU spokesperson Andrew Gardner said in an email. He added, “It is likely the Mill Creek site has other CCRMU given the existing rule’s definition of CCRMU.”

Fewer than half of Kentucky’s coal ash sites are reliably monitored by the federal government. Self-reported industry data show that all but one have contamination levels above safe drinking water standards. That includes Mill Creek, where heavy metals can be found at levels triple groundwater protection standards, finding pathways to the Ohio River and off the plant’s southern edge. Regardless, LG&E plans to keep Mill Creek burning coal. 

Gardner said in an email that the utility “is properly managing the site to protect public health and the environment,” and complies with the 2015 Obama-era rule pertaining to closing impoundments, operating its landfill, monitoring groundwater, and notifying regulators about constituents of concerns and remedies.

In June, Congressman Morgan McGarvey, whose district covers Mill Creek, signed a separate letter to Zeldin asking the EPA not to weaken coal ash regulations that could expose working-class communities facing disproportionate environmental burdens to dangerous contaminants. 

“They’re not located in rich neighborhoods,” McGarvey told The Margin of coal ash sites in his state. “They are already in places where it will hurt even worse for people who have suffered from pollution and being dumped on for years and years.

II. Kentucky’s ‘deregulatory mania’

When Thomas Edison began burning coal at Pearl Street Station to illuminate households in lower Manhattan in 1882, the commercial power he created made commercial-scale waste. 

In the century and a half since, billions of tons of coal ash have been stored in landfills (when dry), ponds (when wet), and haphazard holes. Those dumps, largely unlined, often border rivers and streams, since coal plants need water to create steam and cool the generation systems. Pollutants from those sites could continue contaminating groundwater for hundreds of years, according to Nick Torrey, coal ash attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit focused on legal advocacy and environmental protection in six southern states.

It’s basically a forever problem in terms of any normal human scale.

Since the 1980s, the coal industry has found loopholes to avoid the overwhelming scope of its waste problem. After the 1976 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act was enacted, governing the disposal of waste, the 1980 Bevill Amendment granted polluters regulatory relief by classifying coal ash as a non-hazardous waste, which allowed the industry to continue to dispose of it in landfills and ponds. The EPA reaffirmed that decision in 1993 and 2000, but environmentalists have long protested this exception, arguing coal ash contains dozens of heavy metals and radiation that would qualify other materials as hazardous. 

Kentucky has long been a leader in coal power, a trend on the decline. About 67% of the state’s power grid came from coal in 2024, down from more than 90% a decade earlier. Coal power declined as natural gas became cheaper, the coal supply diminished, and the global energy market pulled away from one of the world’s dirtiest fuels. 

While there has been a reduction in coal, a rapid increase in electricity demand and a failure to quickly transition to renewable alternatives means coal continues to stick around. Last year, LG&E/KU projected its energy demand could double in the coming years, largely from data centers. Activists against data centers in Jefferson County are pushing back against LG&E/KU’s request to build more gas and extend coal, which they say will fuel projects like the 400-megawatt data center approved by Louisville regulators about 12 miles north of the plant.

The map below displays coal ash sites and data centers across Kentucky and near its border, with each site's status available by hovering over its location. The Ohio River is highlighted in red to illustrate the concentration of these sites near major waterways. The map also includes county-level census data showing the percentage of residents who identify as people of color.

Meanwhile, state lawmakers have made it exceedingly difficult to transition to cleaner sources of energy. A pair of laws passed in 2023 and 2024 made it more difficult to retire fossil-fired units and to replace fossil fuels with most renewables. Republican legislators during this year’s session proposed rolling back state environmental regulations under a bill that would make it impossible to pass state environmental laws in Kentucky that are stricter than federal laws. 

“There’s a deregulatory mania in Kentucky right now,” said Michael Washburn, executive director of the Kentucky Waterways Alliance, a nonprofit focused on protecting state waterways.

That pro-coal stance could influence older facilities like Mill Creek, which once had four coal-burning units. One retired in 2024, replaced by a gas turbine still under construction. LG&E/KU also asked the state to build a second gas turbine at Mill Creek and extend the life of the third coal unit until at least 2031. Previously, that stack was slated to retire next year. Two more could be retired in 2035, according to LG&E/KU 2024 integrated resource plan, but that decision will be reassessed in the utility’s 2027 plan. 

“We fully believe these investments are in the best interests of our customers and the communities we’re proud to serve, and they build upon our history of continuous environmental improvement initiatives and major equipment investments at Mill Creek,” Gardner wrote in an email.

Keeping coal burning will cost ratepayers, critics say. Coal generation is expensive, and so is building new gas-fired units, according to a 2025 report by the Kentucky Resources Council. The state could save electricity customers $2.6 billion by mid-century if utilities transitioned away from coal and gas to renewable energy and battery storage, according to the report, potentially reaching a 95% clean energy portfolio by 2050 without increasing costs to consumers.

Ann Gunter, a 72-year-old who moved into her home near Mill Creek in 2003, said she was told the plant would be converted to gas by 2006. More than 20 years later, she said she’s still waiting, frustrated by the soot that accumulates on her house and car. LG&E/KU told The Margin it was not familiar with these claims and was actively transitioning portions of generation on the Mill Creek site from coal to natural gas. Gardner said Mill Creek Unit 5, the first combined cycle gas plant at the site, should be operating by spring 2027.

“They keep telling us, ‘next year we’re converting to gas,’” Gunter said from her front porch, wiping dust off the railing. “And next year never comes."

III. Between Rainbow Drive and the ‘Cloud Maker’

Beneath the towering Mill Creek station, along Rainbow Drive and on surrounding streets, dogs bark. Day lilies bloom orange. Tomato and cucumber starts wait in plastic trays on the patio. Robins’ feet click on the gutters, and cardinals perch on the edge of a bird bath shaped like a sunflower. Canadian geese fly against grey clouds. 

Then a flood warning pings cell phones around the time Lauren Hollobaugh opens the front door of her home bordering a grassy beam that functions as a floodwall. The 33-year-old human resources specialist lives on nearby Tennis Boulevard, with her mother and two kids. Her family is beset by several health conditions. Her mom and son have kidney disease. Her daughter and her mother have eczema. She has sensitive skin, so exposure to chlorine or too much sun causes her to develop rashes.

The Margin knocked on more than 60 doors in May. Some residents, especially those with children, expressed concern about their proximity to Mill Creek but struggle to connect their ailments to their high-polluting neighbor beyond anecdote. However, not everyone feels the same about this neighbor. Some support coal keeping the lights on. Others are indifferent. One neighbor insisted the plant did not burn coal anymore. 

Wilbur, a Spanish-speaker from Venezuela who works night shifts as a Walmart custodian, moved here two years ago with his son and a friend. He said he worried at first, but he hadn’t noticed any health issues. Vina Duncan, a woman in her nineties who moved to the neighborhood 30 years ago from Harlan County, said nothing about the plant bothered her.

But many are worried about the risks to their health and property that living so close to the plant poses while having little insight into the federal changes afoot that could remove guardrails for the plant’s pollution. 

Burning coal produces particulate matter, tiny bits of soot that can trigger asthma and cardiovascular issues. Hendricks has suffered from allergies, and Hendricks’ neighbor, Sherry Fitz, developed allergies after moving into the neighborhood. Every morning, she said she smells chemicals. She has to dust every day. 

Fitz moved onto Betsy Ross Drive when her daughter was three years old, making her a “smokestack baby,” a nickname for the little ones who grow up in the neighborhood, Fitz said. The now 12-year-old has allergies and depression, and her 17-year-old sister lives with social anxiety. Fitz said she doesn’t interact very much with LG&E but recalled a book giveaway by the utility at Watson Lane Elementary, then her kids’ school.

“You're hurting my kids’ insides, but you’re going to give them a stupid book?” Fitz recalled thinking. That school has since closed. A second school in the area, Frost Middle School, also closed, and was later purchased by LG&E. In an email, Gardner said the purchase was to support current and future operations at Mill Creek as the utility plans to build a warehouse there to support the operational needs of Mill Creek’s gas units. 

Soot has fallen in the neighborhood, for about half a century. Marla Patterson, who grew up here, moved back in 2000, said fine black residue coated her outdoor toys as a child. She and her family have long lived in the area and, by her account, she has been significantly impacted by the plant. 

Patterson recalled that her grandparents bought one of Valley Station’s first homes back in the 1940s when the neighborhood was sparsely occupied. Years later, it became a subdivision. Patterson was born in 1967, a year before construction began on Mill Creek. After moving back, Patterson was leaving for work one morning in her brand new black Kia Sephia when she saw tiny white flakes floating in the air. She drove to Timmy’s Auto Wash on Dixie Highway to wash off the dots spotting her car, but the soap and water only made the white specks brighter. She called LG&E to complain, but she said the utility only offered a car wash. The paint job on the new car was ruined, Patterson said. Worse, Patterson, who grew up with symptoms of bad asthma, alleged that she ended up with pneumonia after the incident.

“Anything that sits outside is basically destroyed,” Patterson said. 

Her dad, who never drank alcohol or smoked cigarettes, died of liver cancer less than three months after his diagnosis, Patterson recalled. Her mother has dementia. Patterson works in health care, shuttling between three jobs at a local nursing home, a west end hospital, and a teaching gig at Sullivan University.

“I knew living by LG&E was a bad thing,” Patterson said. But she came back to help her family and take care of her grandmother, and she stayed.

Some neighbors who answered the door for The Margin relocated here because homes offer some of the cheapest property values in Louisville, the state’s most populous city. Alfredo Carballo opened the door to his sister’s house, where she lives with her mom and two young children. They get sick more often in this neighborhood, with cold symptoms including a cough, Carballo said. They spent months trying to sell the home but couldn’t find a buyer, so they took the house off the market.

Patricia Myers, 61, was diagnosed with small cell carcinoma, a highly aggressive form of cancer that typically originates in the lungs, last October. She’s lived in her house, bordering a chain link fence with LG&E/KU since 2008, after growing up in the neighborhood. Myers said she lost several childhood friends to cancer, but gesturing to stubbed-out cigarettes on her patio table, she said she couldn’t necessarily attribute her illness to the plant when she’s also been a longtime smoker. 

One woman, who asked not to share her name, spoke through her living room window after peeling back a lace curtain. She said the issue used to be bigger, but the state and the federal government didn’t seem to care very much anymore. Her next door neighbor, she said, died of throat cancer. 

LG&E/KU told The Margin it wasn’t familiar with these complaints.

“LG&E investigates all complaints, operates in strict compliance with operating permits including dust control plans, and strives to be a good neighbor,” Gardner wrote in an email. “We’re continually monitoring, measuring and reporting the plant’s performance to appropriate federal, state and local regulatory agencies, and we operate Mill Creek and all of our power plants under federally enforceable operating permits.”

The neighborhoods around Mill Creek suffer broader cumulative and synergistic effects of environmental injustice, according to Tony Arnold, a law professor at the University of Louisville who runs the Resilience Justice Project, an organization whose work includes a focus on the environmental and community needs around the Mill Creek watershed.

Along with the Mill Creek power plant, there’s the Kosmos Cement Plant across the street from the Mill Creek landfill, the car exhaust along Dixie Highway, and the chemical plants just north in Rubbertown. 

“A lot of communities, a lot of neighborhoods that are marginalized have fewer resources,” Arnold said. That includes a lack of information about the plant, its emissions, and the regulatory bodies that oversee it. Rollbacks on climate science at the federal level also limit research into how climate change, largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels, could impact Mill Creek’s coal ash.

“With extreme flooding, if there’s some sort of accident or unintentional release or if it’s not managed properly, there are all sorts of things that could go wrong, and the fact that we’ve already had discharges in the past tells you that things can go wrong,” Arnold said. 

In a “worst-case” flooding scenario modeled in a 2017 LG&E report, Rainbow Drive, where Hendricks’ daughter lives, could have been under five feet of contaminated water from the now-closed coal ash pond within an hour of a flood event.

IV. Cancer in coal country

Mill Creek has one active coal ash landfill, a roughly 14-story behemoth sandwiched between the Ohio River and Dixie Highway, an artery that helps connect metro Louisville to nearly 1.4 million people. The plant also houses five closed coal ash sites, including a large closed coal ash pond that borders the river and the Mill Creek watershed. Standing in the woods below the terraced rows of gravel, the chemical smell of the closed pond is inescapable. 

Both the landfill and the pond are leaking contaminants into the Ohio River and onto an industrial property south of the plant, according to a January report filed by LG&E. At least 17 out of 29 monitoring wells at Mill Creek had tests showing contaminants above federal groundwater protection standards. Arsenic, lithium and molybdenum exceeded those standards dozens of times across two testing events in April and September of 2025. Cobalt exceeded those standards twice and thallium once.The report said these contaminants weren’t likely to measurably increase concentrations in the Ohio River, where residents boat, fish, and recreate. LG&E reported and made publicly available its own monitoring data, as required under the 2015 rule, but so far no enforcement actions seem to have been taken by the federal or state government to bring the utility into compliance after its most recent report.

Arsenic, a known carcinogen found at least once at Mill Creek at levels 37 times the federal standard, exceeded the groundwater protection standard seven times last year. Lithium exceeded the threshold across at least 10 wells, sometimes measuring more than seven times the standard. Molybdenum at least tripled the groundwater protection standard seven times, exceeding the threshold across eight wells.

For many people, connecting their health concerns to coal ash is exceedingly difficult. Science shows that dozens of elements in coal ash — including arsenic, mercury, lithium, lead, selenium, and radium — can be dangerous and even deadly to humans. But tying coal ash to a specific person's ailments likely requires studies based on evidence of community or workplace exposure, according to Kristina Zierold, a public health professor at the University of Mississippi. 

And so far, little proof exists, which is largely a missed opportunity, Zierold said. While at the University of Louisville, her research focused on communities bordering Mill Creek and Cane Run Generating Station, another former coal plant owned by LG&E/KU that converted to natural gas in 2015 and then spent years closing its coal ash sites. 

Zierold began door knocking in the Cane Run and Mill Creek neighborhoods in 2012. She sent letters about her study through a mailing list of the 12-ZIP code area and slipped flyers under the windshield wipers of teachers’ cars in local schools. She took out Facebook ads and stood in store parking lots near the plants handing out information. Parents told her about learning difficulties, poor school performance, and the prevalence of ADHD among kids in their neighborhood, challenges Zierold knew were also seen in kids exposed to heavy metals. They also reported asthma and respiratory problems, along with trouble sleeping.

Shoeleather epidemiology eventually introduced Zierold and her fellow researchers to roughly 280 kids, aged 6-14 years old, and their families. They would become the participants in an almost $3 million study from the National Institutes of Health exploring how children’s neurobehavioral problems at home and school could be connected to coal ash exposure. Researchers set up devices to collect air samples in their homes, took dust samples in the children’s bedrooms and family rooms, and periodically collected nail clippings from children to test for heavy metals. 

Under a microscope, the air samples showed 43 percent of 261 kids’ homes contained cenospheres. These are glassy, spherical particles that form when minerals melt during combustion and reform in exhaust steam, according to Zierold. Those cenospheres meant coal ash was present in almost half the homes. Children with coal ash in their homes had increased levels of iron, aluminum, and silica in their nails, all contaminants found within coal ash. Zierold worked closely with a psychologist and found a relationship between coal ash exposure and elevated levels of depression and lower school performance among the kids. 

“There needs to be a ton more funding and a ton more research on this,” Zierold said. But she’s struggled to secure funding to move the research forward.  Zierold would have liked to study adults after hearing about high rates of cancer in the communities near Mill Creek and Cane Run from residents. Counties closer to coal-fired impoundments tend to have higher cancer rates, according to a 2026 spatial association analysis led by Charlie Zhang, an urban and health geographer at the University of Louisville also involved in Zierold’s research.

The map below shows the annual cancer incidence rate across the United States, measured as the number of new cancer cases per 100,000 people. Kentucky is highlighted with a red outline.

Much of Kentucky is dark red on one of the study’s maps in Zhang’s research. Kentucky is one of the top five states when it comes to the number of coal ash impoundments, and ranks highest for both cancer incidence and mortality. Those cancer rates are often attributed to social determinants like low education and high poverty rates, with high rates of tobacco-, obesity- and HPV-related cancers. Research connecting cancer to coal ash is often marginalized, according to Zhang, especially in coal country.

Coal ash, Zierold said, “affects so many people, and a lot of people don’t even know they’re being affected by it, and that’s the sad thing. It’s very sad.”

While Zierold was working on her health study, she was approached by lawyers representing a group of workers who alleged they were sickened from cleaning up the Kingston coal ash disaster across the stateline in Tennessee. The lawyers wanted Zierold for consulting, but because her research focused on kids, not adults, she declined. She called the limited research a shame.

Now, the utility in charge of the Kingston spill, the Tennessee Valley Authority, is issuing its own “scientific context” about coal ash. Angie Mummaw,  an organizer with the environmental nonprofit Appalachian Voices,attended a meeting in April about the extended retirement dates for the two coal units near the Cumberland Fossil Plant about 70 miles west of Nashville. Mummaw encountered a woman holding a booklet of TVA fact sheets who told her that the amount of molybdenum, a coal ash contaminant detected at Cumberland, was equivalent to what a person would eat in a serving of black-eyed peas; she also compared the amount of arsenic found at the plant to what a person might get from a glass of wine or a cup of hot chocolate. TVA’s fact sheets read, in part, “Coal Ash is Not Hazardous” and included the statement “the constituents of coal ash are nearly identical to common soil.”

TVA spokesperson Scott Brooks said in an email that the fact sheets referenced were developed to help advance public understanding using information and data from credible third-party sources.

“They are intended to provide scientific context about coal ash and to illustrate that many of its naturally occurring constituents are also found throughout the environment,” Brooks wrote. He said the common narrative around coal ash isn’t rooted in reality or informed by the extensive science, monitoring, and regulatory oversight that govern its management today.

V. ‘Can Kentucky do something?’

Well over one hundred people signed up to speak at the EPA’s virtual public listening session on the coal ash rollback in late May. So many that the agency had to extend the session, keeping people across the country glued to their computer screens from 9 am to 7 pm. The 141 speakers were from faith organizations, environmental groups and nursing associations. They were Tribal members, scientists, attorneys, parents and neighbors living near coal ash sites. 

Susan Wind, an activist who used to live in Lake Norman, North Carolina, spoke about the cancers children in her neighborhood were diagnosed with in a community she said was built on top of coal ash used as fill for the development. They included her daughter, who was diagnosed with thyroid cancer at 16 years old.

“The word of the day is betrayed,” said Wind. “Betrayed not just by a utility company that put profit over people, but by the very agencies sworn to protect us, you especially, the EPA.” 

She came from a state with some of the strongest regulations in the country. After the Dan River disaster in 2014, North Carolina passed the Coal Ash Management Act, going beyond federal regulations, forcing Duke Energy to excavate and close leaking coal ash sites. Michael Regan, former head of the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, helped negotiate Duke Energy’s cleanup, developed the state’s clean energy plan,and later helmed the Biden administration’s EPA. 

“We have a coal ash program that does work,” said SELC’s Torrey, who lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. “It’s the only one like it in the country.” 

A system with loosened regulations on coal ash, like what Trump’s EPA proposed, could allow utilities to pressure regulators into accepting inadequate monitoring or cleanup plans, critics say. Activists like Wind would continue devoting their lives to challenging such plans on a case-by-case basis instead of working with the federal government to protect them. States would become the new watchdog, and most states aren’t ready, let alone interested, in policing the coal industry.

Oklahoma, Georgia, Texas, North Dakota, and Wyoming have authorized state CCR permit programs, the EPA press office said in an emailed statement, and the agency has proposed approval of three other state CCR permit programs in Virginia, Louisiana, and Alabama.

The Kentucky EEC targeted September to formally file regulation changes to join these ranks, pending a comment period and public hearing.

“Can Kentucky do something? Yes, they can,” McGarvey said. “But the reality is the states, including Kentucky, do not have the resources to do this. They know it. That’s why they’re doing this. They’re trying to give coal companies and big corporations a pass so that there is going to be no accountability.” 

Back on Rainbow Drive, Hendricks stood in her front yard. 

“Are the federal rules changing on this? That’s crazy,” Hendricks said. Her neighbor, Roger Mills, a resident in his 70s, stood outside his front door, with his dog peering through the glass. 

“It’s the dirtiest place I’ve ever lived in my life,” Mills said.“It’s got to be unhealthy breathing it.” But he had little information and few resources. Mills spends his days taking care of his wife with dementia, who grew up in the house where they now live. 

While they breathed, the plant burned on.

***

Please note this article contains mention of suicide. If you are in crisis, please call, text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.

In the early evening of October 11th, 12-year-old Seth Friend went out to fish for tomcod on the Kwigillingok River. It was windy, and the rain tasted like seawater. Dark clouds cast a shadow over Seth’s boat as he navigated strong river currents that nearly towed him away. Spooked, he returned home. 

Seth and his older sister, 20-year-old Ariel, settled into their two-story house—where they lived with their parents, two younger cousins, four dogs, and a guinea pig named Hazel—to wait out what they thought would be just another fall storm. On western Alaska’s Bering Sea coast, late autumn often brings storms that have increased in severity with climate change.

But they weren’t prepared for how devastating this one would be. Remnants of Typhoon Halong slammed into Alaska’s western coast a few hours later, bringing up to 100-mile-per-hour winds and a storm surge that unleashed major floods across the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. The region, nearly the size of Oregon, is one of the world’s largest river deltas. Kwigillingok and its neighbor, Kipnuk, a Yup’ik community, were the two hardest-hit villages. The storm surge reached up to twelve feet in both villages. Halong came with only 36 hours of warning, presenting a limited opportunity for mass evacuation.  

The National Weather Service’s categorization of Halong as the “remnants” of a typhoon undercuts its sheer force. Bryan Fisher, the director of Alaska’s Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, described Halong as the most catastrophic storm he has witnessed in over three decades. Disaster recovery experts have compared the destruction to that of Hurricane Katrina. 

On the night of October 11, as the storm intensified, the Kwigillingok Tribal Council urged all families to seek shelter in the local school, which sat on high ground. But the Friend family was already trapped. Within thirty minutes, floodwaters had rushed in through a hole in the laundry room, inundating the entire first floor. The waters knocked their home of nearly ten years off its foundation. “Our house lifted up,” Ariel recalled. “It went really fast.” 

They ran upstairs. From the windows, Ariel watched as neighboring houses smashed into theirs, shattering their windows and letting in even more water. Barrels of stove oil split, filling the air with the stench of gasoline. A wire snapped, and the power went out. Ariel felt like she was in a boat out at sea in pitch darkness. As she remembers it, the house twirled in circles, and she began to feel seasick. “I was terrified and dizzy because the house was spinning,” she said. 

Ariel didn’t sleep all night. In the morning, after the floodwaters started receding, Ariel went to the bathroom and threw up. “I couldn’t hold it in,” she said, “I just lost my home.

Six months later, as of this reporting, the majority of evacuees have yet to return to their homes. Many have spent the time since Halong in limbo: transitioning from shelters to couch surfing with relatives and friends.  

These transitions have been especially difficult for young people between the ages of 12 and 24, like Ariel and Seth. Tribal leaders and school officials have confirmed at least two youth evacuated from Kwigillingok and Kipnuk have died by suicide in the last six months, and at least one other young person attempted suicide. One 16-year-old boy from Kwigillingok who died by suicide was involved in mental health advocacy and was preparing to go to Juneau to meet with legislative officials at the time of his death. 

This has raised concerns for service providers, Tribal officials, and state officials around gaps in mental health support for evacuated youth. Many are beginning to exhibit a wide range of trauma responses to the climate disaster, including feelings of isolation, depression, and anxiety, according to three school officials, five mental health providers, and 10 youth between the ages of 12 and 24 interviewed by The Margin. 

“Can you imagine being in your home not being anchored, and it floating away with you inside?” asked Jennifer Sahaba, a site administrator for the Lower Kuskokwim School District who has been working to support evacuated youth in the village of Toksook Bay. “That kind of trauma doesn't go away in days and weeks, and maybe even years.

Six months later, Ariel and Seth Friend still have nightmares about the night of Halong. And they’re not the only ones. Children as young as 6 years old are reporting flashbacks and trouble sleeping. These acute stress responses are compounded by their displacement. The storm hit a month into the school year, and many young people are now living hundreds of miles away from their homes, from their villages’ tight-knit social networks, their Yup’ik language, and familiar subsistence lifeways. 

These symptoms are alarming mental health professionals in Alaska, where the suicide rate is more than double the nationwide average, a crisis that disproportionately affects youth.  

From 2011 to 2023, the percentage of Alaska high school students who attempted suicide more than doubled from nine percent to 19 percent. In 2023, the most recent year of data available through the Alaska Statewide Suicide Prevention Council, Alaskans aged 15 to 24 had the highest rate of deaths by suicide of any age group. From 2020 to 2024, youth between 11 and 19 years old exhibited the highest rates of emergency room visits due to suicide attempts. 

The picture is grimmer in rural areas, like the Y-K Delta, which was home to the highest rate of suicide per capita in 2024. And among Alaska Native Youth, there’s a distinct risk. In 2023, an Alaska Department of Health survey found that one in four Alaska Native high schoolers had attempted suicide, compared to one in seven white high schoolers statewide. 

The aftermath of losing one’s home and loved ones, plus the alienating impacts of displacement, is contributing to an already dire youth mental health crisis among Alaska Natives. However, the existing, mounting data on youth suicide risk has not resulted in more resources for mental health; practitioners worry that young people’s emotional well-being will worsen as climate-fueled storms like Halong become ever more frequent. And the complicated, outdated funding models for disaster recovery are escalating stress and uncertainty for young Halong survivors.

In a March 2026 address to the Alaska State Legislature, Representative Nellie Unangiq Jimmie, whose district includes Kwigillingok and Kipnuk, identified mental health support as one of the greatest needs for her constituents impacted by the disaster. She cited these youth suicides as an area of major concern. “From populations [this] small, this is catastrophic,” she said.

‘The houses seem to rise out of the sea’

Ariel lived in Kwigillingok’s downtown area, which bore the brunt of the storm. Powerful floodwaters forced homes like hers off their foundations and sent them barrelling into raised boardwalks. Some houses drifted for several miles, crossing a river that runs from north to south down the village’s center. Panicked livestreams flooded social media that night. 

Residents in Kwigillingok’s uptown area watched helplessly as their neighbors pleaded for rescue. One neighbor opened his window and clutched a light pole to avoid being carried away by strong tides. Another recorded himself as he waded through knee-deep water in his living room, the walls of his home swaying while he frantically tried to retrieve floating items like a guitar case, house slippers, and a trash can.

While the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta often experiences fall storms, Halong was a product of our warming climate. Originating as a category four typhoon off the coast of Japan, the tropical storm trailed east before defying weather forecasts and veering northward. Fueled by abnormally warm ocean temperatures, the storm gathered strength and took an “extremely rare” track to hit villages like Kwigillingok with the intensity it did, according to experts in atmospheric science. The region has only experienced one other fall storm this strong in the last seven decades, and only four other ex-typhoons since 1970. In 2022, Typhoon Merbok—a similar meteorological phenomenon—destroyed homes, critical infrastructure, and fish camps along Alaska’s western coast. The costs of recovery from Merbok have totaled $170 million so far.

Starting on October 11, Halong made an abrupt northward turn, defying forecasts and following an extremely rare path toward Alaska's Bering coast.

Even before Halong, young people in Kwigillingok faced frequent climate-related stressors. For years, the Y-K Delta has been sinking due to a combination of rising ocean temperatures, melting sea ice, and thawing permafrost. Dotted across this flat, low-lying landscape are 56 villages. The population of these communities—ranging from less than ten to over 900 inhabitants—is almost entirely Alaska Native. 

For communities on the Bering Sea coast, like Kwigillingok, some areas are only 10 feet above sea level. As a result, high tides and storms can send seawater over dozens of square miles of low-lying tundra. Strong winds from the south even blow sheets of ice over the village’s shores. These extreme weather events, coupled with sea level rise, are also accelerating erosion of the coastline. 

According to Henry George, a 67-year-old man who grew up in Kwigillingok, the land that the village sits on wasn’t suitable for long-term inhabitation to begin with. “The tundra [in Kwigillingok], it's not hills, it's not bluffs. It's just lowland,” he said. With each passing year, George has observed the tundra growing softer and more sod-like

As with many other villages in the Y-K Delta, missionaries played a major role in the formation of a permanent village at Kwigillingok. In the late 19th century, missionaries dispatched from the headquarters of the Moravian Church in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, arrived in southwest Alaska. After establishing their missionary center in Bethel, the Church stationed members in Indigenous settlements across the Y-K Delta. At the time, Alaska Native communities were dispersed amongst camps and small settlements along the sloughs and rivers that drained out into the Kuskokwim Bay, and then farther west towards the Bering Sea. They lived a semi-nomadic lifestyle, establishing seasonal villages depending on subsistence needs.

In the early 20th century, the Moravians identified Kwigillingok as an ideal location for a “permanent mission station” because it was accessible by waterways and was populated in the fall and winter. When approaching Kwigillingok from the Kuskokwim Bay, the Moravians noticed how close the village was to sea level. “Houses seem to rise out of the sea,” they observed, “there is really no high ground.” Despite this unstable land, the Church encouraged the Kwigillingok community to establish permanent infrastructure—supplying lumber from a saw mill they ran in Bethel for the construction of log cabins and boardwalks. 

Within decades, Kwigillingok’s traditional sod houses—semi-permanent, insulated dwellings that sheltered residents in colder months—were replaced by year-round western-style homes. The opening of a Moravian day school in 1915 and a Bureau of Indian Affairs school in 1924 solidified Kwigillingok as a stationary village. Kwigillingok’s population increased as Alaska Native people across the Bering Sea moved there to comply with a 1929 compulsory schooling mandate. 

Communities like Kwigillingok, whose locations are the result of colonization and imperialism, are now on the frontlines of climate change in subarctic Alaska. As climate-fueled storms have increased in intensity, the low-lying land of the Y-K Delta has proven especially vulnerable to these disasters.

‘The trauma is coming back up’ 

The morning after Halong, the subarctic sunrise illuminated the village, bringing the full picture of the storm’s destruction into view. The stormwaters lifted large swathes of the village several feet above ground before depositing them in twisted configurations. Pieces of boardwalk lay on top of four-wheelers and snowmachines. In the village cemetery, residents had begun above-ground burials in recent years to avoid disturbing the tundra earth, which was softening with rapid permafrost thaw. Overnight, the storm had ripped caskets from their wooden encasements, leaving black unmarked coffins all over the village. 

When floodwaters finally began receding at 8 am, Ariel’s younger cousin, who lived nearby, came to rescue the Friend family. Their two-story house had tipped forward, blocking access to the front door and windows. Ariel’s cousin stood on top of their porch and ripped open a crack in the siding of their roof so the family could escape from the second story. 

The Friends considered themselves lucky. An intact boardwalk had prevented their house from becoming completely unmoored. But nearly all their belongings were ruined—covered in a thick layer of tundra sludge, brine, and stove oil. Ariel’s parents were devastated by what they had lost, especially her mom, who cried over the precious traditional beadwork she had spent hours on. Their house was beyond saving. The wall joints had split open, and the foundation was ruined. They demolished it in January of this year. “Most of the memories were in the house,” Ariel said. “We moved there when I was in grade school.”  

Ariel and her family went to the local school, where they joined the rest of the village. Many Elders had taken shelter there before the storm started. Some residents had left halfway through the night when staying home became life-threatening, driving four-wheelers atop floating boardwalks with young kids cradled in their arms. Helicopters rescued those whose houses floated miles away. 

Three people were missing—including Ariel’s aunt’s best friend, who was later found dead. “I thought she was gonna be at the school, but then I found out her body was decomposed by the water,” Ariel recounted between tears. Nearly nine months after the storm, one missing resident remains to be found. 

                                              ***

Seth and Ariel Friend still have dreams about the night of the storm. And they’re not the only ones reporting what psychiatrists call “intrusive re-experiencing,” a stress response that involves reliving a traumatic event. Families have reported children as young as 6 years old waking up in tears from recurring nightmares of Halong. Eighteen-year-old Elijah Paul, who lived in an eight-person intergenerational household in Kipnuk, spent the night of Halong sheltering in the local school. He remembers a dream he had following evacuation from his home, which had floated during Halong. “I was alone in the house. There was nobody to help me,” he said. “I woke up crying for some reason.” 

Extreme weather also triggers flashbacks of the storm. Elijah began planning for the future after he finished his senior year of high school in the village of Toksook Bay. He wants to attend technical school to become a welder. But when he hears strong winds, he’s right back in the throes of Halong. “I’m traumatized 'cause [of] how the school was shaking in the wind,” he said. When a low-lying area of Bethel flooded with the spring river breakup, children and teens across town expressed anxiety around another displacement. 

Research has demonstrated the short- and long-term consequences of environmental disasters on emotional well-being. In the months after Hurricane Katrina, rates of anxiety and mood disorders like PTSD among people directly impacted rose to nearly 50 percent; survivors’ trauma responses persisted over a decade later. 

Frieda Evon, whose family evacuated from their Kwigillingok home in the middle of the night when Halong was at its worst, remembers her sons, 5 and 7 years old, trembling in her arms as she drove their four-wheeler atop floating boardwalks to get to the school. She described how the mental health impacts on her children have persisted since the family moved to Bethel. “When it's really windy, they start to ask, ‘Is it gonna flood? Is it gonna flood high?’” she said. “I think it was from being traumatized.” 

For 18-year-old Janel Lincoln-John, whose Kwigillingok home floated during Halong, the sound of whistling windstorms incites visceral dread and terror. “I was worried I wouldn’t make it past that night,” recalled Janel, who lived with her mom and stepdad in the village’s heavily impacted downtown. Memories of the storm permeate her subconscious. Janel hasn’t slept well since her evacuation: she wakes up every day at 5 am, around the time when Halong was at its worst. “I think my mind tries to remind me of that night,” she said

Jim Biela, a school social worker for the Lower-Kuskokwim School District (LKSD), has seen firsthand how young people’s trauma is manifesting: as nightmares, flashbacks, and feelings of isolation and anxiety. Biela said he counsels an expanded caseload, including 18 youth who evacuated from Kwigillingok and Kipnuk to other schools in the LKSD. The kids in his care describe nightmares, flashbacks, and feelings of isolation and anxiety that make him worry these mental health challenges will escalate risk factors for suicide.

The emotional pain tied to traumatic events, including climate events like Halong, is seen as a major contributor to high suicide rates in villages, according to a 2020 survey conducted by researchers at Montana State University and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. 

In the first few months after a disaster, service providers like Biela focus on immediate crisis response, ensuring students’ physical needs are met. This initial stage of disaster recovery is adrenaline-filled. Those affected take action and attend to their immediate needs, such as food, water, and shelter. Humanitarian aid pours in. It’s only over the long term that the real emotional toll surfaces. “The trauma does not just happen overnight,” Biela said. “It will develop after a while, especially if you don't talk about it.” Trauma responses look different for everyone. Some ramp up hypervigilance and anxiety, while others sink into numbness and despair. Without early intervention, these acute stress responses can develop into chronic mental health disorders. 

A 2026 Harvard Review of Psychiatry study evaluating global disasters from 1990 through 2024 found that one in five people will develop mental health problems such as anxiety, sleep problems, PTSD, and depression in the initial months after surviving a disaster, and during a second peak about a decade later. Roughly 20 percent of survivors developed suicidal thoughts. The link between climate change and suicidality was reinforced through a 2020 study by researchers at Nantong University in China, which found that extreme weather events were significantly associated with an increase in suicide attempts and deaths. 

Biela believes mental health providers are approaching a critical time for intervention for evacuated youth. “We’re just seeing it now, some of the trauma is coming back up,” he said.

Displaced youth are coming to terms with the long-term consequences of Halong. The schools in Kwigillingok and Kipnuk currently have no plans to reopen, and many school-aged youth are scattered. The LKSD operates schools in Bethel and 26 of the 56 villages in the Y-K Delta region. When Halong hit last October, roughly 130 displaced students transferred to LKSD’s Bethel schools to finish out the year. 

Biela is assigned to a handful of remote villages and acts as a first responder for mental health emergencies. In his two decades with the school district, Biela has lost 18 students to suicide, he said. When Biela encounters a student in crisis, he refers them to just four clinicians in Bethel at the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation, a Tribal provider that operates the only hospital in the region. Those four professionals cover mental health needs for approximately 26,000 people of all ages across the 56 villages in the Y-K Delta. 

Staffing shortages mean a waitlist: it can take up to six months for a young person in need to see a mental health clinician for an initial evaluation. Even when students are referred to intensive programs, they need to fly to the rural hub of Bethel to access them—a journey that can take up to an hour each way. 

According to Biela, who is one of nine social workers in the school district, staffing shortages and geographic isolation present challenges to mental health care for village youth. Although LKSD’s social workers provide frontline care to dozens of schools in their district, more than half of the villages in the region do not have social workers in their schools. “The sheer volume of kids [...] it's impossible to catch everybody,” Sahaba said.

In many parts of rural Alaska, access to community-based mental health services is already limited. For example, while Anchorage and Juneau have Mobile Outreach and Crisis Response centers, which have been proven to reduce inpatient hospitalization and residential confinement for youth, the entire Y-K Delta region, including Bethel, does not. This means that calling a crisis hotline often leads to law enforcement intervention instead. Young people with a serious risk of suicide are held in the village jail until they are flown to Bethel, then Anchorage, where inpatient care is available. 

“ I've had young girls wait two to three days [...] in the public safety office,” Biela said. 

The lack of community-based mental health infrastructure led the United States Department of Justice to conclude, in 2022, that the state was failing to provide adequate services for youth, with the largest gaps occurring in rural regions.

Biela sees funding as the main explanation for staffing shortages in rural Alaska. State funding for mental health and school-based services has been declining in recent years, and federal grant cancellations under the Trump administration have led to more scarcity, according to lawmakers and advocates. “Funding is the biggest issue,” said Biela. “ The public service, the mental health, and all that's always the first to get cut.” Even when the state sets aside money for behavioral health and crisis programs, Biela said, “the rural areas get less than the cities.” Working with what they have, this summer, the LKSD will begin training on trauma and PTSD in order to prepare staff like Biela to address these crises as the first anniversary of Halong approaches. 

In response to the recent suicides amongst displaced youth, Indigenous youth advocates from rural Alaska are fighting for a series of statewide suicide prevention bills: to establish a mental health curriculum in schools, to expand state funding for the 988 suicide hotline, and to fund the Statewide Suicide Prevention Council. The bill to fund mental health education, which has been under consideration for eight years, passed the state Legislature before Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed it in June 2026.

“In my district, there are no therapists down the road, no crisis counselors in every school. When something breaks in a child in rural Alaska, it usually breaks quietly, and we always see how that ends up. We always find out too late,” Rep. Jimmie told news media while advocating for state support for rural suicide prevention during the 2026 Alaska state Legislative session. 

“We are losing kids."

Some Indigenous mental health advocates argue that merely expanding resources for existing mental health interventions is not enough. In 2012, Rose Domnick, a 67-year-old Yup’ik trauma intervention expert, founded Calricaraq, a preventative services program that centers Indigenous ancestral wisdom to address suicidality and other behavioral health issues. The program acknowledges intergenerational trauma is a key factor behind high suicide rates. 

“It’s so culturally grounded in an Indigenous worldview, it's really difficult for Western minds to see and understand that [this] truly is suicide prevention,” Domnick said.

The appeal of culturally-aligned behavioral health programs was highlighted through a 2020 survey of youth from Alaska Native villages, which was administered by researchers at Montana State University, The University of Washington, and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Survey participants indicated a desire for community-based suicide prevention programs rooted in Indigenous culture. Evaluations of similar interventions—like the Yup’ik Qungasvik project and the White Mountain Apache Tribe’s New Hope program—have demonstrated their efficacy.

Domnick takes issue with individualistic views of suicide prevention. She sees youth suicides as the result of colonization’s trauma and violence, which hindered the development of emotional coping skills for Indigenous communities. “That is what colonization severed: transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next,” she said. 

Therefore, Domnick added, addressing mental health issues amongst Alaska Native youth requires collective healing to restore the social and emotional supports that historically existed at the community level. She described this process of slow repair. “We will never be as impactful as the parents, grandparents, aunties, and uncles in preventing suicide,” she said. “And so we have to teach the communities, families how to take care of their children in the same way that our ancestors did.” 

Domnick emphasizes that the Calricaraq program is not merely a translation of Western models of behavioral health because: “We can’t utilize what harmed us to heal us.” 

Our healing must utilize our identity, our culture, and our wisdom to move us away from the impacts of historical trauma and colonization.

‘I don't know where home is anymore’ 

Faith Paul spent the summer before her senior year of high school in Kipnuk—a Yup’ik community of 700 residents thirty miles west of Kwigillingok—with her dad’s side of the family. She arrived in Kipnuk at the beginning of the subarctic spring, right as migratory shorebirds were descending on the Bering Sea coast, depositing their eggs in beds of feathers, grass, and driftwood. Her dad took her egg hunting, and they harvested five gallons. 

Then, it was herring season, closely followed by halibut season, and Faith spent long hours helping her friend process the catch. At times, she passed sun-filled days driving boats through gleaming river bends as tall tundra grasses waved in the wind. She reveled in the freedom of village life. Although she spent the school year in Kwigillingok with her mom’s side of the family, summering in Kipnuk was an annual tradition. 

Now, the changing seasons bring Faith painful reminders of routines no longer possible. “It doesn’t truly feel like it’s gonna be summer ‘cause we're not home,” she said.

Having grown up between the two villages hardest hit by Halong, 17-year-old Faith is experiencing a double loss from the storm. After her evacuation, Faith finished her senior year of high school in Bethel, and in the spring of this year, graduated from LKSD’s Kuskokwim Learning Academy. But what should’ve been a celebratory time only dredged up feelings of isolation. Faith has struggled to adjust to the move to Bethel. She wishes she were graduating with her classmates in Kwigillingok—whom she grew up with—instead of with people she barely knows. 

Faith has struggled to move on from the night of the typhoon. She thinks about it every single day. In Bethel, she has found it difficult to access hobbies she enjoys. Her days blur together. “Every day is just the same routine. I just stay home,” she said. “I still feel stuck in October.” 

As she talks about the typhoon, her sentences trail off into whispers, like she forgets to draw in air. And the final words emerge like a gasp, “I think about it every day ‘cause every day I wake up, and I'm not at home.

Meghan Crow, who has worked as a social worker for over two decades for LKSD, has been providing counseling for Kwigillingok youth since their evacuations. Before Halong, Crow served as Kwigillingok’s school social worker and traveled to the village monthly to meet with students. According to her, post-Halong mental health interventions need to address youth’s loss of their physical rooting in the world. 

“The biggest factor is loss of place,” she said. “It’s like an existential spiritual loss that they're grieving.” 

According to Crow, this uprooting affects all areas of mental health. Her students are struggling to adjust to new schools and transition from Yup’ik to predominantly-English speaking environments. 

For Native youth, separation from their familiar landscape also bars them from lifeways central to their identity and self-worth. Ariel spent her summers cleaning and processing fish—up to 40 per day—that her parents would net from the Kwigillingok River. Ariel loves hunting, partly for the thrill, but mostly for the fulfillment of providing for her loved ones. 

“It’s this way to feed your family or friends if they really need it,” she said. “That's what the hunting part is about.” 

Now Ariel lives apart from her parents, who have returned to Kwigillingok with their pets that survived the storm to help with rebuilding efforts. She’s living with an older cousin in Bethel, and sometimes she thinks about going back to Kwigillingok because she misses her dogs, her guinea pig Hazel, and her family.

Recovery efforts in Kwigillingok and Kipnuk are balancing two competing goals—reuniting the community as quickly as possible at an interim village site and preparing for a large-scale relocation in the long term. Roughly 30 percent of Kwigillingok buildings were destroyed, and around 90 percent of buildings in Kipnuk were destroyed. Both villages have voted overwhelmingly to relocate to higher ground, rather than to rebuild in place.

These two efforts will require separate funding mechanisms. 

Repairing damage from Halong is funded under the Stafford Act, the statute that governs federal disaster declarations. The law requires infrastructure to be rebuilt in the same place. “Our law hasn't caught up with the current climate reality of Alaska,” said Rachael Gunn, the chief of staff for Rep. Jimmie. The Alaska state Individual Assistance program provides renters with only three months of rental assistance, and Tribal leaders report that residents are already facing evictions and housing insecurity. 

Both Kipnuk and Kwigillingok want to be reunited at one interim village site while they wait for relocation, according to Tribal leaders. But, state agencies set construction priorities, sometimes without consulting local leaders, according to Tribal officials.

“This violates our Tribal sovereignty,” said Rayna Paul, the tribal administrator and environmental director for Kipnuk. “We want to relocate and do not want to build back in place and have repeatedly stated that to the state and to the FEMA officials." "This is about our survival and the survival of future generations."

According to Gunn, the real limitation is the lack of resources. FEMA has estimated that repairing the damage from Typhoon Halong will cost close to $125 million. But lawmakers are preparing for these estimates to increase significantly. The Trump administration has denied several of the state’s appeals for FEMA to increase its share of recovery costs

Converging crises—many of which stem from federal administration decisions—will likely drive up repair costs over time. The U.S. war with Iran has aggravated a rural energy crisis by driving up gas and home heating prices. Tariffs have skyrocketed construction costs for a winding and delicate supply chain in rural Alaska. 

This funding dilemma exposes structural inequalities across the state’s vast geography, Gunn added. “It's always been a competition between rural and urban Alaska for resources, and rural’s been left behind for a long time.

For Janel Lincoln-John, an 18-year-old who grew up in Kwigillingok, relocation debates ignite feelings of anger and frustration. Janel sees the village’s current predicament as an outcome of governmental neglect. For years, residents of Kwigillingok have raised fears about worsening floods and sought assistance for relocation. 

“It took how many years?” Janel said. “People would try to ask for relocation, and it took Typhoon Halong to [get] people to notice.” 

Faith has experienced firsthand how difficult it is to coordinate a community-wide relocation in her region. Roughly 90 miles northwest of Kwigillingok sits Mertarvik—the new site for the village of Newtok. Newtok’s residents made the decision to relocate their village to higher ground in the face of climate change in 1993, 15 years before Faith was born. The more than three-decades-long relocation process frequently stalled due to anemic funding and a lack of central government planning. It took until 2019, when Faith was 11 years old, for Newtok’s residents to finally begin moving to Mertarvik. 

“I feel like it'll take forever, and by the time it's done, I feel like I'd be old,” Faith said of Kwigillingok’s planned relocation. “It wouldn’t be the same anymore.” 

“Wherever we move in the future, I feel like [nothing] would make it feel better,” she said. “I don't know where home is anymore.” 

Jennifer Sahaba, the LKSD site administrator, has witnessed how environmental stressors impact Alaska Native village youths’ hopes for their future. Even before Halong, villages across the Y-K Delta faced escalating threats of permafrost thaw, erosion, and flooding. “At one point, this was a sustainable future [...] being able to maintain what they grew up with,” Sahaba said. “But as these environmental factors become much more prevalent, it gives a sense of hopelessness.” 

Research across the globe has documented how repeated climate stressors harm young people’s long-term outlook. A study published in The Lancet Planetary Health last year found that adolescents living in flood-prone areas of Bangladesh showed significantly higher levels of anxiety and depression than those in low-flood regions. This research also found that cognitive overload and feelings of hopelessness limit these young people’s ability to plan for the future. 

Still, Faith, like many other young people displaced by the typhoon, longs to return home to Kwigillingok, where locals say a construction crew of 30—more than half of whom are residents—works 12-hour days, seven days a week, to repair Halong’s damage. They are laying fresh boardwalks, patching and repainting damaged walls, and using inflatable airbags to move homes back onto their foundations. During the winter, they salvaged over a dozen houses that the stormwaters had uprooted. As a short subarctic construction season kicks off the summer, cleanup crews plan to flock to the villages to remove hazardous waste, restore safe drinking water, and repair sewage infrastructure.

The goal is to give residents the option to return to the village by late fall 2027. Faith’s home is still intact, but her parents are hesitant to return, in fear of another disaster.

“For the future, I was hoping to still live in [Kwigillingok],” she said. “I'd even want my kids, if I had any, to grow up there.”

***

When Christina Allen returned home from work, she saw an ominous sea of smoke engulfing the skies above her neighborhood during a massive scrap-metal fire in Camden, New Jersey, in February 2025. 

“Everything went kind of dark and dull,” she said.

Allen, a social worker, mother of a young child and lifelong resident of Camden, saw flecks of white ash the size of snowflakes falling from the sky, as she parked her car and walked toward her family’s rowhome. The air smelled like plastic burning in a bonfire. She could taste char in her mouth, and the cloud of smoke took on an orange glow. 

“It looked like it could be a big fire cloud,” Allen said. “It looked like something from out of a movie scene.”

Less than a half mile away, a roughly two-story-tall mountain of metal morphed into a four-alarm blaze at a scrap shredding facility run by EMR, a multinational metal recycling company with U.S. operations headquartered in Camden and global ones in the United Kingdom.

About 100 residents, including Allen, evacuated their homes that evening as the fire raged on for nine hours. Firefighters from nearly 20 companies worked to extinguish the flames. Camden County Commissioner Director Louis Cappelli Jr. said it was "by far the worst fire that has occurred on this site."

The locations above for EMR’s Camden sites, save for the location of the EMR Shredder Facility, come from the New Jersey Office of Attorney General’s lawsuit against EMR.

The Margin and WHYY News interviewed seven Waterfront South neighborhood residents who experienced acute health symptoms or lingering psychological impacts after the fires. 

Allen’s mother, Felicia Biles, and her stepfather, Michael, left for a relative’s house in the suburbs within minutes of smelling smoke and hearing fire engines. They brought Biles’ rescue inhaler and portable oxygen concentrator, which she sometimes needs to breathe. The family stayed at a hotel paid for by EMR. 

The fire in February 2025 pushed Camden leaders to come together to take action to prevent a fire of this scale from ever happening again. The city and EMR signed an agreement meant to improve fire safety, reimburse the city for firefighting expenses and fund community efforts. But many residents weren’t happy, with some filing lawsuits against EMR, one claiming the company’s sites spew “noxious emissions” that stop them from enjoying their homes and another seeking damages for psychological torment and lost wages. 

But in the early morning hours on May 29, 2026, another blaze broke out at EMR’s shredder facility. In its aftermath, city, county, and state elected officials implored the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, the U.S. EPA and “every other regulatory agency with any jurisdiction” to shut down EMR.

Enough is enough. This will no longer be tolerated by me, my colleagues, elected officials here, and, more importantly, our residents.

Nearly a week later, the city ordered EMR to cease operations at the site. 

EMR is fighting back. The company sued the city June 15 for what it called a “groundless” suspension, claiming that continuing the shutdown would cost jobs and that the agreement itself acknowledged that fires could continue. EMR has blamed flammable lithium-ion batteries in consumer products as the real driver behind the fires. 

Now, as city leaders consider tougher accountability measures, including how long to continue EMR’s junkyard license suspension, some residents are left wondering whether they’ll follow through. 

Allen wants her elected officials to shut down the facility for good. She worries that if the city lets EMR restart its shredder, residents like her will simply be waiting for the next blaze.

“The city officials should really keep their word this time,” she said.

An unpopular agreement 

Weeks after the four-alarm fire in February 2025, Carlos Morales, executive director of Heart of Camden, a nonprofit that has become the neighborhood resource hub for the fires, wrote a letter to EMR’s USA CEO Joe Balzano detailing community concerns. He referenced a meeting with Balzano, Carstarphen, a member of City Council, the city attorney and the business administrator. 

“I came into that meeting hoping to hear something concrete — a real solution, a clear path forward that the community could trust. What I walked away with was something else,” Morales wrote. “I appreciated the blunt honesty from the city team. It was good for you to hear it, and good for me to hear it. There was no spin — just the hard reality that, as of now, EMR cannot guarantee this won't happen again.”

“If another fire happens — and you've said it very well could — the community will act,” Morales added. “People will block your trucks. They will protest. And the anger won't just be directed at EMR. It will fall on everyone who tried to work with you in good faith.”

Nearly two weeks later, Camden announced a memorandum of understanding with EMR requiring the company to allocate $6.7 million toward fire suppression upgrades, reimbursements to the city fire department for damages incurred during the February fire and funding for community initiatives. The deal represented roughly 8.7% of the $77.1 million in tax subsidies EMR received from the state of New Jersey between 2019 and 2024. 

Carstarphen celebrated the arrangement and said that it “provides meaningful compensation” to neighborhood residents and “helps to safeguard against the threat of fire.” City Council approved the deal over passionate opposition from residents and community activists, shortly after a small fire broke out at one of EMR’s facilities.

“I can assure our residents that EMR will be held to these commitments, and we can all agree that we need to eliminate fires from this site,” Carstarphen said during the announcement.

The agreement was sealed with little buy-in from community members. When City Council was discussing the resolution authorizing the agreement with EMR, attendees held signs emblazoned with images of flames that read “Shame” and “Stop the Burn!” Nearly a dozen people stepped up to the microphone to oppose the agreement. Biles and Allen were among them.

“One thing that has not been brought up at all is about the health of the residents,” Allen told the council. She said she had asked for medical screenings to be provided to residents at a prior community meeting following the February 2025 fire, but the request had never been addressed. 

“I don't want to even speak on the EMR thing about ‘Oh, if they're still here,’ this is, they need to be gone,” Allen said.

Biles said the memorandum of understanding, or MOU, should include a provision offering buyouts to residents living near EMR’s facilities.  

“I'm ready to leave,” Biles said. “It's time to go, if they're not going.” 

But despite community concerns, each present Camden city council member, including Vice President Arthur Barclay, who represents the neighborhood, responded “yes” to the deal.

The MOU that the council approved promised $3.25 million over five years in grant payments to nonprofits for community initiatives in Camden. As of publishing this story, no grant money has yet been disbursed. Balzano said in mid-May he hoped the first payments would go out by August or September. 

Biles wants the company to compensate residents directly for costs incurred during and after fires, such as the costs of cleaning homes and running air purifiers, but the deal prohibits payments to individuals. 

“The people in the community, it’s not really for us,” Biles said. “It doesn't seem to really be benefiting us.

A fire suppression system that ‘didn’t work perfectly’

EMR operates nine facilities in New Jersey, including five in Camden’s Waterfront South neighborhood. The company buys, disassembles, sorts and shreds scrap metal, including household appliances, automobiles and material from other industrial businesses. EMR employs 535 people in Camden, according to the company, and of those employees, 191 live in the city.

EMR’s facilities in Camden are located blocks away from homes, a childcare center,  a homeless shelter, an opioid use disorder treatment center, and an elementary school.  

Balzano invited journalists from WHYY News and The Margin to tour the facility on May 15. When asked to respond to residents who characterize EMR as a "bad neighbor,” he agreed. 

“I feel that we let them down. I'm not going to sit here and make excuses for not being able to see what was coming. Batteries are new to us. I didn't realize how combustible they are. I think we've tried to get in front of it now as much as we can. Unfortunately, it took time to kind of come up with a solution.” 

On the tour of the shredder facility, which has the capacity to process up to hundreds of tons of scrap metal each hour, Balzano directed employees to activate a new sprinkler system installed around a 20-foot-tall pile of crumpled cars and mangled construction debris.    

Four water cannons, mounted on thin metal towers and on the body of a crane, swept back and forth over the massive pile of junk, dousing it with heavy streams of water. Balzano explained that the cannons can be guided by heat sensors that monitor the pile for hot spots that could spark fires. 

“If the thermal imaging cameras detect heat at anything over 225 degrees [Fahrenheit], it automatically turns them on,” Balzano said. “It turns the nozzle directly to the [heat] source and then fires on it.”

The new fire suppression system was one of the requirements under the company’s agreement with the city. EMR also expanded the water line serving the facility and increased the number of employees inspecting incoming material for fire risks, from two to six. 

“Just putting more and more people, more and more eyes there … to try to get to the point where we’re on it a little bit faster,” Balzano said. 

Balzano had given a similar demonstration of the fire suppression system to city and state elected officials earlier in the week. After the tour, Carstarphen said in a statement that he and members of City Council were confident the system would “improve safety” and “help restore residents’ faith that the appropriate steps are being taken.

“The system was designed in coordination with the Camden Fire Department to ensure a fire of that scale will never happen again,” Carstarphen wrote, referring to the four-alarm fire in February 2025. “The leadership at EMR made firm commitments to the city when entering into the MOU agreement. Since that time, I feel everyone involved has delivered on those commitments. The $6.7 million pledged is substantial but just as important is rebuilding trust and confidence with the community.”

But days after that statement, a two-alarm fire broke out at the shredder site. While it didn’t reach the scale of the February 2025 blaze, it was large enough and required the city’s nine fire companies, representing around three dozen firefighters, to respond. The fire burned for hours before crews brought it under control. Camden County detected hazardous levels of fine particulate matter just south of homes in Waterfront South. 

Camden Fire Chief Jesse Flax said EMR’s fire suppression system did help tamp down the blaze, though it didn’t work perfectly. One water cannon initially failed to operate, he said. 

“Once they got it on, it kind of contained everything to that general area. We weren't going to have any fire spread,” Flax told reporters. “Once we were able to get everything in place, we were able to extinguish the fire a little bit more rapidly.”

Flax framed the malfunction as a first-fire learning curve. “You're going to get some kinks and some bugs that we got to deal with,” he said. “But when it did activate, what did activate did help.” 

Flax added that the system allowed city firefighters to extinguish the blaze without the help of neighboring fire departments.  

At a protest by EMR employees against city leaders’ calls for EMR to shut down days after the May fire, Balzano said the fire suppression system worked as designed. “In the beginning, when we signed the MOU, we were very clear with the mayor that this would not stop fires,” Balzano said. “This would help contain them and keep them from being out of control. It worked exactly the way it was supposed to work.”

EMR employs nearly 200 Camden residents, some of whom make $25 to $40 an hour plus benefits, and the workers want EMR to stay open. Roughly a hundred EMR employees, many wearing blue T-shirts bearing the logo of the Teamsters Local 676 union, marched from outside the shredder site to Camden City Hall days after the May fire. 

“They should work out ways to keep this going,” said Alex Sosa, a Teamsters member who works as a mechanic keeping EMR’s scrap metal shredder running. “We deal with the junk, we deal with the trash.

In a letter to Carstarphen the morning of the rally, Balzano defended the company’s record, citing its commitment of millions of dollars to install what he described as a “state-of-the-art” fire suppression system at the city’s request, as well as “extensive” operational changes.

“All of these steps were taken in good faith reliance on the framework the City and EMR developed together,” Balzano wrote.

He acknowledged that the city faced “real public pressure” after the May 29 fire, but argued their agreement remained the “right path forward” and said EMR was willing to work with regulators, community leaders, labor representatives and first responders on further improvements.

“Our strong preference is to address these matters collaboratively rather than through adversarial channels,” Balzano wrote.

But the prior evening, Camden City Council Vice President Arthur Barclay called the agreement into question. 

“I'm almost certain that deal’s probably over now,” Barclay told residents at a community meeting. He called it a “gentleman's handshake,” and said he now doubts EMR will follow through on its commitments. “It wasn't a legally binding document, so they're probably going to move forward and just not do whatever.” 

EMR USA General Counsel, Michael Gross, rejected Barclay’s characterization. The MOU, he said, is a “fully executed, legally binding contract,” and said the company plans to “honor every commitment in this agreement like it already has.

Air quality and health concerns

Six residents living near EMR’s facilities described health symptoms during and immediately following the fires, and several described ongoing concerns about their long-term exposure to smoke and air pollution. 

Members of four households within 3,000 feet of EMR sites said that after the fires, they smelled smoke or a similar odor inside their homes, and five residents described coughing or having difficulty breathing during or shortly after fires. 

Kristin Schrum, a mother of two young children who lives in Waterfront South, remembers going to work at a school in the neighborhood during a fire at EMR’s shredder site in 2021. She said she drove the roughly two blocks she would usually walk from her home to work because of the fire, then struggled to make it from her car into the school. 

 “It was so smoky, I couldn't stop coughing,” Schrum said. “I was almost throwing up. Like couldn't even make it into the building without having to stop and cough and gag and almost get sick multiple times.”

Air quality and environmental health experts told The Margin and WHYY News that the fires likely release not only fine particles that can cause lung and heart issues, but also toxic heavy metals and potentially other carcinogenic air pollutants. During the four-alarm fire in February 2025, a community PurpleAir monitor located at the end of Biles’ and Allen’s block detected a spike in fine particle pollution into the hazardous range, according to an analysis by Ode for The Margin and WHYY News. An EPA monitor located at the sewage treatment plant less than 1,500 feet southeast of EMR’s shredder measured particulate pollution in the unhealthy range and a spike in benzene, a carcinogen, during the fire, Ode found.

The below map provides a layout of surrounding air quality monitors located near the source of the 2025 fire, including the severity of their readings for harmful particulate matter in the air and simulated movement of the wind at the time of the fire. The chart on the right shows the surge of harmful particulate matter in the air before, during, and after the fire.

Staying indoors offers “some protection” from air pollution, but older or poorly maintained homes tend to let more pollution in, said Robert Laumbach, an occupational and environmental respiratory disease expert at Rutgers University. Odors lingering inside homes indicate that pollutants may have seeped indoors, said Jennifer Richmond-Bryant, a professor at NC State University who studies human exposure to air pollutants. Those pollutants likely include polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, some of which are carcinogenic, which can cling to surfaces, including walls and tables, and then expose inhabitants through inhalation or ingestion. 

The smoke also likely contains airborne particles of toxic heavy metals, including lead, cadmium, chromium and mercury, which can accumulate in the body over time, said Kabindra Shakya, an environmental scientist at Villanova University. After a fire ends, noxious gases dissipate into the atmosphere, but heavy metal particles can settle into residents’ yards, Shakya said, where they can be tracked into homes on shoes and continue to expose people long after the smoke clears. 

Christina Allen was pregnant with her now 5-year-old son, Jehlani, during a fire at EMR’s shredder in January 2021. From inside the home she shared with her mother, she could smell what she described as “plastic burning.” 

Scientists have found that exposure to air pollution, including the tiny particles present in smoke, during pregnancy increases the risk of complications, including preeclampsia and gestational hypertension, and has been linked to low birth weight. One 2023 study found that exposure to particulate pollution in utero and early life was associated with decreased lung function later on in childhood.

Allen said Jehlani has not been diagnosed with any respiratory conditions, but he is often congested, seems to have “narrow airways,” and shows signs of sleep apnea. She often stays up late monitoring his breathing while he sleeps.  

It’s one of the reasons Allen has asked that health screenings be provided to residents after fires.

Firefighters who have responded to EMR’s fires have their own health concerns. The biggest worry for Pete Perez, the president of the Camden Firefighters IAFF Local 788, is potential carcinogen exposure, a risk firefighters typically face at higher rates than the general public. It’s also one that doesn’t end when the fire does, as they must navigate lingering smoke and thoroughly clean their gear. Perez, who was at the February 2025 fire as the union president, confirmed the findings of a public records request indicating that two firefighters sought medical attention in the days that followed.

Seven residents described lingering psychological effects. Allen said her sense of smell now feels “heightened,” and that the scent of anything burning triggers memories of the EMR fires.

Stalled regulation and piling litigation

Since the January 2021 fire, Aliyia Jones, a Camden native and Waterfront South resident, had been in and out of the emergency room and medical appointments for asthma and shortness of breath. She moved back to Camden after the Paulsboro train derailment. “I thought I was coming to Camden for relief,” she said. 

The February 2025 fire was Jones’ breaking point. “I couldn't sleep at night. I was always on guard, walking around, making sure there’s not a fire,” she said. 

Weeks later, she started therapy for the first time and was diagnosed with PTSD and panic disorder. In April, she quit her job as a direct support professional worker assisting adults with disabilities. 

“I couldn't concentrate. I was making mistakes on the clock,” she said.

In March, Jones sued EMR, seeking damages for lifelong anxiety, lost wages, depression, and stress. The lawsuit was dismissed without prejudice in early May, after a judge agreed with EMR’s defense counsel that Jones had not provided sufficient evidence that the company caused her distress. Earlier this month, she filed a motion to reinstate the case, which is scheduled to be decided July 2. 

Jones had also brought her complaints directly to officials at the NJDEP, the agency responsible for enforcing and implementing federal and state environmental law and issuing permits for industrial facilities, about what it had been like to live near EMR. 

Living next to that has been like living next to hell. Literally.

In response to Jones’ testimony, then-NJDEP Commissioner Shawn LaTourette said, "There's no question that you are owed better than that.”

In January 2026, the NJDEP and the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General also sued EMR, alleging that at least a dozen “major fires” over the past five years had resulted from unsafe conditions at EMR’s facilities and that the company had failed to take “appropriate steps” to fix them.

Lawyers for EMR asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit. A Camden-based environmental nonprofit, the Center for Environmental Transformation, had previously sued the NJDEP and EMR in an attempt to compel regulators to inspect EMR’s facilities more often and require them to remove scrap piles more frequently.

The company also argued that the “vast majority” of the relief the state is seeking had already been implemented through the MOU and that the NJDEP lacked authority under state law to regulate fire risk or prevention. 

Following the May 29 fire, NJOAG released a statement saying “the latest fire only further confirms why EMR’s Camden facilities should not continue operating without the greater accountability and oversight needed to keep the community safe,” and that it would “continue our work in court to stop these dangerous fires once and for all.”

A key effort to increase oversight has been slow to advance. A bill that would reclassify scrap metal facilities like EMR’s as recyclers was introduced in the state legislature in June 2025 but has yet to pass in this session. The bill would require scrap metal recyclers to limit the size of shredder residue piles, mandate fire suppression systems and employee training, and require battery screening policies. 

One of the bill’s sponsors, State Assemblyman Bill Moen, whose district includes Camden, framed the measure as a necessary response to the proliferation of lithium-ion batteries in consumer products. “We need to basically follow suit and level up in how we are then classifying that waste,” he said in March.

The Recycled Materials Association, a trade group for recyclers that counts EMR as a member, opposes the bill. Frank Brill, a lobbyist representing ReMA, argued that it would burden small scrap metal businesses with additional bureaucracy.

“The only problem has come with these lithium-ion battery fires,” Brill said. “Subjecting [facilities] to annual fees and reviews and inspections and anything else that DEP wants to come up with … that are just going to be more trouble for this industry.”

A different bill requiring specific fire safety measures at scrap metal facilities, including remotely operated fire suppression systems at large scrap metal facilities, advanced through both chambers of the legislature this month and is awaiting a final legislative vote before it can head to the governor’s desk. EMR had expressed support for the bill earlier this spring, before it was amended to lower the allowable height for material piles.

The company was the top spender on lobbying in New Jersey within the environmental protection sector in 2025, according to state records.

Throughout these battles, EMR and its allies have consistently pointed to lithium-ion batteries as the cause of the fires. EMR and ReMA say there is currently no technology that allows scrapyards to automatically detect these batteries when they’re hidden inside scrap. An analysis by The Margin and WHYY News of three fire investigative reports on the barge fire May 23, 2022, the fire February 21, 2025 and the fire October 17, 2025, concluded the probable cause of ignition was undetermined. 

“It's not just our industry that is challenged by lithium-ion batteries. They're in everything,” said David Wagger, ReMA’s chief scientist. “Our members do their best because, quite frankly, it's an existential threat. No one wants to have not only their reputation ruined, but their facility become damaged and perhaps burn down.” 

A bill introduced to Congress last fall by U.S. Rep. Donald Norcross, who represents Camden, would create a tax credit to partially reimburse recycling companies for the cost of battery detectors, impose a tax on battery manufacturers and create a lithium battery recycling program, which would provide grants to facilities that collect and recycle lithium batteries. 

“Local jobs are important, but the community also needs to be safe,” Norcross said in a written statement.

‘If I had the money, I would move’

Felicia Biles loves the Waterfront South neighborhood of Camden, where she has lived for nearly four decades. She quilts with a group that meets monthly at a nearby arts nonprofit, grows vegetables and herbs at a community garden and attends plays at the South Camden Theatre Company, all within walking distance of her home. Biles said the people are friendly, and her grandson, Jehlani, plays with kids who live nearby. 

“This neighborhood is beautiful,” she said.

Despite all of this, the fires at EMR’s facilities have made Biles want to move to a neighborhood where she feels safe. But she cannot afford it. 

“I'd rather my health take priority,” Biles said. “If I had the money, I would move.” Since the January 2021 fire, Jones has also been trying to move. “It’s a must that I relocate,” she said in May. 

While operations remain suspended at EMR’s shredder in Camden, residents like Allen and Biles, who want to see EMR shut down permanently, are in limbo. The city is set to reevaluate the suspension of the shredder facility’s junkyard license early next month. City business administrator Timothy Cunningham said during a City Council meeting that EMR could appeal the suspension, and that bills moving through the state legislature and the state’s lawsuit against EMR would be “influential factors” in the city’s decision.

At the City Council meeting earlier this month, Schrum, who has evacuated her home three times due to the fires, said her “level of fear” has decreased since the shredder was paused. When she hears the sound of fire trucks, she said she no longer needs to worry that they’re headed to EMR. 

“We have been waiting four or five years for this, and to have it finally, like, dangled in front of us, it needs to happen,” she said. “The license needs to be revoked permanently.”

A Timeline of Recent Events

A couple of weeks earlier, the county also helped the 65-year-old, who has been living off a fixed income from Social Security disability payments for more than a decade, replace her broken gas furnace with a new, cost-effective, and energy-efficient electric heat pump. It was an upgrade that Moorer would have been hard-pressed to make on her own. Her average monthly income is about $2,600, pooled from Social Security, a small pension from a previous job before her disability stopped her from working, and dog-sitting. She also rents out a room in her house to a family friend. The cost of replacing her old furnace could have topped $10,000.

For years, she had paid repairmen $50 here and there to keep the furnace running, despite being warned about how long those repairs would actually last. “I try to conserve what funds that I do have – I intend to live here for the rest of my life, so I need to be able to have some smart avenues in order to maintain it,” she said. As the cost of property taxes, insurance, and other basic living expenses continues to rise, her budget gets that much tighter.

In November, when Moorer’s furnace went out completely, she layered sweaters and ran space heaters in her den, where she naps with her two dogs, Kimi and Anna Stella, and the ones she dogsits, Izzy and Dozer. “The rest of the house was an icebox,” she said. When it got really cold, she even ran her electric oven just to heat up the house. In January, her electric bill from Puget Sound Energy was over $250. Her usage had skyrocketed, and her bill was more than three times its usual amount.

Despite her financial situation, Moorer wouldn’t have qualified for federal assistance programs aimed at reducing energy bills for low-income households. The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) directly pays people’s utility bills, and the Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP) funds upgrades of old, energy-hogging HVAC systems with newer, cost-efficient models. The income cut-off for those programs is tied to the federal poverty line, which Moorer hovers just above.

Instead, thanks to assistance programs run by King County, where Seattle is located, and funded in part by Washington State, Moorer got the help she needed without having to choose between draining her savings or staying uncomfortably cold the rest of winter. The King County program, called Energize, helps households pay for energy-efficiency upgrades and connects residents to other funding sources, like the county’s housing repair program, to cover weatherization costs. Energize is part of a slew of energy assistance programs funded by the State of Washington’s Climate Commitment Act (CCA) – a statewide carbon cap-and-invest program, which incentivizes high-emissions businesses like fuel suppliers and utility companies to reduce their emissions – with the overarching goal of reducing state-wide carbon emissions by 95 percent by 2050.

The funds have been used to shore up climate change planning, clean energy projects, and other programs that reduce carbon emissions. Household energy consumption accounts for some 300 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually in the United States. The CCA offers funds to swap out gas heating systems for electric heat pumps to reduce energy consumption and make homes more efficient for low-income residents, addressing both economic and social inequities. 

According to a 2025 report from the state’s Department of Commerce, more than 270,000 low-income households in Washington are considered energy burdened, meaning that they pay more than 6 percent of their monthly income towards electricity bills. In some rural counties, nearly a quarter of the population is energy burdened. In rural Ferry County, in the state’s north east corner,  the number rises to 41 percent— the highest rate in Washington. About 15 percent of the county’s population is Indigenous, and the Colville Indian Reservation makes up a large swath of the county. 

When families and households can’t afford their energy bills, some simply turn off their heating and cooling; others might forgo necessities like food, medicine, or clothing to keep the lights on. Energy burdens are often cyclical. Lower-income households tend to live in homes or apartment buildings with inefficient appliances, walls and ceilings that lack insulation, and windows that let hot or cold air from outside seep in. For Moorer, running inefficient space heaters constantly meant it took even more energy to heat her home to a semi-comfortable temperature, which then cost more at the end of the month.

“We initially came at this from a direct emissions climate perspective,” said Terry Sullivan, King County’s climate and energy program manager. “But then increasingly with the climate justice perspective, [we’re] trying to make sure that homes are [prepared for] extreme temperatures.” The county has mapped urban heat islands, identifying which neighborhoods have more exposure to high temperatures during heatwaves, for example. “We use that as a scoring mechanism for most of our programs, since there’s such a high demand,” Sullivan said. King County is also directing resources to places that need upgrades the most, he added. This includes energy-efficient insulation to withstand cold spells or heat waves in the event the power goes out.

King County includes renters in its weatherization and assistance programs, a group often left out of federal programs if landlords don’t participate. A 2025 survey found that more than two-thirds of renters in the region making less than $50,000 struggled to pay their utility bills over the past year.

In 2024, Washington launched its own version of LIHEAP, the State Home Energy Assistance Program, with a $35 million budget from CCA funds. The income threshold is set at 80 percent of the area median income. That means regions can have different metrics that more closely reflect the local cost of living, said Brian Sarensen, the program manager at the Department of Commerce who oversees the State Home Energy Assistance Program as well as LIHEAP. In Seattle and the surrounding county, the income threshold for a family of four rises to $110,950; in areas with a lower cost of living, like Spokane in Eastern Washington, that number is $78,300. 

“There’s a little piece of the population where you make just enough that you don’t qualify for any [federal] services, but you’re not quite self-sufficient,” Sarensen said. “We want them to spend the money to heat their homes so that they can be safe and healthy, but at the same time, where does that money come from?” 

In its first year, the program has served over 20,000 households with bill assistance and furnace upgrades, and prevented utility disconnections for over 4,000 households. The average household reduced its energy burden by over 50 percent. “After 10 years, we see that a home has saved basically the same amount of money we’ve invested in it,” Sarensen said. 

As energy costs are predicted to rise across the country, energy assistance and weatherization programs will continue to be vital tools that help families afford higher bills and reduce overall energy use. An analysis of census data shows that nationally, 48.5 million households struggled to pay at least one monthly energy bill in 2024. Despite this, the Trump administration has signaled a desire to slash assistance programs such as LIHEAP and WAP that have a proven track record of making energy costs affordable for millions of Americans.

Moorer is already seeing the benefits: In February, a couple of weeks after her heat pump was installed, her electric bill was already $100 lower, and her average daily electricity usage dropped from 45 kilowatt-hours in January to 30 kilowatt-hours in February. The heat pump also provides her with central air conditioning for the first time. During the 2021 heatwave that broiled Seattle with temperatures over 100 degrees, Moorer remembers running a window AC unit all day and night, and it eventually leaked all over the floor of her living room.

As climate change will cause more frequent heatwaves, Washingtonians without air conditioning— nearly half the state’s population, according to federal data— are also at risk of prolonged exposure to heat and a plethora of negative health effects from kidney failure to stroke, and in extreme circumstances, even death. A 2019 report from the state’s Department of Health estimated that if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, average temperatures during a “normal” year by midcentury will be hotter than 20th-century records.

In Central Washington, where the weather isn’t as mild as in coastal cities like Seattle, the need is particularly pronounced. “The bills are so damn high right now, in the summer, it’s the extreme heat where you need an AC running 24-7,” says Oskar Zambrano, a Yakima-based community organizer with Washington Conservation Action. 

Over the past few years, the city has had to set up more cooling centers at community centers on 100-degree days for people who don’t have AC. “Like during the pandemic and other times that there has been an urgent need, the funding [for energy assistance] dries up,” he said. “There’s a higher intake of people needing these services than funds available, and as the economy worsens, we can see that happening.”

As the Trump administration targets and surveils undocumented immigrants with increasingly violent tactics, state programs can still provide vital resources to undocumented or mixed-status households. Federal programs require social security numbers and verification of immigration status. In Washington, additional information can be collected to ensure that payments and benefits aren’t duplicated for the same household. “We just have to make sure you’re a resident of Washington State, and that you have an active utility account,” Sarensen said. “Nobody’s going to freeze to death, and nobody’s going to have heatstroke if we can help it and we still have funds available.” 

Even so, in Yakima, where a large Latino community resides, undocumented and mixed-status families are hesitant to put themselves in any sort of spotlight, Zambrano said. “Sometimes, signing up for these programs is in-person,” he said. “We’ve seen a decrease in turnout for our events and activities because people are afraid to be out and about.”

The energy sector’s growing crisis

Historically, Washington state has benefited from low energy prices, thanks to abundant, cheap hydroelectric generation. According to the Energy Information Administration’s most recent data, the average cost per kilowatt hour of energy in the residential sector was 13.33 cents in Washington, compared to a national average of 17.24 cents. But between December 2024 and December 2025, the state’s average price per kilowatt hour had in fact climbed by 12 percent.

The causes of these rising costs, across the nation, are complex, said Elena Krieger, the senior director of research and policy at Just Solutions, an organization focused on equitable climate policy. “In the West, we’re dealing with issues related to wildfires, insurance costs and damages being paid out, and grid hardening investments,” she said. “In the Southeast, they’re dealing with hurricanes, and there are bill increases related to the damage and recovery from those.” Components of the nation’s power grid, for example, are aging and need to be replaced. For example, the Department of Energy estimated in 2023 that 70 percent of transmission lines are nearing the end of their 50 to 80-year lifespans.

Additionally, as the tech industry builds out massive, energy-intensive data centers to fuel the growth of artificial intelligence models, energy consumption is projected to further skyrocket. That will require new, costly infrastructure, if not new power plants as well. If the industry doesn’t shoulder those costs, which could exceed $1 trillion according to an analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists, they could be passed on to utility customers writ large.

“We’re also seeing that there are power plants that were going to retire are staying online, because of projected demand growth,” Krieger said. At the federal level, Trump and Secretary of Energy Chris Wright claim the plants are necessary for reliability, a decision Krieger says keeps high-emissions and particularly expensive plants online. As costs rise for consumers, those closest to these dirty power plants will also continue to breathe polluted air and suffer the health impacts. As of January, Wright had intervened to block the planned closure of at least five coal plants in Indiana, Colorado, and Michigan, as well as one in Washington.  Research suggests that the move could increase utility customers’ costs — and the administration has announced it will pour hundreds of millions of dollars into financially struggling coal plants in West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky and North Carolina. 

The coal plant in Washington, the last in the region, is set to transition to natural gas in accordance with the Clean Energy Transformation Act, a state law passed in 2019 that bans utilities from providing coal power starting in 2026. In its efforts to keep the plant running, the Department of Energy cited emergency conditions from increased demand. The state’s attorney general fired back, calling the Department of Energy’s order illegal and clumsy; as lawsuits are pending, the state legislature passed a bill that will penalize the plant, owned by a Canadian company called TransAlta, if it continues to burn coal. 

Against this political backdrop, energy efficiency programs serve another dual benefit. “These efficiency measures can bring down household costs at each individual house, and collectively that can reduce peak demand, and reduce the need for peaking power plants and other expensive resources that are used to meet those needs,” Krieger said.

At the local level, advocates like Zambrano are also wary that utilities will use compliance with the Clean Energy Transformation Act as an excuse to pass off the cost of decarbonization to customers. PacifiCorp, which operates one of the three investor-owned utilities in Washington, is required to meet an 80 percent clean-energy goal by 2030, said Julian Santos, a climate and clean energy advocate with Washington Conservation Action.

“We are four years away from the first big milestone,” Santos said. “They have a long way to go.” The company’s implementation plan suggests it is currently below 40 percent clean energy and would need to double its renewable energy sources by the end of 2029. During a public comment period on the company’s clean energy plan, environmental advocates argued that attempting to ramp up major infrastructure upgrades in just a few years could make the process more costly than necessary. Last May, the state’s Utilities and Transportation Commission, which regulates power companies, rejected PacifiCorp’s plan, citing its lack of detail and measurable goals to achieve renewable energy targets.

Further complicating matters, in late February, PacifiCorp announced it will sell its Washington service area, which includes Yakima, to Portland General Electric for $1.9 billion. It’s not immediately clear what comes next, Santos said.  “We’re concerned about what that could mean for people in Yakima who are already facing rising rates.”

In a statement, the company said it is “actively engaged” in acquiring additional clean energy sources and does not anticipate service disruptions during the acquisition process. “PacifiCorp is conscious of affordability concerns and will do what it can to mitigate customer cost pressures driven by Washington’s policies,” a spokesperson said

Trump’s Energy Assistance Takedown

After taking office for his second term, President Trump proposed eliminating LIHEAP entirely. In a 2025 budget document, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget called LIHEAP "unnecessary,” and pointed to a government audit from 2010, which found possible evidence of fraud valued at roughly two percent of the program’s budget, in just seven states. The 2025 proposal seeks to instead support low-income individuals through “energy dominance, lower prices, and an America First economic platform.” The Office of Management and Budget did not respond to a request for comment.

It’s a move that Trump repeatedly tried to make in his first term, as well. “We’ve managed to overcome it every time,” said Shaylee Stokes, who directs The Energy Project at the Washington State Community Action Partnership. Advocates worked to convince their congressional representatives that the funding was, and still is, vital. Community action agencies work with local clients and contractors to distribute federal energy assistance funding. In Washington, these organizations collectively serve 100,000 households annually.

The White House’s position doesn’t reflect the fact that LIHEAP, in particular, has typically enjoyed broad, bipartisan support from lawmakers as a long-running, cost-effective, successful program. WAP also has a proven track record of keeping people safer in their own homes when their bills are paid, and of reducing costs and energy-related climate emissions. For every dollar spent on WAP, which has operated since the Ford administration, communities receive numerous health and safety benefits. That could include better health outcomes from reduced exposure to heat and indoor air pollution as windows are sealed up, as well as the removal of mold and mildew when homes are weatherized.

Over the past decade, LIHEAP has typically received over $3 billion annually. Under the Biden administration, LIHEAP received major funding boosts, jumping to $8 billion in 2021. WAP received an additional $3.5 billion dollars as well. In February, Trump signed off on a spending bill renewing the program with a $4 billion budget, a $20 million increase from the previous year.

However, federal programs have never met the true need. According to a 2021 report from the National Conference of State Legislatures, only 16 states have their own state-funded bill assistance and weatherization programs. These programs allow states to expand the benefits of weatherization and bill assistance to more residents.

RMI, an energy and climate policy think tank, estimates that it would take $9.3 billion in annual assistance to end energy poverty and ensure that households never pay more than 4 percent of their income on energy bills — less than 0.25 percent of the federal government’s spending in 2024.

Stokes said that the administration’s rhetoric is far from the reality that community action agencies see every day. Money from LIHEAP and other assistance programs runs out quickly because of the high level of need, she said. “We (did) extra advocacy last year, and we’re expecting to have to do that every year of the Trump administration to make sure that our legislators are hearing about how important (this funding) is,” she said. Ultimately, Stokes said she doesn’t expect the Trump administration to fund LIHEAP in the 2027 budget without pressure.

Without federal funds, the state would fall further short of meeting the full needs of residents facing energy burdens, at an estimated annual cost of $275,000,000 as of May 2025. Washington received $55 million in federal LIHEAP funds in the current fiscal year. Meanwhile, the state is facing its own budget crisis and may need to cut billions of dollars in spending over the next few years.

The Trump administration also attempted to freeze or terminate energy-efficiency grants announced in Biden’s signature bills, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. Sullivan, King County’s climate and energy programs manager, said that departments are still waiting to see if the programs for home energy retrofits and customer rebates for energy-efficiency appliances will be funded at about $80 million each.

The government shutdown in 2025, along with mass layoffs of federal employees, created uncertainty about the status of funds that local programs were banking on. “It created a lot of chaos and uncertainty in our networks,” Stokes said. “You would hear one thing at 10 AM and the exact opposite at 4 PM.” The entire LIHEAP staff was fired in April 2025; at least one staff member was rehired when no one else in the government knew how to disburse the correct amount of remaining funds already appropriated to states.

“It’s a wreck. The loss of institutional knowledge and the increase in administrative burden due to these shake ups has not made things more efficient or saved anybody money,” Stokes said. Instead, local program administrators have had to spend more of their own time and resources to fight budget cuts and keep programs running, and provide vital assistance to families. After the 2025 shutdown ended, Washington received 90 percent of its annual LIHEAP funding, said Jeff DeLuca, the executive director of Washington State Community Action Partnership.

Moorer’s Peace of Mind

Energy assistance programs are also vital because they enable lower-income households to access resources and benefits that would otherwise be concentrated at the top. A 2024 study found that between 2006 and 2021, Americans collectively received over $47 billion in tax credits for energy-efficiency and clean energy upgrades, including rooftop solar, heat pumps, and electric vehicles. About 60 percent of those benefits went to households in the top 20 percent of income.

“This is sort of what you see with capitalism in general — the rich get richer, and that happens in the energy system, too,” said Justin Schott, the director of the Energy Equity Project. He pointed to a case study in the Detroit area, which found that LED lightbulbs, a simple efficiency upgrade, were harder to come by at stores in lower-income neighborhoods. Switching to these bulbs from incandescent bulbs cuts energy usage by 90 percent, but requires an upfront investment.

Larger, systemic inequities are baked into the system, down to the bills that consumers receive. “Everybody pays the same surcharge per kilowatt hour,” Schott said. That means, effectively, energy inefficient households are penalized for using more energy. If those households are energy burdened, that also means they can’t afford thousands of dollars in upfront investments to reap the benefits of a tax credit. “The fact is, low-income households have been subsidizing the wealthy’s access to energy efficiency and clean energy for a very long time.”

Moorer’s high bills from Puget Sound Energy, for example, were affected by a 12 percent rate hike that the utility implemented in January. The utility will use most of the new revenue for clean energy and reliability investments, according to filings with the state’s Utility and Transportation Committee. About one percent of the increased revenue will be diverted to bill assistance programs. Because Moorer used so much extra energy to run space heaters when her furnace broke, she’s paying more into those investments than a household that could have afforded to fix the problem immediately. 

Krieger of Just Solutions says the disparity is akin to regressive tax, like a sales tax. “(Low-income households) pay much more of their income, compared to wealthier households, because their incomes are lower and because they often don’t have access to efficiency measures that would enable them to use less energy for the same set of services.”

A 2024 study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that nationally, communities of color that would have benefited the most from lower energy bills were the least likely to use heat pumps. Further, a 2025 study from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy found that nearly 1 in 5 homes that qualify for weatherization assistance are deferred from the program because significant, costly repairs are needed first. That could include replacing leaking roofs, damaged floorboards, or hazardous, outdated electrical panels.

At the state legislature this year, advocates successfully pushed for legislation to enact a dedicated fund for bill assistance. (The bill, passed on March 12, still needs to be signed by the governor.) “One of our goals is that a state-run program will provide sustained and predictable assistance, not just one-time bill credits,” said Aqsa Mengal, the climate and clean energy policy lead at Front and Centered, an environmental justice advocacy group. It could also reduce burdensome applications for people who need help, for example, allowing Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program recipients to automatically enroll, and the agencies that serve them, by creating one umbrella of funding instead of a patchwork of grants and programs, she said. 

“This has been a multi-year effort on behalf of energy and low-income advocates,” Mengal said. “We are hopeful that the governor will sign the bill.” 

While Washington already mandates that electric utility companies provide bill assistance programs to low-income households, the state Department of Commerce’s 2025 report found that participation rates varied widely. Across Washington’s 39 counties, 32 had enrollment rates below 25 percent. The report also found that nearly all programs failed to align with the state’s mandate, as different electric utilities, some investor-owned, some consumer-owned, doled out different amounts of assistance to households in similar financial situations. Some utilities, for example, required proof of a disability or senior status, in addition to income.

In Yakima, Santos said that means many residents who need assistance fall by the wayside. Utilities are required to provide assistance to customers who meet the state’s definition of low-income, at 80 percent of the area median income. The Department of Commerce estimates nearly 12,000 low-income households in Yakima County are energy burdened, yet PacifiCorp reported providing bill assistance to just over 7,500 customers in the 2025 fiscal year across its service area, which includes portions of two other counties. 

This is despite the state requiring utilities to develop “customer benefit indicators” that track the needs of vulnerable communities in their service area. “What we want now is to see those numbers move in the right direction, to set goals to reduce energy burdens and improve weatherization,” Santos said. “If they just continue tracking these numbers, that’s not going to accomplish anything.” In a statement, the company said that it “follows all state requirements to provide assistance to customers who need it.” The company also provided internal data showing that as of March 2026, it had enrolled more than 9,500 customers in bill assistance. 

In the meantime, advocates are also uneasy that the Climate Commitment Act’s funds could be siphoned off to address other affordability issues. At the start of the legislative session, Gov. Bob Ferguson proposed using $569 million from Climate Commitment Act revenue to maintain the state’s working families’ tax credit. The governor’s proposal was not included in the final budget that passed, according to the Washington State Budget and Policy Center. For now, that marks another victory for environmental justice advocates. (The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)

“It’s a slippery slope, [the tax credit] isn’t directly related to climate mitigation by any means,” Stokes said. “There are plenty of initiatives that the CCA can fund that are approaching environmental justice and energy equity.”

In Renton, once the dust settles from all the contractors working on her house, Moorer looks forward to finally getting rid of the bulky space heaters and the AC window unit in her living room. A stain on her carpet from the AC leak will serve as a reminder of how uncomfortable her house could get before the county installed her new heat pump. But she’s thinking of fixing that up on her own.  “Now I’m sitting nice and cozy, not all bundled up,” she said. “The peace of mind that I get, I can’t thank [the county] enough.

***

Here, the loss of southeastern Louisiana’s once vast marshes feels tangible.

The boat whips between broken segments of tall marsh grass, the stubborn remnants of thick wetlands that have rapidly drowned in recent decades. Areas that seem lush to the human eye appear disjointed and fleeting from a bird’s eye view.

Blink guides the boat of coastal advocates to a short levee that’s quickly becoming this portion of the west bank’s sole protection against hurricanes. The group scrambled onto the squat levee to see the few pickup trucks and cranes lingering on what used to be the site of Louisiana’s largest effort to rebuild land by harnessing the power of the muddy Mississippi River. 

The project, known as the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, was projected to build and sustain up to 27 square miles of land by 2050. The new land would have strengthened the diminishing buffer between the greater New Orleans region and the Gulf of Mexico, as the land sinks and the sea rises. Coastal scientists and state officials said that the first-of-its-kind roughly $3 billion project, was the only long-term solution capable of withstanding climate change.

Standing between two tall power lines demarcating where the project’s footprint would’ve been, Blink said the acres of clear-cut land act as a somber reminder of the project, now canceled less than two years after breaking ground. 

 The project, at the end of the day, would've given New Orleans another generation,” Blink said. “ I'm sad for the people that don't have the means to get out of harm's way…This would've bought us time, and we threw that time in the trash.”

Republican Gov. Jeff Landry and his appointee to helm the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA), Gordy Dove, abandoned the diversion in summer 2025. CPRA cited increasing costs, ongoing litigation and permitting concerns, despite decades of research and a dedicated source of funding. The governor’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

Southern Louisiana is on the frontlines of a question facing most of the world’s coastal communities of how to deal with sea level rise. Because of human factors, including climate change, Louisiana has experienced some of the fastest rates of sea level rise on Earth. The rates are so fast, some scientists liken studying coastal Louisiana to traveling through time, previewing what other coastal wetlands will face in the coming decades. 

After Hurricane Katrina struck 20 years ago, the state developed a nationally-renowned model for tackling the coastal land loss crisis holistically. It was guided by decision-making grounded in science, led and implemented by the CPRA, the state agency tasked with rebuilding and hardening the coast. Sediment diversions, including the Mid-Barataria, were considered a cornerstone in the plan, working alongside other strategies such as marsh created by dredging-and-pumping mud and sand.

Under the Landry administration, however, coastal advocates fear politics have overtaken the state’s past determination to follow the science while the federal government simultaneously dismantles the scientific community. Dove said in an interview with The Margin that his agency’s decisions are backed by “facts and figures.”

The Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion’s termination came after the Landry administration allowed the project to stall for about a year and a half. In that time, the state’s coastal agency offered little explanation, stating staff had signed non-disclosure agreements about the project and ongoing litigation.

Now, the CPRA plans to consider a smaller version of the project that was authorized in 2007, promising it will deliver “similar benefits.” The smaller diversion was originally projected to create more marsh using a dredged sediment pipeline. The diversion would focus more on channeling freshwater than sediment, Dove said. Though, scientists who consulted with the state say the modeling underlying earlier estimates were less sophisticated.

Coastal advocates question whether any new project to reconnect the basin to the river could come fast enough, let alone be large enough, to make a difference. Dove estimated it would take about five years to start construction on the Myrtle Grove project, though the state still needs to reevaluate the project through the permitting process and shore up federal funding. 

Staring at the former site of the Mid-Barataria, Lauren Bourg said she could still picture the new land that would have been created. Bourg directs the National Audubon Society’s Mississippi River Delta program, which has advocated for science-based coastal restoration for more than a decade.

“ It feels crazy that we're standing here… that sediment would've come right in here and would start collecting almost immediately,” Bourg said. “The governor and Chairman Dove have canceled these projects in the name of the people, but what are they giving the people in return? The problems persist. The problems are here. They're not going away.”

Bourg said any project similar to Mid-Barataria could take at least eight to 10 years to greenlight. Construction was expected to take another five years. Bourg and other advocates worry that whatever solution moves forward may arrive too late to combat sea level rise.

“Louisiana's coast doesn't have eight to 10 years,” she said. “It is weird standing here in an area that we thought would be the largest ecosystem restoration project in the country, and there's nothing here.”

In an interview, Dove emphasized that his agency continues to use modeling to design projects, and is only building projects already approved in the master plan. He said he’s dedicated to the use of science, despite what critics say. 

“We do everything by scientific. We do everything by sound engineering. We model every project we have. We follow all state statutes,” Dove said. “It's getting aggravating that certain groups say that they own the word scientific. I've never built nothing without permits and science and models…I wanted that for the record. They do not own scientific. We do scientific.”

Reconnecting the river

With the changing approach to coastal policy and a potential smaller diversion several years away, the question of southeast Louisiana’s future has grown murkier. 

Between 2020 and 2050, Louisiana is projected to see 14 to 22 inches of sea level rise at Grand Isle, a barrier island that sits on the southern end of the Barataria basin, according to the National Sea Level Rise Viewer, a tool created by multiple federal agencies using projections updated in 2022. The coast has already experienced about 11 inches of sea level rise at Grand Isle from 1993 to 2023. That amount of sea level rise would swallow much of the remaining wetlands outside of levee systems and lead to frequent coastal flooding. By 2100, the sea could be almost 3 to 8 feet higher at Grand Isle, depending on how quickly carbon emissions are curbed. 

The idea to restore the Mississippi River’s connection to the surrounding marshes dates back many decades. When Congress directed the Mississippi River Commission to coordinate flood control policy in the late 1800s, some engineers wanted to design a more comprehensive program including levees, outlets and reservoirs. Instead, the leadership adopted a “levees only” policy, sealing most of the Mississippi River’s outlets with higher and higher levees. The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, which displaced hundreds of thousands of people from Illinois to Louisiana, ended that approach. The swollen river demonstrated the need for a system of levees, outlets, and spillways. Still, much of the river in southern Louisiana was leveed, a decision top civil engineers knew would lead to the degradation of the delta. Elmer Lawrence Corthell, a leading engineer, noted in 1897 that decision-makers had to weigh protection of current generations against the effects that sinking, sediment-starved land would have on future Louisiana residents.

Modeling the Effects of the Mid-Barataria Project

The model below uses a comparison slider to illustrate how the landscape changes with restoration versus without restoration. It includes forecasted scenarios showing modeled conditions from Year 2 after project completion through Year 50.

Historically, the Mississippi River built all of the land in southern Louisiana. The river would naturally overtop its banks during flood seasons, and the mud would fall out, building up the land over millennia. Levees protect property by preventing the river from spilling over, but they also prevent southern Louisiana’s spongy land from being replenished. 

While he conceded “the present generation should not be selfish,” Corthell believed the development in the Mississippi River delta would be worth the high price of later needing a vast levee to protect the region from the encroaching Gulf of Mexico. 

Corthell’s prediction was spot on. From 1932 to 2000, Louisiana lost about 1,900 square miles of land, nearly the same footprint as Delaware. Disconnecting the river from the delta with levees was the primary cause, worsened by extraction and canals carved through marsh by the oil and gas industry. 

Coastal scientist Denise Reed moved to Louisiana in the 80s after graduating from the University of Cambridge. She’s a renowned expert on sustaining marshes. In 1993, a state task force introduced its first comprehensive coastal wetlands restoration plan. Reed played a role in the 1993 plan, with the input of other scientists. She said that it was one of the first to clearly call for diversions, like the Mid-Barataria project, as a “lynchpin strategy.”

The 1993 plan said, “The Mississippi River built most of the coastal wetlands in Louisiana and in it lies the best hope for restoring wetlands that have been lost in recent decades.”The restoration plan helped lay the foundation for the state’s extensive coastal master plan as it exists today. It was also among the first to propose what would become known as the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion.

Around this time, Sidney Coffee, who lobbied on behalf of Louisiana on coastal issues in Washington D.C. and eventually became the first chair of CPRA, said both planning and funding for wetlands restoration were inadequate. 

“There was no money,” said Coffee. “It was just a daunting, daunting task.”

Until Hurricane Katrina… 

In the aftermath of the 2005 storm, and Hurricane Rita weeks later, restoring Louisiana’s coast became a top priority. 

“After Katrina, we knew that we had to change everything. We had to have everybody on the same page,” Coffee said. She headed coastal policy under then-Gov. Kathleen Blanco. 

State lawmakers recognized the need for restoration as protection. The natural landscape provides multiple layers of defense to ease the pressure on levee systems. Katrina and Rita provided the political will to start saving the coast, but it took another disaster for the money to match the need. In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (commonly referred to as the BP oil spill) devastated an already suffering Louisiana coastline. The settlement allocated over $4.6 billion to spend largely on coastal restoration in the state — funding at a level that was previously unheard of. It was enough to seriously move forward the Mid-Barataria diversion. 

“We'll never see the money again,” said Coffee.

Designing a diversion

As the Mississippi River winds through south Louisiana, the water slows as it approaches each bend. Computer modeling by the state and other scientists showed a hefty amount of mud and sand could be redirected across Plaquemines Parish’s west bank and out into the Barataria Basin. 

Picture a deep two-mile-long, concrete channel a little more than a quarter-mile wide. One end features a complex system of gates to control the amount of water flowing from the river out the other side. During peak flood season, in the spring, the channel would siphon a fraction of the river. The largest sand particles would start to drop out and build on top of each other quickly, while smaller particles would likely travel down the basin before settling. 

When Reed, the marsh scientist, first moved to Louisiana, she searched for ways to keep coastal wetlands from drowning in sea level rise. 

“The idea certainly, in the saltier end of the system, [was] that sediment was really important for [wetlands’ survival],” Reed said. “And where was that sediment gonna come from? Well, the obvious source was the river.”

So, the idea of man-made diversions quickly rose to the top. Reed said maps showing land loss trends revealed how areas connected to rivers deteriorated more slowly, adding further evidence of the river’s power.

Cuts along the lower Mississippi River serve as proxies for how controlled diversions can build land. Most recently, major flooding in 2019 opened up a new outlet in lower Plaquemines Parish along the east bank of the river, called Neptune Pass sitting about 30 miles south of the Mid-Barataria site. The boat of coastal advocates rocked as it motored across a choppy Mississippi River to the 850-foot-wide mouth of the young distributary. 

Neptune Pass rose to prominence in 2022 after the channel grew nearly sixfold from 2016 to 2021. The channel transformed from a meager bayou to a massive crevasse diverting about one-sixth of the Mississippi River and dumping it in bays to the east. As more of the river flowed out, the power of the mainstem started to slow, allowing for more mud, silt and sand to drop out, leading to sandbars in the new navigation channel thus placing Neptune Pass at the center of a new coastal controversy. 

So the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Louisiana’s coastal authority met in a standoff. Close the channel to maintain the depth required for giant ships or allow the spontaneous diversion to start building land in the surrounding wetlands. 

Now, six years after its emergence, rocks transported downriver cover the base of the channel and its banks to limit further erosion. The Corps’ position won out. The federal agency is in the process of placing more rocks in the channel to constrict the flow of water, easing any impact on marine traffic. The amount of sediment passing through will be reduced with the restraints on water flow. Yet, the area remains a prime example of how little time it takes for the river to begin building land when given a chance. 

As Blink’s boat cruises down Neptune Pass, he points out how a line of tall black willows along the bank didn't exist six years ago. This pocket of vibrant wetlands sharply contrasts the bay near the Mid-Barataria site.

“It's not often one could stand in the middle of a huge geologic change. Being in the middle of a baby delta, or a new delta being formed, is really kind of cool,” he said. “Everything's nice and green. There's a lot of diversity… If we give nature the room to do what it needs to do, it's going to solve a lot of our problems.”

The concept has been proven repeatedly over decades. Uncontrolled, Neptune Pass built at least 1,000 acres of new delta at its mouth leading into Quarantine Bay by 2023. Farther west, near the mouth of the Atchafalaya River, a manmade channel opened in the early 1940s unintentionally built and maintained almost 10 square miles of land south of Morgan City by 2010, according to one LSU study. The Wax Lake Outlet created one of the few deltas that continues to grow, thriving as the rest of the coastline recedes.

Mid-Barataria, meanwhile, was engineered to build up to 27 square miles of land by 2050.

The below timelapse between 1984 and 2020 shows the creation of the delta from the Wax Lake Outlet. 

Race to the bottom

Across the region, the Mid-Barataria diversion had broad support. But locally, in Plaquemines Parish, a project of this scale has been controversial since it was proposed. The concerns of seafood fishers, marine animal advocates and communities vulnerable to increased flooding made the project divisive. So much so that, when the project’s tradeoffs were undeniable, the local parish council unanimously voted to oppose the diversion after the draft environmental impact study was released in 2021.  

With its prime location at the foot of the Mississippi River, Plaquemines Parish historically served as a trade hotspot. The coastal parish maintained a thriving seafood industry, even attracting immigrant fishers from Central Europe in the early 1800s and later from southeast Asia. While crawfish and shrimp remain supreme in Louisiana, oysters are a prime cash crop. Oysters and other bivalves are also among the most sensitive to environmental changes. 

Byron Encalade learned the oyster business from his grandfather and uncle in the small Black fishing community of East Pointe à la Hache. He still remembers helping his grandfather fix boats as a little kid, crawling beneath the boat during repairs. “Cooning,” or gathering oysters, was one of his first jobs. Growing up, when he needed money, Encalade and his cousin turned to the brackish waters of Plaquemines Parish, chiseling oysters out of shallow oyster beds until they caught a handful of sacks. It was their version of an allowance.  

“We’d get $2 or $3 a sack. I know that don’t sound like much money today. But you're talking about back in the 60s, that was a lot of money,” Encalade said. 

His oyster pocket money helped him pay for everything from school clothes to his first pair of All Stars so he could play basketball.

“I bought them myself, fishing oysters,” he recalled fondly.

Now, at 72 years old, he said the lifestyle of his childhood is rarer or has disappeared altogether. The last oystermen struggle to remain in the industry, especially those who are Black like Encalade. When disasters, like influxes of freshwater due to flooding or smaller river diversions, struck, Encalade said it was harder for Black oystermen to have the resources to recover, in part due to discriminatory state policies that make it more difficult for Black oystermen to obtain new leases.

In Plaquemines, new oystermen are uncommon. Everyone Encalade knows who still harvests oysters are in their 60s. 

“Most of the people I know in it wish they would have got out of it years ago,” Encalade said.

He said the parish’s oyster industry has been destroyed over the last two decades by back-to-back disasters, rising prices and diminishing oyster reefs. In 2001, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries observed more than nine million barrels of oysters in the public grounds around Plaquemines Parish alone. Last year, the state’s assessment found less than half a million barrels around Plaquemines. Statewide, there were 1.2 million barrels of oysters in the public grounds. While those numbers don’t include oysters in areas leased from the state, they reflect a decline seen across the business. 

Shrimpers have faced a similar plight as the same disasters have weakened their industry. Additionally, cheap farmed shrimp imported from other countries has also flooded the market, reducing the price people are willing to pay for Gulf shrimp. 

After watching freshwater wipe out popular oyster grounds east of the Mississippi River, Encalade opposed the idea of the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion. The pulse of freshwater would transform areas that had grown much saltier with the encroachment of the Gulf of Mexico, which enabled oysters and brown shrimp to migrate higher in the basin. With the diversion, salinities would drop closer to levels seen in the early 1900s, before the deterioration of Louisiana’s coast. 

The fear of too much freshwater meant oystermen and fishers were among the loudest voices attempting to stop the project. Seafood fishers like Encalade felt they were in the fight of their lives, struggling to keep their culture, heritage and income alive. Any additional stressors, like the diversion, felt like a threat to sweep fishers’ last leg out from under them. 

The question about fishermen like Encalade became a political flashpoint for the 2023 gubernatorial election. As the Mid-Barataria verged on approval in 2022, Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards was nearing the end of his term-limited tenure. When he was in office, the state’s coastal authority held course, steadily working toward a permit from the Army Corps and funding approval from the trustees created by the BP oil settlement.

“[This is] the largest ever ecosystem restoration project in our state's history,” Edwards said at the groundbreaking in August 2023, which no local Plaquemines Parish officials attended. “It's also a project that will once again show the rest of the nation, of the world, that Louisiana has what it takes to address the growing threat of land loss and sea level rise.”

Couched in the celebration was a warning. At the groundbreaking, Edwards said the next person in line must “allow science to guide that decision-making.” 

That year, one of the Louisiana fishers’ most powerful allies grew louder. Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser, who served as president of Plaquemines Parish for almost a decade, campaigned heavily against the diversion, calling for its cancellation to preserve local fisheries and communities. He was widely considered a would-be frontrunner for the governor’s race.So was then-attorney general Jeff Landry, who used litigation to champion the oil and gas industry. Some of Landry’s positions were unsupported by research, including when he previously labeled climate change a “hoax” in 2018. Nungesser met with Landry in November 2023 before he ultimately declined to run for governor. The sediment diversion was one of the topics they discussed at the meeting.

Near the end of his first year in office, Landry grew vocal against the sediment diversion and railed against the Mid-Barataria’s pricetag. The project had grown more expensive over the years due to the lengthy approval process, and Landry said he worried the state would have to make up the difference if the project cost continued to balloon.

But the state had already secured enough money to pay for construction: $2.26 billion in BP settlement money and $660 million from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. The state was also building the diversion under a program called “construction manager at risk” that required firms to deliver the project under a guaranteed maximum price, reducing the likelihood of a drastic cost increase.

At a November 2024 state Senate transportation committee meeting, Landry also pointed to the plight of the fishers, prioritizing the concerns of the seafood industry.

“This project is going to break our culture,” Landry said. 

Without the project, however, shrimpers, oystermen and other fishers will also miss out on additional aid for their businesses. Dove told The Margin the state doesn’t plan to look into other support for the fishers or communities outside the levee system. He said other coastal projects, like a billion-dollar, 23-mile-long strip of land created through dredging called the Barataria Landbridge, will prevent flooding from future sea level rise. But coastal advocates contest the land bridge's ability to offer protection beyond the next 20 years — the typical lifespan for marsh created through dredging. 

“We don't have to help the fisheries because there's nothing to help. And they're gonna be fine. We're not gonna interrupt what they're doing right now with the fisheries, with the oysters,” Dove said. “We're not gonna hurt fisheries.”

After campaigning to cancel the project, even Encalade had little hope for the future of his fellow oystermen.

Encalade still leads the Louisiana Oysterman Association, but he’s sold all of his oyster boats. For a while, the only thing that kept his oyster business alive was simultaneously owning and operating his own truck operation. He’s sold his 18-wheelers, too. Encalade said he’s thankful his kids chose to go to college and get advanced degrees instead of pursuing the oyster business. He said a lot of his friends who took payouts from the BP oil spill and reinvested it into their oyster business have yet to recover their investment, and it’s hard to find an alternative.

When you lose everything and so much of your income and your business that your foundation is based on that water… and suddenly it just gets pulled from underneath you. … You can't pick up and say, ‘Well, I'm gonna go start another business here and there,’” he said. “Where are you gonna go?”

The ripple effects

The lack of progress on the already permitted and funded diversion raised questions from the federal partners charged with disbursing the BP settlement.

After November, Landry and Dove, the chairman of the coastal authority’s governing board, continued to say publicly that the diversion no longer seemed feasible in the long term, due to the cost of operating and maintaining the project once it was opened. Dove estimated maintenance costs included more than a billion dollars of dredging waterways near the project. 

The agency also didn’t make progress toward settling a lawsuit with Plaquemines Parish. The Parish brought litigation challenging the project shortly after the groundbreaking, when the parish issued a work stop order, followed by another within the following four months that left the project in limbo for over a year with little pushback from the Landry administration.

About five months after the November 2024 committee meeting, the Army Corps suspended the diversion’s permit.

“This suspension is based on the State’s actions (including failures to act or to obtain compromise), its public statements and positions, the new information and potentially changed circumstances since permit issuance,” wrote Col. Cullen Jones, the commander and district engineer of the Army Corps’ New Orleans District, in a letter dated April 25, 2025. He noted that the suspension did not reflect the process leading up to the Corps’ 2022 decision to greenlight the diversion. According to the letter, quoting from the Corps’ original permit decision, the benefits of the diversion as originally designed had “slightly outweighed” the project’s cost and consequences. 

A spokesman for the Corps said he couldn’t provide further comment on the Mid-Barataria diversion due to pending litigation.

Quantifying the Effects of the Mid-Barataria Project

The chart below outlines the expected total land area as a result of the Mid-Barataria project with restoration versus without restoration. It includes forecasted scenarios from Year 2 after project completion through Year 50.

The state didn’t contest the permit’s suspension; instead, it requested more time while studying the potential of a sediment diversion that would be five times smaller. 

The state’s last extension request was in July, a little over two weeks before the state’s coastal agency decided to officially terminate the Mid-Barataria project. The termination came after the state had already spent more than half a billion dollars on the diversion. The federal trustees—NOAA, the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture—agreed to still reimburse the state for the money spent on the now-canceled project, returning the remaining $1.6 billion of BP oil spill money to the trustees to fund future Louisiana projects. 

Any new project will have to go through the years-long restoration planning process again to receive approval, as well as receive new approval from the Corps. 

In his statement, Dove pledged the coastal agency’s commitment to rebuilding the coast hadn’t wavered, despite canceling a project that had been a key piece of its master plan for 18 years.

The administration recently doubled down on its approach to sediment diversions by quietly withdrawing its permit application for another large-scale sediment diversion. The Mid-Breton Sediment Diversion, while large-scale, would have been smaller than the Mid-Barataria, about two-thirds the size, on the east bank of the river. The coastal agency halted the project with little consultation from its governing board, citing a lack of funding.

Given the cost of Mid-Barataria, the Edwards administration knew there wouldn’t be enough BP settlement dollars to also pay for Mid-Breton,so the future of the project wasn’t secure. However, with Mid-Barataria’s cancellation, state Rep. Jerome Zeringue wondered if that money could have gone to Mid-Breton instead and how the latest cancellation would affect the master plan.

At the October CPRA board meeting, Dove didn’t address the question directly, though he said there will be an impact on the 2029 master plan. But he said the Corps would move forward with a previously authorized slate of restoration projects in the Breton Sound Basin. In a later interview with The Margin, Dove said those projects haven’t been funded yet, but if they are, the move will be cheaper for the state.  

Despite a request from a board member, CPRA agency officials didn’t commit to sharing what the future computer modeling of the Louisiana coastal projects shows after the cancellation of the plan’s sediment diversions. 

New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward sits about 20 miles north of where the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion was projected to build land. The area around New Orleans, including parts of Jefferson Parish, was expected to benefit the most from the wetlands created by the diversion, restoring some of its storm buffer to the south. 

The Lower Ninth Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement & Development is a Black-led organization founded not long after Hurricane Katrina that tries to address environmental issues that lead to disasters as well as advocating for resources in the community. For Arlo Townsley, their Coastal Restoration Coordinator, the project’s cancellation felt like it signaled the loss of a major tool, the river, to help shape the broader future of the region. He said he was excited to see the river managed differently, in a way that built land instead of lost it. 

“It would have meant a lot in terms of projects to come and other avenues of how to build a sustainable future for our coast and the land that we're on,” Townsley said. “Any land that we lose, it brings the Gulf closer to us…So it definitely impacts us [on] that larger scale.”

He said the cancellation also brings up a lot of questions about how to move forward when large-scale projects to reconnect the river are taken off the table. 

His organization has focused on restoring the coast closer to home. The central wetlands of Bayou Bienvenue are nestled in a triangle bordered by New Orleans East, the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish. The same canal that funneled storm surge from Hurricane Katrina into the city’s levee system killed off the cypress and tupelo swamps that once buffered the area from storms, leaving behind a ghost swamp. With the closure of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, the central wetlands have started to recover. Salinity is low enough for trees to survive again. 

In late October, a group of environmental and coastal advocates clad in Halloween costumes gathered volunteers on party boats to help replant the swamp with 1,000 young baldcypress trees. The planting is part of a larger effort to reforest the swamp with more than 30,000 trees, as well as thousands of plugs of new marsh grass. For Townsley, these plantings felt like a bright spot amid the loss of two sediment diversions. 

“Now that [those] projects don’t exist, that makes the projects that we're doing in the central wetlands a lot more important,” he said, noting that the plantings have been effective so far. 

Amid the dire projections and the uncertainty of coastal restoration, Townsley said it’s hard to imagine whether a city like New Orleans could even exist after another 100 years. 

“It would be an entirely different city, and one that was very much redesigned to live with water, instead of against it,” he said. “The paradigm that has brought us here is like, how do we control, wall off, channelize, and separate ourselves from water.”

Charles Sutcliffe, a senior advisor for resilience at the National Wildlife Federation, said the chances of either sediment diversion being revived, even by a future administration, are slim to none. 

As the boat whipped on the outskirts of Myrtle Grove on that September tour, he noted how the loss of the project leaves the same communities that feared the project stranded. No diversion means no money to help them adapt to a basin that will continue to change with or without the project. Tides that will continue to rise. 

Sutcliffe was named the state’s first Chief Resilience Officer during the Edwards administration. “They're flooding today. They are going to flood more and more and more as time goes on. And there's not even been a discussion about how do we provide that kind of flood relief to them now, outside of the project. To me, that's as offensive as killing a project that's been planned for so long.”

Yet, as the climate projections grow, the scale of the solutions in Louisiana is shrinking. Sutcliffe and Bourg said the priorities have also shifted, focusing more on hard infrastructure than marsh creation.

Bourg added that these changes and choices go against the decades of science that guided the state’s coastal program. 

“If we are saying we are unwilling to have these large-scale restoration projects implemented, we are essentially turning our backs on this part of Louisiana,” she said. 

As the boat floated in Quarantine Bay, where the mighty Mississippi continues to build land through Neptune Pass, Foster Creppel, a Plaquemines Parish resident, shared, 

“As long as we have the Mississippi River, there's hope.” 

***

Disclosure: The author worked at the National Audubon Society from February 2020 to October 2020 as a communications associate.

I woke up on Sunday, September 29, 2024, with a headache that was unusual for me, but I took Tylenol and pushed through. It was a church Sunday, and I had plans for my daughter, Nicole Green, and my grandson to join me at my church, an hour away.

After the service, during the long drive back home, my daughter received an alert on her phone around 11:30 a.m. about a fire nearby. We mistakenly thought the risk was in our town of Covington, so we took Exit 82 in Conyers. Little did we know that this was where toxic flames ignited that morning. 

We drove right through a danger zone.  

A few months before my headache started, BioLab, a plant in Conyers known for manufacturing pool and spa water chemicals, established an around-the-clock fire watch protocol in response to strong odors detected in on-site storage. According to a May 2025 investigation by the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB), the so-called permanent fire watch was responsible for “identifying and managing hazards, detecting early signs of product decomposition or fire hazards, notifying site leadership of any observed leaks or other water intrusions, and contacting the third-party sprinkler company if a sprinkler head was leaking.”  

However, the state and BioLab then began preparing for a different kind of emergency. Hurricane Helene made landfall on Sept. 26, 2024, around 300 miles away in Florida as a Category 4 hurricane, the deadliest storm in the contiguous U.S. since Katrina. BioLab closed down following our governor’s state of emergency declaration in preparation for the hurricane. The fire watch continued to work, using buckets to capture rainwater from the leaking roof, as approximately 10 inches of rain descended on Conyers between Sept. 26 and 27. As Helene continued north into Appalachia, she left a breeze that lingered after the rain stopped. But a new disturbance would soon descend upon us. 

At about 5 a.m. on Sept. 29, 2024, a member of the fire watch team at BioLab heard a loud popping sound and initially believed it to be the nearby ice machine. Upon investigation, the employee found that some chemicals had gotten wet, which likely caused the popping noise. 

The BioLab plant stored trichloroisocyanuric acid and sodium dichloroisocyanurate, two chlorine-based disinfectants. When these chemicals come into contact with water, they produce nitrogen trichloride, or in simpler terms, “an explosion hazard,” according to the CSB investigation. In the month of the fire, BioLab’s inventory had grown to more than double what the company told local officials it would store, with about 13.9 million pounds of chemicals. The company stored these chemicals in “super sacks,” thousands of pounds stacked on top of one another, some of which were stored outside the plant’s firewall. The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) previously fined BioLab $61,473 in April 2024 for improperly storing the chemicals that triggered the fire.

Pollution from the BioLab Fire

The following map visualizes the dispersion of chemical pollution following the BioLab fire over several days following the incident, coupled with annual household income data for the surrounding affected areas.

By approximately 5:10 a.m., a member of the fire watch called 911 as smoke began to fill the warehouse. News reports later confirmed that on this initial 911 call, the employee mentioned a sprinkler head had burst inside the facility. Around 6 a.m., local emergency services issued shelter-in-place and evacuation orders, going door-to-door to neighbors adjacent to the warehouse. Hours later, a second, more intense fire broke out, sending plumes of black and multicolored smoke into the air, as “small explosions” shot chemicals out of the building. Rockdale County Fire Rescue personnel said it sounded like the gun range. The fire destroyed the warehouse, trapping chemicals that personnel were unable to remove ahead of the second fire.  

At the time, I lived nine miles from the BioLab plant; my daughter and grandson were 11 miles away. I kept a close eye on 11Alive News and reassured my roommate and her visiting granddaughter that it was safe to be outside in the post-hurricane breeze. However, local officials had evacuated about 17,000 people and implemented a shelter-in-place advisory for the metro Atlanta area as the toxic smoke moved through. 

The day after the fire, I drove my roommate’s granddaughter to the Atlanta bus terminal to return home to celebrate her mother's birthday. To ensure everything went smoothly, I decided to leave 30 minutes earlier than planned. On the drive, we encountered a roadblock at Exit 84 to I-20, forcing us to take a detour instead of taking the main highway through Conyers. We navigated to Highway 155 North and drove through what I assumed to be thick fog, drastically limiting visibility to about five feet.

Returning from the bus terminal, I started coughing, my eyes burned, and the headache I had hoped would go away returned with a vengeance. Later that evening, I experienced stomach cramps, too. I informed my roommate of my intent to visit urgent care if my symptoms didn't improve by morning. While heading to bed, I noticed a slight chlorine smell in the house, which was puzzling since I hadn’t done any cleaning.

By Oct. 1, my headache had worsened, and a powerful bleach odor permeated the entire house. My eyes burned intensely, my cough worsened, and my chest felt constricted. At this point, I was not just concerned; I was furious. 

That same day, around 10:30 a.m., I visited the urgent care center. Without health insurance, I initially managed all my doctor’s visits out of pocket. There, the doctor administered a nebulizer respiratory treatment and a steroid injection. She prescribed a regimen: 10 mg steroids for a week, 800 mg ibuprofen three times a day for five days, eye irritation relief drops, an albuterol inhaler, medication for a sinus infection, and antibiotics.

As I glanced at the material my doctor handed to me, the phrase “Today’s Diagnosis Includes” caught my eye. Along with the other diagnoses, it stated, “Exposure to biological agent.” I had suspected as much, but seeing it in writing crystallized the reality of the situation. Reading my diagnosis stirred a whirlwind of emotions—fear, anxiety, and yes, anger. Standing outside the building, my heart racing. I took a moment to collect myself, got into my car, and, while driving, allowed myself to feel what needed to be felt. I cried. 

Although I considered leaving the area temporarily, I didn’t have the funds for a hotel stay. However, I had a Kairos prison ministry weekend scheduled for Oct. 3 in Hartwell, Georgia, about 80 miles away. The hotel was taken care of, and I was determined to attend. I hoped that this would provide me with some much-needed relief, even if I couldn’t be much help; at least I could breathe some fresh air. 

I checked into a hotel, borrowing my daughter’s nebulizing machine for her asthma to assist with my breathing. 

On Oct. 6, around 7 p.m., I returned home and noticed a resurgence of symptoms—chest pain, coughing, burning eyes, a persistent headache, and now itching. I made myself a bowl of soup and settled on the sofa with my late mom’s blanket for comfort, but I started itching. I chose to go to bed early, but the itching continued throughout the night. 

Within the next 48 hours, I realized that a residue had settled on the sofa, bed, walls, and floors. I immediately got to work, thoroughly cleaning and dusting all surfaces and washing all exposed linens, comforters, towels, and clothes—an effort that took up most of my day. I saw dead bugs in the windowsill, which made me think to collect as much evidence as possible. I collected the dead bugs and air conditioning filters. I took pictures of my garden and filmed a short video.

After cleaning the house, I felt extremely weak and struggled to catch my breath during basic tasks like showering and eating. For the next five days, using the remaining medications I had been prescribed, I tried to endure without going back to the doctor. I had little to no appetite and only ate enough to take my extra medications.

On the morning of Oct. 11, 2024, I returned to urgent care, where the doctor provided me with two more nebulizer treatments and administered another steroid shot. She prescribed a higher dose of steroids to take home, an additional inhaler, and more nebulizer medications. The doctor also recommended that I purchase a nebulizer machine and mentioned that we would take an X-ray of my lungs at my next appointment. I invested in an air purifier, though in hindsight, I should have gone straight to the ER, but I was worried about my finances and couldn’t fathom the cost of that hospital bill.  

Like many people, I faced my share of challenges in life. Last year, I relocated to Covington in January, had a car accident in February, and lost my mom in April, all while navigating a divorce. Coupled with my emerging health issues, it was all a lot to handle. 

Meanwhile, I found a shared community among those who were also trying to catch their breath, quite literally, in the wake of the BioLab catastrophe. I’ve interviewed at least nine people and attended multiple related community meetings to capture what we learned and lost in the shadow of that plume that erupted in our backyards just over a year ago.

“We want BioLab shut down…” 

In the days and weeks following the BioLab fire, many of us in the surrounding area sought answers. I joined a Rockdale County Resident Facebook page and came across a recording of the state House and Senate Rockdale County legislative delegation meeting held on Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2024.

The Rockdale County Soil and Water Conservation District supervisor, Kenny Johnson, insisted that all Rockdale County residents undergo blood testing and that Georgia’s congressional representatives pursue a federal criminal investigation into BioLab. Soon after his remarks, Johnson stepped out into the hallway and collapsed. The Associated Press reported that Rep. Viola Davis (D-Stone Mountain) administered CPR until medical officials rushed Johnson to Grady Memorial Hospital, where he died later that day. 

Walter Bannister, a resident of Conyers and founder of The Citizens of Rockdale, spoke at the same meeting just before Johnson delivered his remarks. Citing his disaster recovery experience with the defense coordinating element for FEMA groups 2 and 3, he said he believed the governor should have issued a state of emergency. 

“We want BioLab shut down and moved out of Rockdale County,” he added, drawing applause from attendees.

Last year wasn't the first time the BioLab warehouse caught fire; it’s happened at least three times in the last two decades. BioLab’s lawyers continue to battle lawsuits, including one on behalf of Rockdale County and a class-action lawsuit, both of which are still in litigation. In a Sept. 2025 ruling, a federal judge dismissed parts of Rockdale County’s lawsuit seeking reimbursement for public services such as firefighters and for monitoring air and water quality, and dismissed claims of violating the Clean Air Act without prejudice, meaning the state can refile those in another case. In the class-action suit, a federal judge agreed with BioLab’s motion to dismiss allegations of “strict liability” for any and all damages arising from storing potentially hazardous chemicals. The Georgia Supreme Court will weigh in on the legal grounds of the medical monitoring fund. The class-action suit seeks to compensate members for treatment and screenings “necessitated by their exposure to toxic chemicals.” In May 2025, BioLab announced it had completed remediation of the Conyers facility and wouldn’t restart its operations there.

The way forward wasn’t as simple for the rest of us. 

Bannister lives a few miles from BioLab, or “ground zero,” as he calls it. For nearly three weeks following the fire, nightly shelter-in-place warnings continued for the communities in a two-mile radius of the plant. He likened the smoke that engulfed the community to the 1980 horror film “The Fog.” The silence and stillness were particularly eerie. The birds and the insects that normally chirped or stung were gone. He told me the grille of his 2022 Toyota Tundra had corroded, making the car appear to be decades old. The oak trees in his yard and vegetables in the garden looked like they’d been through a fiercely cold winter. The trees were green one day and dead the next, he said.

His initial symptoms were similar to those of others I’ve interviewed, watery eyes and frustration with the persistent smell of chlorine. He and his wife bought bottled water to wash their faces after being outside. “Every time you’d go outside, your skin would literally burn,” he told me over the phone in October. “It almost [felt] like somebody putting a butane torch to your face—you can actually feel the heat coming from it.”  

Every time you’d go outside, your skin would literally burn,” he told me over the phone in October. “It almost [felt] like somebody putting a butane torch to your face—you can actually feel the heat coming from it."

Bannister shut the HVAC off, taped the windows, and sent his family to Ocala, Florida, to get away from the “chemical, acid smoke smell” that still seeped into the house. His wife returned when yet another storm, Hurricane Milton, was spinning toward Florida. But the Bannisters’ kids stayed behind. “The kids are like, ‘We know the hurricane is only going to be like a day, and it’s going to knock down some trees, and it’s going [to] rain…but y’all [are] fighting invisible wounds up there—we’re not going back up there.’” Walter was proud that they didn’t want to put themselves in harm’s way. 

I could relate to Bannister’s desire to keep his children safe. With my breathing trouble, I’ve been empathizing with my daughter, Nicole, who’s dealt with asthma symptoms for years. Feeling a tightness and pain in your chest because your airways are inflamed is something you can’t fully understand unless you experience it.

Nicole worked retail in Conyers, about four miles from BioLab. In the immediate aftermath of the fire, she wanted to figure out what she needed to do to feel better—she needed me, her mama, as she later told me. But, she had to return to work in the days following the fire, so she brought her nebulizer with her to try to manage the increasing asthma attacks. “The smell was in the clothes, and that did nothing but make my asthma worse,” she said. 

She stopped going into work for about four days to find relief. When she returned with a doctor’s note, management let her go. My daughter has two children, then ages 11 and 21, and she needed to support them. She didn’t have her own car, so she rented vehicles to pick up groceries for Instacart. More than a year after the fire, she says her asthma still feels worse than it did before the BioLab fire.   

“I just feel like everyone was treated unfair[ly] healthwise, whether you got respiratory problems before and it worsened, or you got respiratory problems when it happened,” she said. “Where’s the empathy, where’s the care?"

Chemical Incidents in the Southeast United States

The following map depicts chemical explosions, fires, and leaks that have occured between 2021-2025. Additional details are available for each individual incident.

Data is provided by the Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters.
 

The Opposite Effect

After several months of visiting urgent care, I mentioned to my doctor that I would get sick every time I went out to pick up groceries, shop for clothes, or handle other errands. She told me, "I need you to stop going out." I kept repeating her words to myself on the way home, feeling helpless. At that point, the only option I saw was to leave the area entirely.

While searching for housing in neighboring counties, my symptoms worsened just before Christmas—I thought I might die. I had to look for a house, pack mine up, then unpack a whole house, all while I was deathly sick. I felt so weak I couldn't even sit up long enough to make a bowl of soup. After a trip to urgent care and taking more medication, I would start feeling better after about a week, only to experience weakness, exhaustion, stomach pain, and difficulty breathing again. I purchased a health care plan at the beginning of this year, which I could barely afford. If Congress lets the Affordable Care Act subsidies lapse, I’ll be uninsured again. Lately, I’ve been seeing a pulmonologist—it’s been a relentless cycle of doctor's appointments, X-rays, CT scans, and, most recently, an MRI.

I’m trying to focus on the bright spots. 

There are people like Cheryl Garcia of Conyers, who was also preparing to go to church the Sunday of the fire, but paused when she saw news reports. She had a metallic taste in her mouth, smelled chlorine in her home, and her husband complained that his eyes, throat, and nose were burning, and his chest felt tight after being outside. Garcia, who is a retired nurse practitioner, developed vocal cord dysphonia and underwent eight weeks of speech therapy twice a week. She and her husband had all the vents cleaned, the crawl space in the basement encapsulated, and their roof replaced. And they pray—a lot. She’s also fighting for accountability from local officials and industry.

“I have pretty much forced myself onto the local emergency planning committee, which was not active before BioLab, and I made a lot of noise about that,” she said. “They are now meeting monthly. And as a citizen, I am there every month to hold them accountable, and hopefully that will prevent something like this from happening again.” 

There is a disaster waiting to happen in every community on the margins, from the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, to the petrochemical plant explosion in Roseland, Louisiana, to the ammunition factory explosion in Tennessee, to the recent ammonia leak near Yazoo City, Mississippi, where a plume of yellow smoke spread through the air. 

It's easy to become isolated—many of us were literally encouraged to stay home and isolate. In many ways, we are still emerging from the shadow of that plume.

However, it is having the opposite effect, and I hope communities are becoming aware of how much we need each other. It’s part of why, this September, almost a year to date from the fire, I completed Henry County’s Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) training to learn disaster response skills, search and rescue techniques, and disaster medical operations. Next, I’ll learn CPR. In the event of the next emergency, I will not merely seek assistance from others but serve as a proactive resource to aid my community.

***

Alfonso Figueroa and Anel Juarez drove 100 miles from their cobalt-blue manufactured home in Winchester Heights, Arizona, to a hospital in Tucson, where Anel’s OB-GYN had scheduled an appointment to induce her labor.

Countless times, Alfonso made the two-hour drive with his wife for prenatal care. But on this ride, Anel, who was having contractions, felt every pothole on the dirt roads of her community. At least it was under 100 degrees that day.

Just after midnight on September 4, 36-year-old Anel gave birth to their third child, Alaia Isabela. The next day, the couple drove their newborn home, navigating those bumpy roads. Anel supported her baby’s head in the car seat.

“I feel like she gets shaken up a lot because of the movement of the car, because of the road,” Anel said in Spanish.

Alfonso and Anel moved to Winchester Heights from Mexico 16 years ago. Before that, he worked a back-breaking job at a factory for next to nothing. Working on a farm in the U.S. allows Alfonso, 38, to earn more in a couple of days than he did in a week back in Mexico, while Anel stays home with the kids.

He loves his job and is currently caring for 108,000 pistachio trees near Wilcox. When Alfonso returns home to Winchester Heights and looks around, he sees his community in disrepair: “My place back in Oaxaca seemed better than here. I thought this was an abandoned town,” he said in Spanish.

Rows of manufactured homes and trailers, some more sophisticated than others, line the six parallel streets that form Winchester Heights. The dirt roads connect to a soccer field. Nearby, a tienda sells beer and snacks, and roses bloom outside the community center and a small playground. 

For most residents, Spanish is their mother tongue. Instead of Winchester Heights, some call it Perras Flacas, or Skinny Dogs, a nickname for the community's many stray dogs, including pit bulls, said Alfonso, who won’t let his older children, Ashley, 9, and Alfonso (Jr.), 12, play far from home. 

Alfonso and Anel have worked hard to create a home, investing time and money to improve it for their growing family. Their house has a well-kept lawn and fruit trees form a neat line along the front fence. Inside, they hang out on spotless leather couches in front of a large flat-screen TV. 

No matter how much they invest in their home, they alone can’t change the community’s lack of infrastructure. Winchester Heights—a tiny dot on the map of southern Arizona— is a colonia, roughly translated as “neighborhood” in Spanish. It’s home to several hundred people living about 100 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border. Most of its residents are farmworkers on nearby pistachio and tomato farms. Some have lived here for decades with their families, while others are temporary workers. 

There are at least 2,000 colonias dusted along the southwestern border states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, many of them unincorporated like Winchester Heights.

Most of these communities were established by workers who came into the U.S. during waves of labor migration. Families settled close to the industries where they were employed, sometimes in mountain canyons or in the middle of a desert. Today, around 1 million residents, most of them with Mexican roots, call colonias home.

Climate Risks Affecting Colonias in Southern Arizona 

In the eyes of the U.S. government, when a community is certified as a colonia, it has significant needs— little to no access to potable water and wastewater services, and substandard housing and poor infrastructure. Additionally, "regions with colonias have poverty rates 3 to 9 percentage points higher than other border regions," according to a 2024 federal government report. Getting resources and infrastructure improvements to colonias has always been challenging, and it is getting more difficult now with cuts across the government agencies that fund them. 

Nearly 60% of colonias in the country are at risk of losing their status and funding in the next few years, according to a 2024 report on rural development in colonias by the United States Government Accountability Office. According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)’s outdated rules, the metropolitan statistical areas that colonias belong to cannot exceed 1 million people. Colonias in the Tucson metropolitan statistical area crossed this threshold in 2014.

In July 2025, Texas Congressman Tony Gonzales introduced a bipartisan bill, aiming to protect colonias’ funding by increasing the maximum for the metropolitan statistical areas surrounding colonias from 1 million to 2 million people. The bill, the Ensuring Continued Access to Funding for Colonias Act (H.R. 4498), sits in the House Committee on Financial Services, awaiting further action.

Due to their geographical location, colonias are particularly vulnerable to climate change, with extreme heat, drought, wildfires, and flooding threatening their residents. And federal funding supports repairs to water systems, infrastructure upgrades, and housing. The combination of inadequate water access and poor infrastructure makes people sicker. In Arizona, most of its 58 colonias are in medically underserved areas, where the ratio of population-to-primary care physicians is greater than 5,000 to 1.

Residents of colonias are among the most vulnerable populations in our country, authors of the 2024 GAO report found.

The Margin and Arizona Luminaria visited eight colonias in Arizona, including some that lost their designation. Many of these communities rely on septic tanks or sewage lagoons and receive water from communal wells. Those outside of the well system store water in cisterns or tanks, which exposes it to contaminants. Many residents don’t believe the tap water is safe to drink, so they mostly use it for dishes and bathing. Interviews with 48 residents, local and state officials, nonprofits, researchers, and healthcare providers revealed that all are concerned that compounded stressors to which residents of colonias are exposed are leaving them in harm’s way.

A Legacy of Impermanence  

Arizona’s colonias first emerged in the late 19th century, following the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which created a labor shortage in railroad construction and slowed mining and agriculture. To adapt, companies sought cheap labor from Mexico. Recruited Mexican workers settled in worker camps along the border. Some of these camps, including places like Clifton, two hours north of Winchester Heights, remain colonias today.

One reason these informal settlements endure is the state’s land-use policies. In the 20th century, especially the 1990s, Arizona saw a boom in “wildcat subdivisions,” where developers split large parcels into smaller lots without guaranteeing water access or other essential services. Angela Donelson, co-author of the book “Colonias in Arizona and New Mexico,” has spent part of her city planning career studying colonias and trying to improve conditions in poor rural communities.

“There's roads that are impassable. There's irregular lots, irregular streets, probably issues with electrical connections,” Donelson said. Those irregular homesteading and uneven development patterns are a signature of many wildcat subdivisions, and, in turn, colonias in Arizona.

Since the 1990s, the federal government has taken strides to improve living conditions in colonias. The 1990 Cranston-Gonzalez National Affordable Housing Act established a designated set-aside Community Development Block Grants from HUD and mandated the four states—Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California—to spend up to 10% of their community development funds on projects that benefited colonias. In 1997, Congress made the colonia set-aside funding permanent.

This money is competitive, and HUD allocates it to state agencies annually. In the latest funding cycle, according to the data from the Arizona Department of Housing—the agency administering the funds—the state received just over $2 million to spend on housing and water infrastructure improvement in four counties with colonias.  One of these counties was Cochise, which was awarded $119,372 for housing rehabilitation in up to five colonias, including Winchester Heights.

A Glimpse into Neighboring Colonias

Explore the following colonias to hear from residents and view images from each area.

“It’s never enough,” said Christine McLachlan, the director of Development Services in Cochise County. “Any money we could possibly get would instantly be absorbed. The need is great.”

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) also has targeted funding for colonias through rural development grants and loan programs for water, wastewater, and housing improvements. And colonias are eligible for the funding for “disadvantaged communities” under the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law administered by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Still, without the designated set-aside grants, it will be even harder for colonias to secure the funding needed to improve their living conditions. Colonias will have to compete against a much bigger pool of communities in need. 

“We have a lot of need, but so do other counties, and so it's tough,” McLachlan said.

For the amenities—or ad hoc solutions—colonias do have, residents largely have themselves to thank. In Winchester Heights, residents pulled wild mesquite trees through the dirt, carving out their own streets. In the case of fires, residents are often their own first responders. Alfonso Figueroa shared that he once had to bring a water truck from work to help put out a fire, as there are no fire hydrants in his colonia. Instead, neighbors run to help each other with their own hoses or buckets of water.

Hydrants aren’t the only thing Winchester Heights lacks. Stormwater drainage, streetlights, public access to water and sewer infrastructure, trash removal, health care and schools are nonexistent. Alfonso and Anel’s kids go to a small elementary school 20 minutes away. This unincorporated colonia has no formal governance structure, leaving residents to seek resources and funding on their own with little to no outside support. Coupled with working and raising families, making time to pursue those resources is an unrealistic expectation.

“We don’t know anything,” Alfonso Figueroa said about the funding options. “It makes me sad, because even though there are funds to help the community move forward, nothing gets done.”

This is not only Winchester Heights’ issue. Olga Morales-Pate, the CEO of the Rural Community Assistance Partnership (RCAP), said there’s one common denominator in a lot of colonias: They're managed and operated by volunteers. 

“Most of them are small in size. They lack the financial capacity to afford a paid workforce… You don't have the staff with the right level of sophistication, the right level of training to navigate the regulatory requirements, the funding requirements,” she said. 

The lack of capacity translates into the lack of progress on the ground. In 2015, RCAP, a national network of nonprofits that work to improve living conditions and access to funding in colonias and other rural communities, published a report on the water and wastewater infrastructure needs in colonias. RCAP found that a third, or 604 colonias, housing over 134,000 residents, lacked adequate access to potable water and wastewater management. The 2021-2022 follow-up report showed that conditions in 63 colonias had deteriorated.

“ Having water in Arizona is kind of [a] privilege, but the quality may be terrible,” said Adriana Zuniga-Teran, an associate professor at the School of Geography, Development and Environment at the University of Arizona. Connecting colonias to a public water supply can be prohibitively expensive or logistically impossible due to their remoteness.   

“The horizontal infrastructure, the underground infrastructure–the water and the wastewater–will basically determine a community's ability to build the housing, the medical facilities, the school systems, the grocery stores–everything that makes a community sustainable,” said RCAP’s Morales-Pate. “And that is the one thing that is lacking in our communities.”

Colonias’ Capacity Crisis 

Set in a breathtaking canyon and cut in two by the San Francisco River, Clifton was founded in 1873 after copper ore was discovered in the area. The town is approximately 5 miles away from the Morenci mine, the largest copper producer in the U.S. The historic downtown is adorned with local shops, a museum, an old jail, and a century-old county courthouse. Yet, many of the houses that line Clifton’s canyon roads are crumbling. Paint peels off walls, windows are broken or covered with foil to reflect heat, and some people reside in other people’s backyards. 

Less than half a century ago, Clifton was thriving. Here, in Greenlee County, the residents are whiter and older than those in the Cochise County colonias, and many used to work in the mines. It had schools, an auto shop, and department stores, including a J.C. Penney. Frank Monjaras, 72, used to roam the outdoors as a teenager after his father had taught him desert survival skills and how to shoot a .22-caliber rifle. “My days were spent at the river, running around, riding a bike all day long,” said Monjaras. “I would go out, grab my rifle, box of the .22 [caliber] shells, a blanket, two canteens, can of soup, and hit the mountains up around here, what they call Clifton Peak, Mulligan's Peak, and upriver. I'd be gone all weekend,” reminisced Monjaras

Today in Clifton, hundreds of older residents depend on free meals at the senior center and food pantries. Carolina Cortez, a community health worker with Southeast Arizona Health Education Center (SEAHEC) distributed goods at a food drive in Clifton in September 2025. She rose with the sun to make an hour-long drive, and when she arrived 15 minutes before opening, a line of cars was already waiting. A little over two hours after the opening, the pantry ran out of food. That day, they were able to provide groceries to 108 people, and turned away 32 vehicles. Many of the seniors who come to the food drives retired from the mines.

Monjaras was in his 30s in 1983, when everything changed. That July, the Morenci miners began a year-long strike against the owner, Phelps Dodge Corporation, demanding fair wages. Eventually, they were defeated, and many lost their jobs. In October that same year, the “Great Flood” devastated Clifton, with the San Francisco River rushing through its streets, covering roughly 90,000 cubic feet per second. Following the storm, Frank and his wife Margaret resettled to their house in North Clifton, where they live now.

Over four decades later, Clifton never fully recovered. Businesses left, schools and stores closed, roads cracked, and the houses aged with their owners. Unlike other colonias, Clifton has a government, yet the colonia still doesn't have the capacity to go after competitive grants, a town administrator told The Margin and Arizona Luminaria.

The housing conditions in Clifton upset the Monjaras family, but they don’t surprise them. Their own home needs a paint job and new siding, but they can’t afford it. “It's the money, you know,” Monjaras said. “My wife gets Social Security. I get Social Security. We have to pay our bills, food, you know—take care of ourselves, and what we have left has to stretch out till the next monthly payment.”

Besides, Frank can’t do much fixing on his own. Ten years ago, he got a bad knee infection. As a veteran, the nearest Veterans Affairs (VA) medical center is roughly 41 miles away in Safford. After three years of going back and forth, he developed gangrene. Ultimately, he had to go to Tucson, about 170 miles away, for an amputation. 

Early one afternoon this September, the Monjaras sat in their living room, Margaret, 73, on the couch next to a basket of black and red yarn—the Morenci school colors. A few feet away, Frank engaged in conversation from his wheelchair. They stayed close to their swamp cooler, an energy-efficient cooling unit that infuses moisture into the air. The cooler blew, but didn’t do much else.

“Swamp coolers don't work very well during the summertime. When it's hot, it is hot, and my house will get really hot,” Margaret Monjaras said. Steady air conditioning on a fixed income is a luxury for the Monjaras, but on some days it’s the only way to survive the heat, which reached 111 degrees in mid-August, 2025. “So, we try to do the best we can. In our bedrooms, we have little window air conditioners, which are great. We close the door, turn that on, and we’re nice and cool,” Frank Monjaras added.

The southern border region, where all of Arizona’s colonias are, has more consecutive days with temperatures above 90 degrees than the rest of the country.  Being able to stay cool is a matter of survival. “You're choosing between somewhere this money could go and cooling your space. Which, depending on the time of year, may be a life and death situation,” said Nathan Lothrop, associate director of the Building Resilience, Innovation, Sustainability, and Assistance Center for the Environment and an assistant research professor at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health at the University of Arizona.

Heat-related deaths in Arizona have increased by 350% from 2020 to 2024. According to state data, 990 people died of heat in 2023. In the first nine months of 2024, 742 people died from heat-related causes, according to the Arizona Public Health Association's resident epidemiologist, Allan Williams.

On July 20, 2023, a farmworker in his mid-20s and father of two from Yuma County collapsed in the field in the morning, and died before 10 a.m. during the 11 days of temperatures at and above 110 degrees. “No one should be dying, but the fact that someone died at 8:00 a.m. from heatstroke, and who was a young man, it doesn't fit the stereotypes of who is being impacted by heat in the past,” said SEAHEC’s executive director Brenda Sánchez. 

Heat is exacerbating the multidecade drought in the American Southwest known as the “megadrought.” It is depleting rivers, groundwater, and aquifers, thus further compromising water availability and quality for all, but particularly for those relying on water wells, like the residents in Arizona’s colonias and other remote rural communities.

“Even if someone had a heatstroke, if someone was dehydrated… they didn't miss work. They went to work sick because they had to go to work,” said Sánchez. “They don't have sick time; they need to be able to put food on their table. I don't like to use the word ‘resilience’ because I don't think it's resilience. It's life or death for them to be able to, to just survive,” she said.   

When seasonal monsoons or heavy rains come, rain pounds the baked desert ground. Water remains on the surface instead of being absorbed, causing flash floods. If a community doesn’t have adequate drainage, it floods.

The eastern part of Winchester Heights is flood-prone. “When a strong storm hits, all the homes and streets fill with water,” said Jose Rodriguez, 43, Alfonso Figueroa's co-worker and neighbor, speaking in Spanish. Flooding makes dirt roads dangerous. “Those floods have caused accidents, too… Fort Grant Road is where many accidents happen,” he said. 

In Pirtleville, a former colonia in Cochise County that wasn’t included in the Arizona Department of Housing’s 2024 list of designated colonias, water stays for days after a storm and breeds mosquitoes and flies. “It smells really bad,” said Elizabeth Vertrees, 44, who had water in front of her house for a week after the last significant rain. She said the back roads were flooded and she had to go “all the way around” to drive her daughter to school. 

Research shows that historically, people in colonias have been sicker than the rest of the country. According to a 2014 EPA-USDA report, border counties with colonias had significantly higher rates of Hepatitis A, along with water and foodborne illness, compared to the rest of the U.S. In August 2025, according to Cochise County officials, West Nile virus, a disease spread by mosquitoes breeding in standing water, was detected through vector traps near Pirtleville.

“A Colonia Means Something”

When a colonia is decertified, it not only loses critical access to federal set-aside funding, but other grants also become more challenging to obtain. Without the designation, former colonias compete with all localities applying for HUD’s community development funding.

Colonias must continuously demonstrate they meet the criteria HUD established 35 years ago. Naco, a historical frontier community of 800 to 1,000 people in Cochise County, was certified as a colonia in 1995. In 2024, the Board of the Naco Sanitary District, the de facto leaders of this unincorporated community, discovered that Naco had technically lost its status in 2008. 

According to the Arizona Department of Housing, the HUD Office of the Inspector General discovered that due to HUD's own lacking guidelines, Arizona had incorrectly certified most of its border communities as colonias, and as a result received and spent millions of federal dollars on communities that did not meet criteria under the 1990 Cranston-Gonzalez National Affordable Housing Act. HUD officials disputed the findings but agreed to address certain issues identified in the inspector's audit. All Arizona colonias had to apply to recertify within a two-year window, but Naco did not. The Sanitary District Board hopes to get the status back.

“A colonia means something. It has genuine political and financial implications to it. And thus, there's this sort of constant tension with identifying and labeling something as a colonia,” said Lucas Belury, a geographer and University of Arizona Ph.D. candidate researching colonias. 

However, not all colonias are reckoning with the same challenges. Elgin, a scenic colonia in Santa Cruz County, is studded with vineyards, distilleries, and ranches. And Patagonia, a colonia with an arts center, plant nursery, two grocery stores and community members advocating for environmental monitoring and resources. San Simon is another example. The community’s original draw, a railroad track, runs through the northside of its three-quarters of a square mile. With two churches, paved roads, a brick firehouse, and two stores, San Simon’s amenities far outnumber Winchester Heights’ with less than two-thirds the population. Three shiny white tanks flank the San Simon Water District office of board president, Robert “Chuck” Fickett, 76.

In 1985, Fickett took it upon himself to form a water district and update the failing water infrastructure. “Things were deteriorating. There [were] leaks around town,” Fickett said. Recently, after the old well faltered, the water district obtained funds from the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality and purchased a new well, which they plan to connect in early November 2025.

Despite San Simon’s efforts, it still has issues to address. Kathy Clark, who rents a trailer there, is still reeling after losing her home in the 2024 wildfire in another colonia, Bowie. “We had a fire that destroyed everything, and we moved over here,” Clark said. There were no fire hydrants near her home in Bowie, she said. San Simon has none, either.

Like Winchester Heights, San Simon is roughly an hour from the nearest hospital, but here, when people seek medical care, they go see Frances Grill, a family nurse practitioner at a Walker Family Medicine clinic. The clinic was founded in 2003 by Grill and Heather Lentz, now an EMT, and is located within the walls of San Simon High School, complete with two custom-built private exam rooms and a partitioned waiting area.

“We started it because we live here and we found that people really would use it if it was local, but they didn’t want to go far away,” Grill said.

In four hours on a given Tuesday, Grill estimated she would see around 25 patients. She notices the difference access has made. “I think they’ve gotten healthier, actually, because we’re here. … Some of these old ranchers who would never go to a doctor now come here,” she said. Some of Grill’s patients, even those now living in cities like Tucson and Willcox, still drive all the way to San Simon to see her.

When Winchester Heights residents fall ill, they wait for the next mobile clinic to arrive and hope it’s nothing serious. Aida Garcia, a SEAHEC-trained health worker, or promotora in Spanish, and community organizer, worries about the health of her community members, most of whom are seasonal workers.

“Families have to choose: go to the doctor or feed their kids. Sometimes people endure illness because there’s no money and the work is temporary,” she said in Spanish.

Aida has lived in Winchester Heights for 25 years. As a promotora and president of the Winchester Heights Community Center, she is an unofficial community leader who runs the food bank, health care outreach, and maintains the community center on her own.

At 4 p.m. on Friday, September 12, cars lined up in front of the Winchester Heights Community Center for the monthly food drive. Garcia and eight volunteers helped people load their vehicles with supplies, including a few melons, cartons of milk, cereal, and pasta. Forty minutes into the food drive, the wind picked up and lifted the tent sheltering the food off the ground. The volunteers rushed to hold it down. A storm was coming, but cars kept pulling up.

Alfonso returned from work in his pickup truck. During every storm, he worries his home could be destroyed: the roof could blow off or the trailer could tip over. He and his wife spent the last nine years making their slice of Winchester Heights their own. Colonias remain one of the few places where people like Alfonso and Anel can afford to own a home.

“Thank God the house is already ours,” Anel said. 

The couple and their growing family said they will remain as long as there’s water in the wells. But they hope for the kind of improvements that would make their young children’s lives better: like paved roads where thorns and rocks won’t puncture bike tires. 

“We hope someone looks at this community and sees hardworking people—and improves the streets, lighting, everything. So our kids grow up in a clean, healthy, beautiful community,” Alfonso said.

***

The Puyallup River flows through the Tacoma Tideflats of Washington state, where a migrant detention center sits on a former branch of the river channel. It is also the site of a former slaughterhouse and meatpacking plant.

The migrant detention center, privately owned by The GEO Group and currently known as the Northwest Immigration Processing Center (NWIPC), is built on the Tacoma Tar Pits—part of an EPA Superfund site. Some of this waste is under a prone-to-failure asphalt “cap” situated at a higher elevation, causing it to flow downhill toward the detention center’s southern property line. To the west, a former bulk fuel terminal has contaminated the groundwater with diesel, gasoline, and motor oil, all of which flow directly toward the detention center. Additionally, the site previously housed a slaughterhouse that contaminated the soil with petroleum products and metals. The toxic chemicals from the previous century gel and unfurl in the groundwater beneath the detention facility in ways that are not fully understood.

Meanwhile, migrants—many of whom have no criminal record—drink from the water faucets, take showers, and breathe the air. When they do, they have complained of seeing dark water flowing from the taps that sickens their digestive systems, been afflicted with rashes on their skin after showering, and sickened by gasoline exposure, even as air conditioning systems are shut down during extreme temperatures, according to records obtained by open records law.

The NWIPC is also a place where detained migrants have complained of, and alleged, physical, sexual, and verbal abuse and medical neglect at the hands of staff. This is a story of how those with authority have, thus far, failed to prevent these human rights abuses. 

The GEO Group, Inc., which owns the facility, has a contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that expired last month (September 2025). Neither GEO Group nor ICE has announced whether the contract has been renewed. Jurisdiction is shared between several local, state, and federal agencies, specifically the Department of Homeland Security and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The city of Tacoma issued building permits for the facility to be constructed in 2002 and expanded in 2008. The Tacoma Police Department (TPD) has jurisdiction to conduct criminal investigations at NWIPC, where, according to federal records, GEO Group is guaranteed a minimum of 1,181 detainees.

As of December 31, 2024, the city of Tacoma’s Employees’ Retirement System (TERS) had indirect exposure to $859,634.73 of GEO Group Inc. corporate bonds by owning shares in two funds that held these bonds. Mayor Victoria Woodards is the Chair of the TERS board.

In response to this, a Tacoma spokesperson stated, “It is understandable how the presence of any controversial holding in TERS’ portfolio, no matter how small, raises questions.” The spokesperson went on to state that the city’s retirement board can’t invest in “any single company within large, diversified portfolios.” The spokesperson stated what investments are made, “is not a choice the City or the TERS Board makes.”

“The TERS Board has a non-negotiable, legally mandated fiduciary duty to see to it that TERS’ assets ensure the long-term security of its members. TERS Board members cannot, by law, place their own personal or political beliefs above that fiduciary duty,” according to the spokesperson.

One former NWIPC detainee requested to use the pseudonym Roxanne for safety reasons. Born in Mexico, Roxanne lived through domestic violence, survived attempts at her life, and fled to the United States to survive; she sought asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.

“When I turned myself in to the officers at the border, I was denied the opportunity to seek asylum,” Roxanne said. “I was discriminated [against], I was verbally attacked, and I was forced to sign an involuntary removal [order],” she added. 

By Roxanne’s account, U.S. border officials sent her back to Mexico, where she was kidnapped by cartel members and held for ransom. Roxanne said this is increasingly common with more deportations from the U.S. to Mexico. 

“[Cartels] kidnap people and force them to communicate with their families and request huge [amounts] of money, and if families are unable to pay them, then they just don’t set them free or they simply disappear,” she said. 

After paying the ransom, Roxanne stayed the night in a cartel-controlled hotel, and she returned to the border the next day to seek asylum again. She was turned away again. “[Later], I tried a third time. I turned myself in to the officers, but this time I was detained by the sheriff officials and [taken] to a detention center,” she said. Being detained allowed her enough time to locate an attorney who would advocate for her asylum claim.

Released from detention, Roxanne said she went to the Pacific Northwest, where she faithfully attended her check-in appointments, until one day, she was arrested by ICE at her check-in appointment, and taken to the NWIPC in Tacoma, where she was faced with xenophobic detention officers. “‘Here, we speak English. This is America,’” Roxanne recalled being told by the GEO Group guards. She continued, “There was a lot of racism.”

Pathways of Contamination

Complaints made from January 2023 to February 2025 to the Washington Department of Health (WADOH), obtained via open records request, reveal reports of contaminated drinking water from various units across the detention center. A significant majority of these reports originated from units in the southeast building, which the GEO Group added in 2009.

Legal records show the land for the detention center, built before 2004, is under a partial consent decree with the EPA and the Department of Justice. This decree requires that any use of the land must not disturb remedial actions, thus prohibiting the use of groundwater or the disturbance of the cap containing toxic wastes. According to an EPA spokesperson in a statement to The Margin, “GEO Group did not violate land use restrictions established in the 1991 Partial Consent Decree related to the Tacoma Tar Pits site. The NWIPC building expansion occurred outside of the Tacoma Tar Pit’s protective cap, and groundwater was not used.”

In 2003, DVR, LLC (DVR), a limited liability company, implemented institutional controls through a restrictive covenant due to residual concentrations of diesel and heavy oil. DVR then granted property to Correctional Services Corporation LLC (CSC), which the GEO Group would later acquire. The restrictive covenant contains eight sections, including the prohibition of groundwater use, the prevention of activities that could compromise the integrity of the voluntary cleanup program for the Washington Department of Ecology (Ecology), the prohibition of actions that might cause the release of hazardous substances into the environment, and the prevention of the creation of new pathways for exposure. Additionally, the restrictive covenant requires the landowner to notify and obtain approval from Ecology for any use of the property that is inconsistent with the restrictive covenant. Once the restrictive covenant was filed with Pierce County on March 27, 2003, a “No further action letter [NFA]” Ecology issued to DVR on March 7 of that year took effect. In the NFA letter, Ecology stated it can rescind the “no further action” determination if GEO Group violates the requirements of the covenant.

According to a publicly available EPA report, in 2008, the GEO Group’s construction of an addition to the detention center violated Section Six of the restrictive covenant because GEO Group was required to obtain written approval from Ecology before starting construction.

A GEO Group spokesperson claimed in a news article at the time it was unaware of any violations of the restrictive covenant, stating it received required permits from the City of Tacoma. However, statutory warranty deed records show that, in being granted the property from DVR, the restrictive covenant and other relevant restrictions—most notably, a partial consent decree with the EPA—came with the property. In other words, these restrictions were granted by DVR to CSC in 2003—and therefore, to GEO Group in 2005.

“The GEO Group did not inform us about the expansion," an Ecology spokesperson said at the time, as per the covenant, GEO Group is required to notify Ecology of construction that could cause a release of contamination into the environment. After informing GEO Group of the violation, Ecology committed to “working with the company to properly handle construction at the site to meet the state’s requirements.”

In 2003, CSC began construction of the NWIPC, with the auguring of holes for stone columns to support the foundation. These columns were installed to a depth of about 45 feet below the surface of the ground. In 2008, GEO Group expanded its facility by adding several buildings. Notably, a large, three-story building was constructed on the southeast corner of the existing compound using essentially the same auguring technique for stone column installation, with 40 foot-deep columns spaced on a grid of approximately every eight feet. In all, hundreds of these holes were augured.

The new building’s location and the underground stone columns meant the drilling may have gone through a known contaminated site, even as GEO Group’s contractors stated on January 22, 2009, that construction activities were, “unlikely to have resulted in a release.” GEO Group’s consultants, who had tested groundwater from three wells adjacent to where the southeast addition would be in June 2008, stated that two of the three wells contained no polyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, but that, “Low levels of anthracene and phenanthrene were detected” in a sample taken from where the southeast addition would be constructed. Very high levels of lead were detected in one site adjacent to the southern edge of where the southeast addition would be constructed. GEO Group then hired a separate contractor to conduct additional lead testing, which found no dissolved lead in the area where it was previously detected at high levels.” Ecology became aware that GEO Group’s contractors had begun construction on December 9, 2008. On December 23, 2008, an email from Tamara Langton, EPA Remedial Project Manager for the Superfund site, to the Washington Department of Ecology expressed concern that the construction could breach an area known to be contaminated with petroleum products and affect surrounding soil and groundwater. 

“I can't tell with certainty that the expansion isn't negatively impacting the 2002/2003 cleanup action (of most concern is the auguring for stone foundations on or close to the SP‐8 cleanup area),” Langton wrote. An analysis later penned by Langton stated that another site (SP-11) was likely breached by the auguring in 2008-2009. Despite the violation, Ecology worked with the GEO Group to mitigate the problem via a voluntary cleanup action.

In 2008, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC), led by Tim Smith, alerted Ecology, EPA, and the City of Tacoma. They expressed concern that auguring for the stone columns had punctured the EPA Superfund cap, opening a potential pathway of contamination to NWIPC detainees and workers. In December 2009, the EPA’s analysis concluded that BORDC’s concerns were unsubstantiated, stating the Superfund cap had not been compromised by the construction activity. In responses provided to The Margin for this story, EPA stated it is not currently aware of any impacts from the Tacoma Tar Pits site to the NWIPC. However, less than 20 years later, detainees are complaining to the Washington Department of Health about contaminated water in the very building addition BORDC had originally raised concerns about. 

Below the Surface: Contamination within the NWIPC

The below visual highlights how recent unapproved construction coupled with surrounding pollutants and underground water flows exacerbate the reports of contamination within the NWIPC.

In an interview, Peter Knappett, associate professor in hydrogeology in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at Texas A&M University cited a legacy of industrial contaminants to the west and south of the detention center based on his analysis of Ecology and EPA reports. Knappett reviewed groundwater contour maps from a site to the west of the detention center that was previously a Chevron bulk oil storage facility and stated the groundwater is flowing steeply toward the detention center. 

“There were observations even in the parking lot of the detention center of high overall levels of petroleum products in the shallow groundwater,” he said. Knappett added the groundwater contaminated with petroleum products in the western part of the site “has a continuous contaminant plume that goes at least underneath the parking lot of the [detention center] building.” Monitoring wells adjacent to the NWIPC have both revealed diesel and heavy oil above Model Toxics Control Act (MTCA) cleanup levels in both aquifers, at approximately seven feet below the pavement.

Knappett continued that if holes were drilled through both contaminated aquifers, it would open “cross-formational flow.” He said whenever construction of any kind occurs and holes are made across horizontal geologic layers, “Then you’re opening up potential conduits for water contamination, things to go up or go down.”

“There’s no reason to think that a contaminant plume would stop in the parking lot and not continue to flow down gradient,” he said. Knappett added since contaminants were sourced from the surface, it is likely they remain present throughout the soil zone. 

From 2023 to 2025, as the levels of diesel and heavy oil rose in groundwater monitoring wells adjacent to the detention center, so did detainee complaints of contaminated water, according to publicly available documents and documents obtained by public records act request. Complaints made by detainees also note water systems being out, coming back on again very cold or hot, or pipes breaking. Lauren Jenks, Assistant Secretary of the Environmental Public Health Division in WADOH told The Margin, “There's likely some sort of maintenance issues or pipe issues or something like that, that's causing some of the things that people are complaining about.” Joe Laxson, the policy director in WADOH's Environmental Public Health Division added that in a complex plumbing system like at the NWIPC, circulation needs to be maintained. “From our water program’s perspective, that could be the main issue, that there just isn't routine maintenance happening on the plumbing,” he said. 

When asked about contaminated water complaints, an Ecology spokesperson responded that they haven’t received complaint records from DOH and don’t have updated information. “[T]herefore, we don’t think an interview at this time will be beneficial,” the spokesperson said. “[T]he water supply for the building is city drinking water, which should be a pressurized system. This means that if there were cracks in the pipe, water would push out, and any contamination would not be able to enter the pipes. The pipes are in the upper feet of soil, and any soil contamination around the property (e.g., Chevron Bulk) is deeper.” An Ecology spokesperson stated if DOH’s investigation “indicate[s] there is a possible environmental concern, then Ecology can investigate under the full authority of the [MTCA].”

A WADOH spokesperson stated it “has not specifically shared the complaints with [Ecology] because there is not an apparent pathway for the clean-up sites near the NWIPC to impact the water supply. The plumbing for the building is typically located above grade and should not have a direct path for contamination.”

GEO Group and ICE have allegedly denied state officials access to enter and test the water in the secure areas of the facility, including the units with the highest number of contaminated water complaints from detainees from 2023 to 2025. During the 2023 legislative session, the Washington state legislature passed HB 1470, which the governor signed into law, allowing the state Department of Health to investigate complaints made by detainees, including those of drinking water contamination. GEO Group sued the state to prevent such inspections, allegedly denying an in-person inspection of the secured area of the facility attempted by a DOH technician in July 2024. GEO Group denies this allegation. According to an analysis by The Margin of DOH records released under public records law, there are nearly 100 contaminated drinking water complaints from 2023 to 2025.

Reports of Contamination

The Washington Department of Health has captured reports of contamination from within the NWIPC as told from detainees or from the families of detainees. The complaints accessible below via the map or buildings list span from 2023 to 2025.

On August 19, 2025, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated an injunction entered by the Western District of Washington that prevented the state of Washington from entering the facility to test the water in all parts of the facility. When DOH recently sent representatives to the facility on September 3, following the court ruling, they were again denied access by the GEO Group facility administrator and ICE staff. 

“We believe we have authority to [test water in all parts of the facility] in two different ways, under the Secretary’s authority and then under the new law that has passed to allow us to inspect it and respond to complaints there,” Jenks said.

The August Ninth Circuit Court decision removed the injunction that prevented WADOH from entering the facility, but the district court has not yet mandated that inspectors from WADOH be allowed to enter the facility. When asked what WADOH would do if they were denied access after the district court entered such an order requiring that they be given access to the NWIPC, Jenks said, they’ll take it to the state Attorney General.

Years earlier, in 2018, Mayor Woodards said in an interview, “If we were to be notified by an agency responsible for health and welfare, and they evaluated (the NWIPC) through a health-and-welfare lens and found there to be a violation, then we could look into those violations.”. A Tacoma spokesperson clarified to The Margin these comments were general in nature. 

Tacoma Mayor Woodards shared the following statement with The Margin:

My City Council colleagues and I have been actively engaged on the issue of conditions at this facility and have consistently advocated for greater state oversight. We strongly supported the legislation requiring the Washington State DOH to develop rules and enforce measurable health and safety standards in private detention facilities. The Washington State DOH has the authority to conduct these inspections. We support these efforts and consider them a critical partner in this work. We are aware of the ongoing litigation challenging the Washington State DOH's jurisdiction and support the State's effort to ensure this vital oversight can be carried out. The health and safety of every person in our community, including those in detention, is of paramount concern, and we will continue to advocate for accountability.

In an audio recording obtained by public records act law, a WADOH employee states a meeting was held between WADOH, the Tacoma Mayor, and a Tacoma Police Department (TPD) deputy chief. (A Tacoma spokesperson responded regarding this meeting, “While Mayor Victoria Woodards is kept apprised of inter-governmental affairs regarding a variety of issues, neither she nor her staff have met with [WADOH] to discuss specific complaints from facility detainees regarding conditions in the facility, as health and welfare complaints fall within the purview of the [WADOH].” A WADOH spokesperson confirmed the City of Tacoma representative was not from the mayor’s office.) The WADOH spokesperson stated the meeting established, “a protocol for how DOH reports complaints to TPD that we receive that are of a criminal nature.” According to the records obtained by open records law and statements from TPD officials following that meeting, WADOH is to call 911 and make a report,which according to a TPD spokesperson, would lead to TPD following standard procedures.

According to the Washington State Investment Board, which oversees the investment of Washington public trust and retirement funds, “As of March 31, 2025, the WSIB owned 58,426.29 shares of The GEO Group Inc. with a market value of $1,706,631.92.”

“They can do anything with impunity”

Roxanne recounted being harassed by several fellow detainees. “I would go to the officers, and I would tell them what was going on, but they wouldn’t do anything,” she said. The harassment continued. Fellow detainees stole her panties. “I would try to approach the officers, but they wouldn’t say anything. They would simply say, ‘go back to your bed.’” When she pushed the person in an attempt to retrieve her underwear, she was attacked from behind. Roxanne was scolded by an officer and later a supervisor.

While Roxanne did not make official reports, her story reflects many other experiences at NWIPC, repeated, over and over, in thousands of detainee complaints, as detailed by records obtained via open records law from WADOH and detailed by the University of Washington Human Rights Center (UWCHR).

According to an April 2, 2024 TPD incident report, a detainee alleged that during a routine unit search, the GEO Group officer told the detainee to, “Come here.” “The [GEO Group officer] then put his hand in [the detainee’s] pants and squeezed his ‘private parts’ multiple times,” according to the report. On the same day, a second detainee alleged the same GEO Group officer “touched [another detainee] inappropriately during a pat down [search].”

As stated in a log from the computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system obtained by public records act law, the following day a separate GEO Group officer reported the alleged assault to Tacoma Police Department (TPD) on the first victim’s behalf. The report reads: “An officer in [the Administrative Review Unit]” attempted to call back this GEO Group officer, but they were no longer on shift. Instead, the officer spoke with yet another GEO Group officer who stated they were conducting an internal investigation and “would notify [TPD] once the investigation was completed if necessary.”

On April 15, 2024, one of the alleged victims called TPD to ask why officers had not collected his statement. According to a report, he said the 911 dispatcher later informed him that a GEO Group officer had prevented TPD from entering the facility to investigate. “All of this is recorded on [GEO]’s cameras,” the complainant stated in a grievance submitted to WADOH and obtained by The Margin via public records act law.

According to the CAD report, on May 20, 2024, a TPD detective learned of one alleged assault while investigating the other. Over a month later, on June 25, 2024, TPD detectives visited NWIPC to investigate. The visit followed a call on June 21 from the attorney of one of the victims, who officially reported the second assault.

Based on the TPD detectives’ report, they visited NWIPC and spoke with an investigator, who “advised that an investigation into the allegations of both the complaint from [one of the alleged victims] as well as the other complaint was completed and deemed unfounded,” according to the South Sound 911 incident report. The investigator added that both complainants reside in the same POD (a self-contained housing unit), and there was information about possible contraband there or on the detainees. The GEO Group investigator stated to TPD that a Correctional Emergency Response Team (CERT) was deployed, and all detainees were temporarily removed and PAT searched. Afterward, detainees were returned to the POD. TPD detectives did not interview any alleged victims, according to the incident report

The GEO Group investigator then provided TPD detectives with a copy of the internal investigation, and a handwritten statement by the GEO Group officer accused of the sexual assaults, “denying placing his hands inside the detainee’s pants during the pat down.” TPD Detectives stated that this evidence would then be forwarded to the Pierce County Prosecutor’s office for review. The incident reports do not indicate that the investigators contacted either victim for an interview.

An internal report of the investigation into one of the assaults conducted by the GEO Group was released to The Margin in response to an open records request. At the time, the GEO Group officer in question led a CERT team.  The GEO Group investigator who communicated with TPD Detectives, stated in the internal report that, concerning the alleged assault, "Video footage is unavailable. The PAT search was conducted outside the view of the camera." Later in the report, however, a GEO Group sergeant, separate from the investigator, contradicted the first allegation: "CCTV shows [the GEO Group officer accused of sexual assault] conducting a pat search in accordance with proper policy and procedure." No mention of this footage—or lack thereof—was made by TPD detectives in their incident report.

According to a Pierce County Prosecutor’s Office spokesperson, that office did not receive a copy of the GEO Group’s internal investigation nor any surveillance footage. The spokesperson responded to questions from The Margin, “After reviewing the evidence submitted by TPD, charges were not filed from this incident. In any prosecution, we need sufficient evidence, probable cause to believe a crime occurred, and a basis to believe that the charge can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.”

A TPD spokesperson responded that the investigating detectives were not available by press time to confirm or deny whether they had reviewed surveillance footage. According to the incident report, on July 9, 2024, one of the TPD detectives received a document stating the Pierce County Prosecutor’s office was not filing charges against the GEO Group officer in either case.

The Washington Department of Health has captured reports of abuse from within the NWIPC as told from detainees or from the families of detainees. The reports below span from 2023 to 2025.

[LIGHTBOX=reports-of-abuse]

Records indicate that the same individual accused of committing the two aforementioned assaults faced additional accusations. In February 2024, DOH records show a detainee alleged to have been subjected to “sheer retaliation” by the same GEO Group officer and his “CERT gang” after filing complaints. The complainant reported they had accused the same officer of sexual assaults and were told that, “I’m just a immigrants [sic]. Nobody is going to believe me.” The complainant concluded his grievance thus, “He is right about that because no one do [sic] anything about these dehumanizing and abusive behaviors. They can do anything with impunity, including sexual harassments.”

The following month, another detainee submitted a complaint, reporting a hunger strike involving every person in their unit. “We are probably going to be […] a subject of retaliation by ICE and GEO for our peaceful protest, but it has to be done. The condition is getting worse every day,” the complainant stated. They specifically accused the same GEO Group officer of “targeting detainees with mental health [sic] and others who [are] protesting about staff misconduct and other imperative issues.” The complainant identified the GEO Group officer’s “coconspirators,” whose names are withheld here. 

In November 2024, a detainee submitted a complaint that, upon returning to their cell, GEO Group officers had “destroyed” the room. “I confronted them about trashing my room and they laughed at me. As I was talking to [one GEO Group officer], [the GEO Group officer accused of the aforementioned sexual assaults] keeps on touching me,” the complaint stated. Another complaint, made the same day, stated the same GEO Group officer, accused of sexual assaults, “kept touching my arm. I told him to stop touching me. He kept doing it.” According to the complaint, another officer said, “let’s go to intake.” The detainee was roughly taken by the arm, they pulled away in response, then the GEO Group officer accused of sexual assaults and a third GEO Group officer, “retaliated slamming my head onto the ground, cuffing my hands and feet,” according to the complainant. One officer allegedly kneed the detainee in the right side of their ribs. “I couldn’t breathe and they damn near killed me. That’s assault, battery, and abusive force. It is on camera. I want to press charges and file a lawsuit,” the complainant stated.

GEO Group has surveillance cameras throughout the detention facility and records incidents, including those occurring in the minutes after Jose Manuel Sanchez Castro was found unresponsive on Oct. 27, 2024, at age 36. The Tacoma Fire Department responded, attempting to save his life. According to ICE, the cause and manner of Sanchez Castro’s death is currently undetermined by the Pierce County Medical Examiner. Sanchez Castro died after being under GEO Group’s medical observation for several days, when EMS was unable to save him after he was found unresponsive.

The allegations of assault have continued. 

On April 5, 2025, a GEO Group officer called 911 on behalf of a detainee to report a sexual assault. Because the alleged victim was Spanish-speaking, an interpreter was contacted. The interpreter spoke with the man over the phone and relayed his message. That same day, an incident report notes a TPD officer was dispatched to the NWIPC to investigate the detainee’s allegation of unwanted touching. The TPD officer called the NWIPC and spoke with the on-duty Lieutenant, who informed them they were aware of the situation. The officer reported, “[The Lieutenant] stated the reporting [alleged victim], was just having another ‘episode’ and talking with an inside psychologist,” adding it was not the only report he made and indicated “he was well known for making complaints and allegations against staff.”

Similarly, records reviewed by The Margin do not show that the TPD officer spoke to the alleged victim. On the 911 call, the alleged victim repeatedly said GEO Guards were trying to poison and kill him. He also claimed they tried to bribe him to conceal the name of the officer who allegedly sexually assaulted him. The TPD officer wrote in his report that he was unable to establish probable cause or any evidence of a crime.

On April 8, 2025, a call taker from the Rebuilding Hope Sexual Assault Center called 911 dispatchers to report a call from a detainee wanting to report unwanted physical touch at the NWIPC, but the detainee did not know the address. The 911 dispatcher, interpreting this as an alleged sexual assault, called the NWIPC to try to determine if the alleged victim was there. The dispatcher was transferred to a sergeant who informed the dispatcher that the detainee was in segregation and was considered to have a “mental altered status.” The dispatcher concluded the call stating, “I am not doing any documentation.”

Weeks later, on April 24, 2025, a GEO Group officer called 911 for a detainee who said he had been physically assaulted. The 911 dispatcher requested a TPD officer to call or go to the NWIPC. A TPD officer called the NWIPC and asked if GEO Group actually needed a response. The GEO Group officer who answered the phone said allegations of assault are usually handled internally

A few days after the previous incident, on April 28, 2025, a separate call taker from Rebuilding Hope Sexual Assault Center called 911 to report a detainee who had experienced sexual assault in December at the NWIPC and was now contemplating suicide. The call taker explained that the detainee said he had attempted suicide two or three times before. The 911 dispatcher relayed this information to the Tacoma Fire Department (TFD) and requested that emergency responders be sent to the NWIPC. During the call, the detainee’s report of suicidal ideation was shared with the TFD representative. The TFD representative stated, “We can’t enter that facility without their permission, so they’re going to need to contact the staff of that facility,” clarifying later in the call, “We can’t access that facility without a call from them.” The call ended.

After the call with the TFD representative ended, the dispatcher followed up by contacting the NWIPC to verify whether the situation was being addressed. The officer confirmed they were handling it and planned to speak with the person who made the complaint. The dispatcher then concluded the call.

The UWCHR recently published a report that found authorities often do not investigate detainee assault allegations. The report concludes that current policies fail to protect detainees or ensure accountability,asserting, "ICE and GEO often deter police investigations, and that TPD regularly fails to push back or follow up." 

A TPD spokesperson responded: "Following the publication of the [UWCHR] report, the Tacoma Police Department has clarified procedures and delivered departmental guidance reiterating its commitment to safeguarding constitutional guarantees and ensuring that safety, security, and respect for rights remain central to its role."

The over 1,300 complaints provided by DOH detail abuse, retaliation, and threats by GEO Group staff, poor quality food, medical neglect, and potentially contaminated drinking water. Weighed alongside 911 audio records and police incident reports, a concerning trend appears to emerge about the conditions in the GEO Group-owned NWIPC.

In response to our questions, an ICE spokesperson responded, "ICE remains committed to transparency and accountability... ICE operates in accordance with established laws and regulations, and we do not comment on rumors, allegations, or opinions."

A GEO Group spokesperson responded to our questions with the following statement:

"We are proud of the role our company has played for 40 years to support the law enforcement mission of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Over the last four decades, our innovative support service solutions have helped the federal government implement the policies of seven different Presidential Administrations. 

In all instances, our support services are monitored by ICE, including by on-site agency personnel, and other organizations within the Department of Homeland Security to ensure compliance with ICE’s detention standards and contract requirements regarding the treatment and services ICE detainees receive.  In the event issues are identified, we quickly resolve all of ICE’s concerns as required by ICE’s Quality Assurance Surveillance Plan.

The support services GEO provides include around-the-clock access to medical care, in-person and virtual legal and family visitation, general and legal library access, translation services, dietician-approved meals, religious and specialty diets, recreational amenities, and opportunities to practice their religious beliefs. Additionally, all of GEO’s ICE Processing Centers are independently accredited by the American Correctional Association and the National Commission on Correctional Health Care.

At locations where GEO provides health care services, individuals are provided with access to teams of medical professionals including physicians, nurses, dentists, psychologists, and psychiatrists. Ready access to off-site medical specialists, imaging facilities, Emergency Medical Services, and local community hospitals is also provided when needed."

***

Detainees face abuses, yet cannot even call law enforcement for help without the assistance of the very same people who allegedly abuse them. Even when they do call out of the facility this way, the authorities charged with protecting them don’t always do so. As attempts to test water preempt investigations into water contamination, detainees are forced to choose whether or not to drink and bathe in potentially contaminated water.

For now, despite the revelations of this investigation, the answers to so many questions remain hidden within the chain link fence and concrete walls of the NWIPC, flowing in and through, the groundwater beneath its banal design, in the tide flats of Tacoma.

Roxanne was released from the NWIPC, and her lawyer continues to advocate for her asylum claim. “I feel free, but I don’t feel safe, especially because I live with that uncertainty of whether I’m going to be detained or not,” she said.

“What I would like for people to know is to not lose hope. They shouldn’t stop fighting—they need to continue fighting—to keep that faith because it is possible to leave from a detention center.”

***

On October 12, the remnants of Typhoon Halong—a tropical storm that originated in the Philippine Sea—hit western Alaska communities. The storm slammed the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta region the hardest, bringing 100 mile per hour winds and record flooding to the villages across the coast. Governor Mike Dunleavy has issued a disaster declaration. According to the National Weather Service, this storm may be the strongest one to impact western Alaska since Typhoon Merbok in 2022. Like Merbok, Halong is a storm fueled by climate change. Warmer waters in the Pacific Ocean increase the likelihood that tropical storms will migrate eastward, maintaining hurricane-force winds and heavy rainfall as they barrel towards the Bering and Chukchi regions. 

Forty-nine communities have reported damage from Halong, but two villages were hit especially hard: Kwigillingok and Kipnuk. The Margin mentions these communities in our story. In both villages, Halong has torn houses from their foundations, trapping families inside as homes float atop floodwaters. The Alaska State Emergency Operations Center estimates that dozens of homes, as well as critical infrastructure like the utility poles and runway in Kipnuk, have been destroyed. As of publishing, the Coast Guard and National Guard have rescued at least 51 residents of these villages, including 24 people from two Kwigillingok households. One woman from Kwigillingok has been found dead, and two other villagers remain unaccounted for. U.S. Coast Guard Commander Captain Christopher Culpepper compared Halong’s impact to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. “Several of these villages have been completely devastated, absolutely flooded, several feet deep,” he said. More than 1,000 residents across the Y-K Delta have been displaced from their homes. 

Community groups across western Alaska are collecting disaster relief funds through the Alaska Community Foundation.

On the anniversary of her mother’s death, 50-year-old Christina Waska wakes up in the Yup’ik village of Mertarvik. As the late October sunrise gently illuminates the tundra landscape, she retrieves food thawed from her family’s freezer—typically, herring, seal, or halibut gathered earlier in the season—and begins preparing a feast. Sometimes it takes until the evening for her to finish. “When it's all done, I invite the whole community of 300 to come and eat. Join us during the celebration of life,” Waska said.

Waska is hosting an annual village feast for ancestors. Common in predominantly Yup’ik communities along southwestern Alaska, the ceremony acknowledges the healing power of communal remembrance. Attendees who knew the deceased fondly reflect on their memories of them. The atmosphere is simultaneously celebratory and melancholic. 

Mertarvik is where Waska feels closest to her late mother, who was laid to rest there in 2021. Waska has returned nearly every fall since, but the homecomings are bittersweet. 

Waska grew up nine miles away in the village of Newtok. In 2007, as Newtok was rapidly losing land to permafrost thaw and erosion, the Waskas and other residents began a painstaking process to relocate. They planned to rebuild the entire village, from the school to the houses to the water and sewage system, at a new site called Mertarvik. National headlines in 2013 dubbed Newtok’s residents “America’s first climate refugees.”

The process, which formally began over 30 years ago in 1994 and cost $160 million, was a historic effort. The Newtok Tribal Council requested funding from a patchwork of state and federal governmental agencies to rebuild critical infrastructure in a harsh climate where construction can be prohibitively expensive. A 2020 report by the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium described the project as being complicated by a “vicious cycle of underinvestment,” which can significantly increase the cost and length of time it takes to complete the relocation.

Federal law does not consider “erosion” or “permafrost thaw” as disasters. Instead, the law describes these as gradual environmental changes, making many of these villages ineligible for Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) disaster funding. Currently, funding is ad hoc, with environmentally threatened villages competing against one another for limited state and federal funds. Grants are often ill-suited to address specific climate needs, and are administered by government groups that have little expertise in the environmental challenges of rural Alaska, according to the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium. 

For years, the U.S. Government Accountability Office has urged the federal government to fund climate migration efforts more heavily, pointing out in 2019 that “most of the federal government’s efforts to reduce disaster risk are reactive and revolve around disaster recovery.” In 2020, the GAO examined the cases of Newtok and Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana, the first two communities in the country to relocate in the face of the climate crisis, and concluded that “unclear federal leadership” is a clear challenge for current climate migration models. The agency recommended that the federal government establish a clear strategy around relocation and a central agency to coordinate these efforts.

The lack of a federal plan for climate adaptation and inconsistent federal funding have led to challenges at the new village site of Mertarvik. Some of the houses, poorly-built and rapidly deteriorating in the subarctic climate, are plagued by rapid mold growth and icy-cold drafts. Meanwhile, the construction of new homes has slowed, leading to overcrowding.

Waska hoped that the additional infrastructure planned through the relocation to Mertarvik would allow her to raise her family in a village environment. She had moved to a big city before, opting for Anchorage in 2008 due to a lack of housing. In 2024, Waska moved in with relatives in Mertarvik so that her 16-year-old son could play village basketball. But, after again trying and failing to find suitable housing, Waska and her son made the difficult decision to return to Anchorage months later in 2025. Home to roughly 40 percent of Alaska’s entire population, Anchorage, the state’s largest city, is more than 1,000 times the size of Mertarvik.

The shortcomings of current climate-caused relocation models, which saddle small Tribal governments with the immense logistical challenges of community-wide moves, make it difficult for households like Waska’s to remain in villages. 

A Yup’ik adage goes:

The ocean cannot be learned, but the land stays in place.

The rapid temperature rise in subarctic regions has upended this tenet of traditional knowledge. Across rural western Alaska, the terrain is shifting. It’s sinking and collapsing due to permafrost thaw, retreating with rapid erosion, and being embattled by increasingly harsh storms. These climatic changes are destroying housing and infrastructure in villages across Alaska’s western coast. As public funding declines and federal programs fail to keep up with the rapid pace of climate change, people are pushed toward more extreme modes of adaptation. 

One way of adapting is to migrate. Out-migration often involves a multi-leg journey across hundreds of miles to urban settings that possess vastly different cultures and environments from those of small, remote communities. The Margin spoke with over a dozen people who had relocated from Native villages to Alaska’s major cities. Their stories covered a wide range of geographies and experiences. Some had moved recently, and others had been living in cities for decades. Nearly all identified how climate impacts are making it more difficult to remain on their traditional homelands.

These moves, large and small, bring mental health consequences. Former village residents reported a sense of loss around access to land-based practices, kinship networks, Native languages, and traditional knowledge systems. Reminiscence of home was tinged with feelings of what psychologists call ecological grief, which encompasses both the mourning of a land long lost and anxieties about anticipated changes to the environment. Time and time again, The Margin heard about how village life can be crucial for accessing subsistence lifeways, community ties, and cultural and linguistic practices—all key determinants of emotional well-being for Indigenous communities. 

A growing body of research is seeking to understand the many ways that human-caused environmental change disrupts people’s mental health. And much of this research focuses on Arctic and subarctic regions, such as western Alaska. In these locations, not only are temperatures rising at faster rates than those of more temperate climates, but people also rely more heavily upon land-based activities for culture and identity.

Vincent Paquin, a Montreal-based psychiatrist and researcher who has studied climate change’s impacts on the mental health of Indigenous communities in the Circumpolar North, says the loss of access to ancestral lands can bring a unique sense of loss for Alaska Native communities. “Ecological grief is different from the traditional notion of grief,” Paquin said. Changes to the environment and the resulting loss of species, meaningful landscapes, or traditional knowledge systems characterize this type of mourning. “It’s an ambiguous loss in the sense that it doesn't happen overnight, but gradually and almost insidiously.” 

Research on the Australian Wheatbelt and Canadian Inuit communities by Ashlee Cunsolo, the director of the Labrador Institute at Memorial University of Newfoundland, and Neville R. Ellis, a research fellow at the University of Western Australia, has demonstrated how witnessing changes to the land or weather can bring feelings of anger, frustration, and despair. When there is no specific disaster to blame, people may experience a lack of closure, and ecological grief can manifest as “living with both the presence and the absence of what was lost,” according to Cunsolo and Ellis.

Newtok’s land eroded so rapidly over the last three decades that Waska’s family had to demolish her childhood home. Today, all that remains at the old village site are boarded-up gray buildings. While Mertarvik is less than 10 miles away from Waska’s hometown, the loss of Newtok remains. 

In 2009, two years into the relocation process, Waska gave birth to her youngest son. She named him Newtok after the village she still considers home. “I gave him a strong name. Something that I'll carry close to my heart for the rest of my life,” she said. “So even if it's gone, I'll always have Newtok.”

"It's the loneliest feeling in the world, out-migrating"

Although many of Alaska’s 229 federally recognized Native villages are rapidly losing land to permafrost thaw, erosion, and flooding, the majority do not have plans to relocate. Waska’s homeland, Newtok, remains a marked exception, especially as federal grant freezes and funding cuts under the Trump administration have stalled several climate mitigation projects. 

The 2020 Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium report described village out-migration as the “worst-case climate scenario,” one that becomes more likely as government funding wanes. Although resettlement is often proposed as a solution to climate threats in rural Alaska, the report emphasized how out-migration from Indigenous communities has been linked to a wide range of adverse outcomes, including greater encounters with racism and stigma, homelessness, and other social harms.

Forcing people to move and just ignoring the problem is not an option. It's a culture-killing option.”

Without the funding in place to shore up village housing options, some researchers predicted widespread rural-to-urban resettlement as environmental threats to villages escalate—a prediction that hasn’t borne out in the data. There is evidence, however, that climate displacement is happening in some Alaska Native villages, often in response to acute disasters. In 2021, Kwigillingok, a Yup’ik community of around 370 people located on the northern shore of the Kuskokwim Bay, experienced severe tidal flooding. Kwigillingok had been sinking for years due to permafrost thaw, and its lower elevation occasionally allows the ocean to submerge nearly the entire village at high tide. The year after the flooding, 32 people left the village, with half of them leaving for Anchorage. 

Kwigillingok, like Newtok, is part of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in southwestern Alaska, and is represented by the Calista Corporation, one of the twelve Alaska Native corporations that the federal government distributed land to as part of the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. Today, the Calista Corporation represents the 56 permanent and seasonally occupied villages located in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. According to Curt Chamberlain, deputy general counsel for the Calista Corporation, the Middle Kuskokwim area of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta experienced a 30 percent out-migration from 2013 to 2023. In many cases, people follow a stepping-stone pattern of migration—moving first to a rural hub, such as Bethel, before settling in Anchorage, Fairbanks, or Juneau. 

In 2020, the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium urged the federal government to close the over $80 million gap in annual funding that they anticipate villages will need to face these climate threats over the next decade. This year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has canceled at least $280 million in funding for the state of Alaska. Many of these grants were slated for rural villages, including for environmental infrastructure projects such as the creation of erosion barriers to mitigate flooding from permafrost thaw. Earlier this year, the Alaska Native village of Kipnuk joined a coalition of Tribes, nonprofits, and local governments led by legal nonprofit Earthjustice to sue the Trump administration for the termination of $3 billion worth of Environmental and Climate Justice Grant programs.

Climate Risks Affecting Federally Recognized Native Villages

Permafrost, erosion, and flooding are climate risks that negatively impact federally recognized Native villages in Alaska. Toggle on each climate risk layer below to see its impact across Alaska, and hover over each federally recognized Native village to view its climate risk score by threat, provided by the Alaska's Statewide Threat Assessment Rankings.

And still, demographic data shows that Alaska's rural villages are displaying stable or even growing populations. Birth rates in recent years offset out-migration in many environmentally threatened villages, said Chamberlain. In 2024, demographer Guangqing Chi, associate professor of rural sociology and demography at Pennsylvania State University at the time, found that demographic trends fail to paint a unified picture of mass climate displacement in Alaska.

Understanding how environmental change influences migration can be a complex process. Chi and his colleagues found that since climate change can seem abstract compared to day-to-day stressors, people often don’t attribute drastic life changes to its impacts. Instead, they might identify pressing socioeconomic conditions, such as a lack of housing or high living costs, as reasons for moving. Environmental changes, however, can exacerbate many of these conditions. 

Those seeking to preserve Alaska Native village life worry that, without sufficient housing to withstand the environmental changes already underway, it will become increasingly difficult for people to remain in villages. “The Y-K [Delta] region is actually the one region in the whole state that's actually still growing, despite the housing shortage,” said Peter Evon, the executive director of the Association of Village Council Presidents Regional Housing Authority (AVCP-RHA), the regional housing authority in the area. “We know people want to stay here. But unfortunately, because of these climate impacts, the shortage is getting worse.”

Chamberlain understands firsthand the importance of preserving people’s right to stay in their villages. When he returns to the village where he was born, the sight of the Aniak River through the plane window brings a swell of emotions. “I get choked up on that river because that's where my tie to the land is,” Chamberlain said. “It’s a very central part of who I am as a person,” Chamberlain recalled memories of boating and fishing on the Aniak River in the summers. With subzero temperatures, his family traveled atop its thick river ice, part of a network of ice roads that averaged 200 miles, providing safe passage to waterside villages up and down the Kuskokwim River. “That river's a part of me,” Chamberlain said, tears in his eyes. “It fed and provided for every aspect of my life and my culture.”  

Psychologists at the University of Victoria in Canada define attachment to place as the cognitive-emotional bond that forms between people and their essential settings. This bond provides a range of psychological benefits, including feelings of comfort, safety, freedom, and joy. Place attachment is also commemorative—places become tangible symbols of past events, indispensable for remembering and reimagining them. Present-day villages are not only hubs for the preservation of traditional practices, but also for the emergence of new permutations of Native Alaskan culture.

Now, without infrastructure investment, Chamberlain expects out-migration to increase as community instability rises due to climate change. Having grown up in a predominantly Yup’ik community of around 430 people, he remembers arriving in Anchorage as an earth-shattering transition. “When you grow up within Yup’ik culture, it's very different from Western culture,” he said. “And as you move out, you tend to find yourself displaced and isolated.” Chamberlain compares the move to leaving for another country, describing how foreign it felt to live in urban areas, where cultural ties faded and traditional belief systems retracted. 

“Every time I'm outside of my region, there's an immense feeling of separation and loneliness,” Chamberlain said. “Like a big part of who you are as a central being is being starved.” He continued, “It's the loneliest feeling in the world, out-migrating.”

‘I can't even imagine not going home’ 

Fall is Debbie Demientieff’s favorite season in Holy Cross, a village of 140 people located on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. In early September, the shrubby willows on the village’s rolling hills transform into glowing golden brush. Moose roam the tundra, feeding on the spread of these stocky plants. The powerful rush of the Yukon River blankets the landscape in a sheet of calm. Before climate disruptions, the river brought abundant chinook salmon runs that fed the entire community.

Demientieff, a 63-year-old Deg Xinag Athabascan woman, was raised in Holy Cross but left the village for Anchorage in 2010. “I really didn't wanna leave because I love living by the seasons,” she said, referring to a rural lifestyle that revolves around seasonal food gathering. 

Although her job keeps her in Anchorage, Demientieff and her husband return home every year for their family’s moose hunt. “When August 1st hits, this big clock starts ticking, and it's time to get ready to go home,” she said. For a few weeks every fall, Demientieff moves back and forth between Holy Cross and a subsistence camp located roughly an hour from the village by boat, depending on ideal weather conditions for food gathering. 

Subsistence camps are seasonal settlements that Alaska Native communities use to harvest wild foods. Perhaps the most well-known are the fish camps that dot the riverbanks of southwest Alaska. For generations, people flocked to these sites during summertime, catching, processing, and preserving salmon under the midnight sun. Camps are the legacy of nomadic lifestyles. Hundreds of years ago, they formed part of a vast network of hunting and fishing routes that crisscrossed the region. People often set up camps a few miles from kin and from larger settlements that would become modern-day villages. Today’s camps are the result of the steady preservation of land-based knowledge throughout several generations. 

When she’s not hunting big game, Demientieff fishes and goes berry-picking. All year, Demientieff looks forward to the delicate, salty-sweet caviar she harvests from broad or humpback whitefish. These small freshwater species have long served as an essential subsistence food base for communities like Demientieff’s along the Yukon River. On a mountain near camp, crowberries are abundant. They are subtly-sweet, tundra blackberries with black pearly exteriors that burst in the mouth with a juicy pop and are perfect for pie. 

Demientieff also uses the fruit for another one of her favorite treats. She whips the crowberries with moose tallow, sugar, and poached whitefish—flaky and cod-like—until the mixture reaches the consistency of cake frosting. This traditional dessert is shared amongst several Native Alaskan communities across the state. It is called akutaq by Yup’ik communities, nonaałdlode by Athabascan communities, akutuq by Iñupiaq communities. Demientieff simply calls it “fish ice cream.”

Traditional foods bring back memories. The taste of moose can recall the hours spent preparing its meat. The ceremonial harvesting process, which typically requires at least two people, is carried out with painstaking care to honor the animal and ensure no part goes to waste. Full-grown bull moose in prime condition can provide roughly 500 pounds of meat, feeding a family for an entire year. In remote regions of Alaska, where access to groceries is limited, putting away subsistence foods during the fall is critical for surviving harsh winters.

Food does not just mean physical satiety, however. Food supports the unique, extended family and kinship relations that underpin village life. According to a 2020 survey of Alaska Native adults conducted by researchers at Yale School of Medicine and the University of Alaska, Anchorage, land-based activities form the foundation for ways of relating to loved ones. Extended kinship relationships are established and reinforced through the harvesting of fish and wildlife. Alaska Native Elders describe “food sharing as not only a way to demonstrate relatedness, but a way to create relatives.” In the 2020 survey, people also described a spirit of interdependence in villages that is lacking in cities. Villages can be places where people access social networks that protect them from emotional harm. 

For Alaska Native communities, being at camp is a crucial cultural tradition. It’s a time of year when relatives congregate to pass on knowledge about their land and history to future generations. Moose meat is central to Athabascan culture. Families like Demientieff’s have passed down knowledge of moose processing for hundreds of years. Demientieff’s subsistence camp is owned by her husband’s family. Her mother-in-law, who is in her nineties, was the key figure at camp for many years. When one of Demientieff’s granddaughters was a toddler, Demientieff brought her to camp to expose her to traditional ways of living.

“It's all connected to family,” she said. “We're not there just to get food to put away in the freezer.” Demientieff brings moose meat back to Anchorage to share with her father, a 96-year-old Athabascan Elder who lives near her in the city. “I learned a lot [about] putting away food from him,” she said. “Throughout [my] childhood years and teenage years, that’s how they provided for us.”  

It’s getting harder to preserve life at camp. As the fall of 2022 arrived, so did Typhoon Merbok. Fueled by warmer waters in the Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea, the storm slammed the western coast of Alaska, ushering in hurricane-force winds that covered the Yukon River in roiling waves. Merbok damaged countless hunting and fishing camps across the west Alaska coast, at times sweeping away the valuable drying racks and smokehouses needed to preserve food for the winter. More extreme storms like Merbok, once abnormal for the region, are expected to increase as ocean temperatures continue to rise.

Demientieff was at her family’s subsistence camp in Holy Cross during the typhoon. “I've never seen the Yukon River look like an ocean before,” she said. “The waves were just rolling in constantly.” Flooding from the storm swallowed several feet of shoreline: “We lost a lot of land from where [our camp] used to be.

As a result of the flood damage, Demientieff’s family tore down one of their cabins, which had been at the campsite for over 50 years. That hasn’t stopped her or her family from returning. 

The remoteness of Holy Cross means that Demientieff typically takes small regional aircraft from Anchorage that can cost over $1,000 in round-trip airfare. When flights were grounded, during the coronavirus pandemic, Demientieff and her husband launched a boat from a bridge 135 miles north of Fairbanks. They sailed for several days on the rough waters of the Yukon River to get to camp. 

Access to her village is core to Demientieff’s identity. “I can't even imagine not going home in September,” she said. “That whole relationship with the animals and the environment and where we live [...] that really uplifts us as people.”

"My ancestors were here before me" 

Chefornak is a Yup’ik community of around 500 people in southwestern Alaska. Chefornak is nestled between the Bering Sea and the Kinia River, both of which are eroding rapidly with storm surges and sea level rise. Volcanic eruptions from a now-dormant volcano a few miles south shaped the village’s terrain, creating boulders of hardened lava separated by icy silt and mud. With rising temperatures, these frozen layers have melted, softening the ground and creating uneven dips and valleys. Its unique geography makes it vulnerable to a variety of climate risks. According to a 2019 report by the Denali Commission, the independent federal agency responsible for providing infrastructure support for rural Alaska communities, Chefornak ranks in the top 25 of the state’s environmentally threatened communities.

These environmental changes are destroying Jessica Kaagyugaq Lewis-Nicori’s childhood home. “My mom's house is falling into the land because permafrost is thawing and a new creek is forming right by her house,” she said. “The wood is going to deteriorate soon, and then it’s gonna actually fall.” The house’s foundation is in constant contact with water, leading to serious mold issues. This creates an unsafe, allergy-inducing environment for Lewis-Nicori’s four children, who range in age from several months old to 12 years old. Lewis-Nicori’s experience highlights how ecological grief can be anticipatory: an underlying sense of anxiety about an impending loss to your home and land. 

“The world is changing, and the Chefornak I grew up with, it’s never gonna be the same,” she said. “There used to be a creek where there’s no creek anymore, and the land that was [...] solid is now mushy.” 

Chefornak is facing a climate-induced housing crisis. In 2021, rapid permafrost collapse caused a four to six-foot sinkhole to open up under a home, forcing the family that lived there to evacuate. The slow-moving nature of erosion and the difficulty in documenting its impacts make it challenging to secure funding under the Stafford Act, the law governing FEMA’s emergency response program. Although Chefornak has received a total of $7.6 million from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) Branch of Tribal Community Resilience from 2021 until the present, the AVCP-RHA, the regional housing authority for the Y-K Delta region, estimates that the village needs $37.1 million to address its housing needs in full. The remoteness and extreme climate of rural western Alaska make building new homes extremely expensive. Building materials must be barged in during a narrow window between May and October, and construction season is confined to a few short months in the summer. The estimated cost of building a single home in Chefornak is over $750,000.

The transition to city life has been hard on her mental health. “I tend to get depressed. And I won't tell anyone,” Lewis-Nicori said. She associates Chefornak with feelings of comfort, safety, and acceptance. There, she found it easy to lean on others for emotional support. “It’s so small and you know who your family is,” she said. “If I have a problem, I can go to an auntie [...] a cousin or an uncle or whoever.” Her sense of community in Anchorage pales in comparison.

Part of the difference lies in how people communicate. Lewis-Nicori grew up speaking Yugtun, the Central Alaskan Yupʼik language. In Chefornak, she was surrounded by it—its guttural tones, abundant suffixes, and tendency to emerge through rounded and pursed lips. She speaks Yugtun with all her children. In the city, however, preserving the language feels more difficult. One day, her two-year-old son returned from daycare in Fairbanks, refusing to speak Yugtun. “Mom, nobody talks like that,” he complained. “We’re not in ‘Chefornak world’ anymore!” 

“My language is slowly dying. We can see it,” she said. She recounted a visual metaphor from her uncle, who passed away earlier this year: “We see that it's falling, so we're catching it right before it falls and breaks.” A review paper published earlier this year by researchers at the University of British Columbia found that speaking Indigenous languages is associated with a wide range of positive health outcomes, including feelings of resilience and healing, as well as overall psychological well-being. 

For many Alaska Natives, villages are places of strength, places of power rooted in traditional ways of being. Lewis-Nicori’s family also holds recent memories of violent campaigns of assimilation.

Alaska Native communities are distinct from Indigenous groups in the contiguous U.S., in part due to later periods of American colonization. Even in Alaska, the remote location and absence of resources that settlers deemed profitable, like bowhead whales, sea otters, and gold, meant that the predominantly Yup’ik communities in the southwestern part of the state remained relatively protected from the boom-and-bust colonization cycles that plagued other Native Alaska communities. 

“Western contact for my region was two generations ago,” Lewis-Nicori explained. Her grandparents were nomadic until a 1929 federal schooling mandate led to forced sedentarization. “They had to settle because their kids had to go to school or else they'd go to jail,” she said. “My mom got taken, and she went to boarding school.” 

These Alaska schools formed part of a nationwide campaign of violent assimilation that lasted over a hundred years, with origins in the Indian Civilization Act Fund of 1819, through which the federal government partnered with missionaries and church officials to establish schools to aid in the “civilization process” of Indigenous communities. Boarding schools sought to erase Indigenous culture through force. They took children as young as five from villages, referring to them by government numbers, and disciplined them for their language and cultural practices.

Yet, the boarding school system’s lasting harm wasn’t acknowledged by the federal government until recently. In 2021, the U.S. Department of the Interior began the first federal investigation into the “loss of human life and lasting consequences of the Federal Indian boarding school system.” The report they released in July 2024 found that nearly 1,000 children, likely an undercount, died as a result of the rampant abuse at boarding schools. The findings prompted President Joe Biden to issue a formal national apology to the descendants of boarding school survivors in late 2024. In Alaska, some of the state’s 26 boarding schools remained open until the 1970s.

Decades after the boarding school system, many people are seeking to remain in villages. There, they look after cultural practices, nurturing kinship networks and harvesting wild foods at subsistence camps. Language revitalization efforts are underway, especially in southwest Alaska’s coastal and lower Kuskokwim regions, where the Yup’ik language is spoken by roughly 10,000 people, representing the most commonly spoken Indigenous language in the state. Elders pass on land-based oral histories and establish themselves as advocates and culture bearers.

For centuries, the land in southwest Alaska was knowable to the predominantly Yup’ik communities that lived there. They passed down land-based knowledge through generations, with Yup’ik oral histories documenting how the topography formed and changed over time. This traditional wisdom made changes to the terrain more predictable. According to Yup’ik Elders, adapting to harsh weather is ingrained in their bones. In centuries past, anticipating the behavior of weather, broadly defined by the Yup’ik word ella to include changing seasons, temporary atmospheric conditions, and the natural ecosystem, structured the activities of day-to-day life. 

Chefornak will always be Lewis-Nicori’s home. It’s a place that grounds her in her lineage. It’s where she remembers her great-grandmother, who, until the day she stopped walking, left early in the morning and returned late in the evening with salmonberries to sustain them through winter. It’s where her grandparents traversed the length of the Urrsukvaaq, the Kinia River, seasonally to access hunting and fishing grounds. “In Chefornak, I always remember, my ancestors were here before me,” she said. “If we actually had a house, we would still be there.”

For now, Lewis-Nicori lives in the city, where she demonstrates a quiet defiance in remembering these histories. Like the rural-to-urban migrants that came before her, Lewis-Nicori extends aspects of village life into urban centers. Lewis-Nicori attends yuraq, or a weekly dance practice for Yup’ik and Cup’ik peoples at Anchorage’s Alaska Native Medical Center. She translates her wisdom about medicinal flora and fauna to the wetlands surrounding Anchorage. 

“I'm not from this region, but I see the same medicines that we have on the coast here,” she said. This knowledge is precious. “We don't have generational wealth,” Lewis-Nicori said. “Our generational wealth is our knowledge and our culture and our traditions.”

“I like still being Yup’ik in the city,” she said. “It feels like I'm taking a stand.”

***

Plumes form from burning coal for electricity at the Mill Creek Generating Station, the last utility-scale coal-fired power plant in Jefferson County, Kentucky. The plant operates between the banks of the Ohio River and a low-income neighborhood called Valley Station less than 15 miles southwest of downtown Louisville. The city has repeatedly failed to meet the EPA’s air quality standards for ozone, becoming one of the 25 smoggiest cities in the U.S., according to the American Lung Association’s 2026 State of the Air report.

Air pollution is a known problem for Hendricks’ community. What’s more obscure are the health risks from the waste left behind by combusted coal, known as coal ash. Proposed federal regulations coming from the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency could make finding and cleaning up that waste even more difficult.

Walking barefoot along the horseshoe of her driveway in May, Hendricks said she’s long worried over the health impacts from the plant.

People are dying of cancer left and right in this subdivision.

That waste, known as coal ash, has been dumped within at least six sites across Mill Creek’s 544-acre footprint, enough to fill more than 6,200 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Contaminants within the ash can cause cancer and other serious health effects. But for decades, coal ash was poorly regulated by the federal government. The grey sludge, often kept in place by mixing the featherlight dust with water, leached from unlined pits into groundwater, surface water, and soils. Meanwhile, dried ash took to the air and traveled for miles into the surrounding communities, landing on windowsills and migrating into children’s bedrooms. 

Coal ash contains higher concentrations of contaminants compared to the original rock. According to a January 2026 report filed by the plant’s owners, Mill Creek’s coal ash sites are leaking heavy metals like arsenic, molybdenum, and lithium. Arsenic is a known carcinogen; molybdenum can cause achy joints and lead to liver and kidney damage; and lithium is a metal associated with multiple health risks, including neurological damage. 

For decades, electric utilities avoided monitoring and cleaning up their waste. Then came a pair of disasters in 2008 and 2014 where coal ash broke from a dam at the Kingston Fossil Plant in Tennessee and a pipe at the Dan River Steam Station in North Carolina, clogging waterways and leveling homes.In 2015, President Barack Obama’s administration finally took action to protect communities from coal ash, requiring groundwater monitoring and cleanup plans. 

The industry’s own data, compiled by Earthjustice, an environmental nonprofit that has litigated numerous coal ash cases, showed that coal ash at nine out of every ten power plants polluted groundwater. In 2023, the EPA announced that cancer risks from arsenic and radiation in soils containing coal ash were high enough to require further regulation. Under President Joe Biden, the EPA doubled down, adding the protection of communities from coal ash contamination to a national priority list as one of its most critical charges. 

But the heyday of federal coal ash oversight has atrophied, and long-fought-for improvements are under threat again. Most states, including Kentucky, rarely regulate coal ash beyond permitting facilities and largely rely on federal oversight for enforcement. 

“Team Kentucky’s focus is to make sure our communities and our natural resources are protected from any adverse effects of coal ash storage. We do this by working with our utility companies and property owners, but also within the constraints of federal and state laws,” Robin Hartman, spokesperson for the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, the state agency responsible for environmental and natural resource regulatory enforcement, said in an email. 

Five days before President Donald Trump was sworn in for the second time, 10 utility executives, including the owner-operator of Mill Creek, asked Lee Zeldin, a fossil fuel evangelist and then-nominee for administrator of the EPA, in a letter to overhaul environmental laws, including nascent regulations on coal combustion residuals, a wonky name for coal ash. The last signator, John R. Crockett III, is president of Kentucky’s two companies that form the state’s largest utility, Louisville Gas and Electric Company and Kentucky Utilities Energy, LLC, or LG&E/KU.

The EPA acquiesced in April, first proposing a new rule that would allow states and utilities to bypass standing regulations for coal ash cleanup, and then reopening a case for a new permitting system that could further weaken requirements. In an emailed statement to The Margin, an EPA spokesperson described the proposed changes as “a major improvement over the Biden-era rule.” They continued, “Under the proposed new compliance pathway, permit authorities could tailor requirements to site-specific risks and incorporate advances in monitoring and corrective technologies.” 

In late June, LG&E/KU filed comments supporting those amendments, highlighting the need to delegate the federal coal ash program to state authorities, enhance flexibility for compliance options, and remove provisions for specific sites called Coal Combustion Residuals Management Units. Earlier that month, the Trump administration doubled down, announcing $700 million in taxpayer funding to keep coal alive. The budget included $124 million on upgrading three coal plants in Kentucky, which is home to eight operating coal plants, the majority of which line the Ohio River. 

“The two things are part and parcel of one another,” said Gavin Kearney, deputy managing attorney for Earthjustice’s clean energy program. “Eliminating coal ash protections is a way of helping coal plants prosper.

Now, the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, the state agency responsible for environmental and natural resource regulatory enforcement, is seeking approval to self-implement permits and efforts to clean up coal combustion residuals (CCR), another name for coal waste.   

“The EEC has been developing new regulations for (CCR) that, if approved, would protect Kentuckians’ public health, ratepayers, and the environment by enabling additional oversight from the state and allowing the cabinet to evaluate each facility individually,” Hartman said in an email. “The proposed regulation would require CCR owners to get a permit similar to those acquired by landfills and require the facility to conduct a comprehensive investigation of the structural stability, groundwater quality, and all remedies for coal ash impoundments."

Advocates warn that under new coal ash proposals, utilities could potentially close coal ash ponds that are in contact with and contaminate groundwater, which the current rule forbids, without first cleaning them up. The rollbacks also relax some monitoring requirements for cleaning up contaminated groundwater. In addition, the proposals could exempt hundreds of large piles of ash from any oversight by rolling back a 2024 rule that expanded the definition of coal ash sites. This proposal could allow state regulators to shortcut or eliminate coal ash protections, leaving citizens to challenge a utility's plans for its coal ash cleanup on a site-by-site basis. This would be a Sisyphean task. In Kentucky, there are at least 87 coal ash sites; across the country there are more than 1,000, according to Earthjustice. Experts said they estimate the weakened rules to be finalized by the end of this year. Mill Creek likely has at least three Coal Combustion Residuals Management Units (CCRMU’s), according to data collected by Earthjustice. 

Folks like Hendricks, who often had multiple jobs at a time while raising two kids and caring for ill relatives, don’t usually have time or resources to play watchdog to powerful utilities. She inherited her house from her mother, who died three years ago from lung cancer, and lives in it with her sister. Her daughter lives in a house Hendricks owns on Rainbow Drive, the last line of homes before the green lawn of the plant property begins. Most families like hers living near coal ash sites depend on federal regulators to ensure their safety from toxic and sometimes unstable ash impoundments.

LG&E told The Margin the utility would publish a report defining its CCRMU sites, in compliance with regulations, which LG&E has asked the EPA to rescind. During the licensing process for two new gas units at Mill Creek, one proposed and one under construction, LG&E disclosed the plants would be built on an old storage site for Posotech, a low-grade concrete material manufactured with coal ash, LG&E/KU spokesperson Andrew Gardner said in an email. He added, “It is likely the Mill Creek site has other CCRMU given the existing rule’s definition of CCRMU.”

Fewer than half of Kentucky’s coal ash sites are reliably monitored by the federal government. Self-reported industry data show that all but one have contamination levels above safe drinking water standards. That includes Mill Creek, where heavy metals can be found at levels triple groundwater protection standards, finding pathways to the Ohio River and off the plant’s southern edge. Regardless, LG&E plans to keep Mill Creek burning coal. 

Gardner said in an email that the utility “is properly managing the site to protect public health and the environment,” and complies with the 2015 Obama-era rule pertaining to closing impoundments, operating its landfill, monitoring groundwater, and notifying regulators about constituents of concerns and remedies.

In June, Congressman Morgan McGarvey, whose district covers Mill Creek, signed a separate letter to Zeldin asking the EPA not to weaken coal ash regulations that could expose working-class communities facing disproportionate environmental burdens to dangerous contaminants. 

“They’re not located in rich neighborhoods,” McGarvey told The Margin of coal ash sites in his state. “They are already in places where it will hurt even worse for people who have suffered from pollution and being dumped on for years and years.

II. Kentucky’s ‘deregulatory mania’

When Thomas Edison began burning coal at Pearl Street Station to illuminate households in lower Manhattan in 1882, the commercial power he created made commercial-scale waste. 

In the century and a half since, billions of tons of coal ash have been stored in landfills (when dry), ponds (when wet), and haphazard holes. Those dumps, largely unlined, often border rivers and streams, since coal plants need water to create steam and cool the generation systems. Pollutants from those sites could continue contaminating groundwater for hundreds of years, according to Nick Torrey, coal ash attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit focused on legal advocacy and environmental protection in six southern states.

It’s basically a forever problem in terms of any normal human scale.

Since the 1980s, the coal industry has found loopholes to avoid the overwhelming scope of its waste problem. After the 1976 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act was enacted, governing the disposal of waste, the 1980 Bevill Amendment granted polluters regulatory relief by classifying coal ash as a non-hazardous waste, which allowed the industry to continue to dispose of it in landfills and ponds. The EPA reaffirmed that decision in 1993 and 2000, but environmentalists have long protested this exception, arguing coal ash contains dozens of heavy metals and radiation that would qualify other materials as hazardous. 

Kentucky has long been a leader in coal power, a trend on the decline. About 67% of the state’s power grid came from coal in 2024, down from more than 90% a decade earlier. Coal power declined as natural gas became cheaper, the coal supply diminished, and the global energy market pulled away from one of the world’s dirtiest fuels. 

While there has been a reduction in coal, a rapid increase in electricity demand and a failure to quickly transition to renewable alternatives means coal continues to stick around. Last year, LG&E/KU projected its energy demand could double in the coming years, largely from data centers. Activists against data centers in Jefferson County are pushing back against LG&E/KU’s request to build more gas and extend coal, which they say will fuel projects like the 400-megawatt data center approved by Louisville regulators about 12 miles north of the plant.

The map below displays coal ash sites and data centers across Kentucky and near its border, with each site's status available by hovering over its location. The Ohio River is highlighted in red to illustrate the concentration of these sites near major waterways. The map also includes county-level census data showing the percentage of residents who identify as people of color.

Meanwhile, state lawmakers have made it exceedingly difficult to transition to cleaner sources of energy. A pair of laws passed in 2023 and 2024 made it more difficult to retire fossil-fired units and to replace fossil fuels with most renewables. Republican legislators during this year’s session proposed rolling back state environmental regulations under a bill that would make it impossible to pass state environmental laws in Kentucky that are stricter than federal laws. 

“There’s a deregulatory mania in Kentucky right now,” said Michael Washburn, executive director of the Kentucky Waterways Alliance, a nonprofit focused on protecting state waterways.

That pro-coal stance could influence older facilities like Mill Creek, which once had four coal-burning units. One retired in 2024, replaced by a gas turbine still under construction. LG&E/KU also asked the state to build a second gas turbine at Mill Creek and extend the life of the third coal unit until at least 2031. Previously, that stack was slated to retire next year. Two more could be retired in 2035, according to LG&E/KU 2024 integrated resource plan, but that decision will be reassessed in the utility’s 2027 plan. 

“We fully believe these investments are in the best interests of our customers and the communities we’re proud to serve, and they build upon our history of continuous environmental improvement initiatives and major equipment investments at Mill Creek,” Gardner wrote in an email.

Keeping coal burning will cost ratepayers, critics say. Coal generation is expensive, and so is building new gas-fired units, according to a 2025 report by the Kentucky Resources Council. The state could save electricity customers $2.6 billion by mid-century if utilities transitioned away from coal and gas to renewable energy and battery storage, according to the report, potentially reaching a 95% clean energy portfolio by 2050 without increasing costs to consumers.

Ann Gunter, a 72-year-old who moved into her home near Mill Creek in 2003, said she was told the plant would be converted to gas by 2006. More than 20 years later, she said she’s still waiting, frustrated by the soot that accumulates on her house and car. LG&E/KU told The Margin it was not familiar with these claims and was actively transitioning portions of generation on the Mill Creek site from coal to natural gas. Gardner said Mill Creek Unit 5, the first combined cycle gas plant at the site, should be operating by spring 2027.

“They keep telling us, ‘next year we’re converting to gas,’” Gunter said from her front porch, wiping dust off the railing. “And next year never comes."

III. Between Rainbow Drive and the ‘Cloud Maker’

Beneath the towering Mill Creek station, along Rainbow Drive and on surrounding streets, dogs bark. Day lilies bloom orange. Tomato and cucumber starts wait in plastic trays on the patio. Robins’ feet click on the gutters, and cardinals perch on the edge of a bird bath shaped like a sunflower. Canadian geese fly against grey clouds. 

Then a flood warning pings cell phones around the time Lauren Hollobaugh opens the front door of her home bordering a grassy beam that functions as a floodwall. The 33-year-old human resources specialist lives on nearby Tennis Boulevard, with her mother and two kids. Her family is beset by several health conditions. Her mom and son have kidney disease. Her daughter and her mother have eczema. She has sensitive skin, so exposure to chlorine or too much sun causes her to develop rashes.

The Margin knocked on more than 60 doors in May. Some residents, especially those with children, expressed concern about their proximity to Mill Creek but struggle to connect their ailments to their high-polluting neighbor beyond anecdote. However, not everyone feels the same about this neighbor. Some support coal keeping the lights on. Others are indifferent. One neighbor insisted the plant did not burn coal anymore. 

Wilbur, a Spanish-speaker from Venezuela who works night shifts as a Walmart custodian, moved here two years ago with his son and a friend. He said he worried at first, but he hadn’t noticed any health issues. Vina Duncan, a woman in her nineties who moved to the neighborhood 30 years ago from Harlan County, said nothing about the plant bothered her.

But many are worried about the risks to their health and property that living so close to the plant poses while having little insight into the federal changes afoot that could remove guardrails for the plant’s pollution. 

Burning coal produces particulate matter, tiny bits of soot that can trigger asthma and cardiovascular issues. Hendricks has suffered from allergies, and Hendricks’ neighbor, Sherry Fitz, developed allergies after moving into the neighborhood. Every morning, she said she smells chemicals. She has to dust every day. 

Fitz moved onto Betsy Ross Drive when her daughter was three years old, making her a “smokestack baby,” a nickname for the little ones who grow up in the neighborhood, Fitz said. The now 12-year-old has allergies and depression, and her 17-year-old sister lives with social anxiety. Fitz said she doesn’t interact very much with LG&E but recalled a book giveaway by the utility at Watson Lane Elementary, then her kids’ school.

“You're hurting my kids’ insides, but you’re going to give them a stupid book?” Fitz recalled thinking. That school has since closed. A second school in the area, Frost Middle School, also closed, and was later purchased by LG&E. In an email, Gardner said the purchase was to support current and future operations at Mill Creek as the utility plans to build a warehouse there to support the operational needs of Mill Creek’s gas units. 

Soot has fallen in the neighborhood, for about half a century. Marla Patterson, who grew up here, moved back in 2000, said fine black residue coated her outdoor toys as a child. She and her family have long lived in the area and, by her account, she has been significantly impacted by the plant. 

Patterson recalled that her grandparents bought one of Valley Station’s first homes back in the 1940s when the neighborhood was sparsely occupied. Years later, it became a subdivision. Patterson was born in 1967, a year before construction began on Mill Creek. After moving back, Patterson was leaving for work one morning in her brand new black Kia Sephia when she saw tiny white flakes floating in the air. She drove to Timmy’s Auto Wash on Dixie Highway to wash off the dots spotting her car, but the soap and water only made the white specks brighter. She called LG&E to complain, but she said the utility only offered a car wash. The paint job on the new car was ruined, Patterson said. Worse, Patterson, who grew up with symptoms of bad asthma, alleged that she ended up with pneumonia after the incident.

“Anything that sits outside is basically destroyed,” Patterson said. 

Her dad, who never drank alcohol or smoked cigarettes, died of liver cancer less than three months after his diagnosis, Patterson recalled. Her mother has dementia. Patterson works in health care, shuttling between three jobs at a local nursing home, a west end hospital, and a teaching gig at Sullivan University.

“I knew living by LG&E was a bad thing,” Patterson said. But she came back to help her family and take care of her grandmother, and she stayed.

Some neighbors who answered the door for The Margin relocated here because homes offer some of the cheapest property values in Louisville, the state’s most populous city. Alfredo Carballo opened the door to his sister’s house, where she lives with her mom and two young children. They get sick more often in this neighborhood, with cold symptoms including a cough, Carballo said. They spent months trying to sell the home but couldn’t find a buyer, so they took the house off the market.

Patricia Myers, 61, was diagnosed with small cell carcinoma, a highly aggressive form of cancer that typically originates in the lungs, last October. She’s lived in her house, bordering a chain link fence with LG&E/KU since 2008, after growing up in the neighborhood. Myers said she lost several childhood friends to cancer, but gesturing to stubbed-out cigarettes on her patio table, she said she couldn’t necessarily attribute her illness to the plant when she’s also been a longtime smoker. 

One woman, who asked not to share her name, spoke through her living room window after peeling back a lace curtain. She said the issue used to be bigger, but the state and the federal government didn’t seem to care very much anymore. Her next door neighbor, she said, died of throat cancer. 

LG&E/KU told The Margin it wasn’t familiar with these complaints.

“LG&E investigates all complaints, operates in strict compliance with operating permits including dust control plans, and strives to be a good neighbor,” Gardner wrote in an email. “We’re continually monitoring, measuring and reporting the plant’s performance to appropriate federal, state and local regulatory agencies, and we operate Mill Creek and all of our power plants under federally enforceable operating permits.”

The neighborhoods around Mill Creek suffer broader cumulative and synergistic effects of environmental injustice, according to Tony Arnold, a law professor at the University of Louisville who runs the Resilience Justice Project, an organization whose work includes a focus on the environmental and community needs around the Mill Creek watershed.

Along with the Mill Creek power plant, there’s the Kosmos Cement Plant across the street from the Mill Creek landfill, the car exhaust along Dixie Highway, and the chemical plants just north in Rubbertown. 

“A lot of communities, a lot of neighborhoods that are marginalized have fewer resources,” Arnold said. That includes a lack of information about the plant, its emissions, and the regulatory bodies that oversee it. Rollbacks on climate science at the federal level also limit research into how climate change, largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels, could impact Mill Creek’s coal ash.

“With extreme flooding, if there’s some sort of accident or unintentional release or if it’s not managed properly, there are all sorts of things that could go wrong, and the fact that we’ve already had discharges in the past tells you that things can go wrong,” Arnold said. 

In a “worst-case” flooding scenario modeled in a 2017 LG&E report, Rainbow Drive, where Hendricks’ daughter lives, could have been under five feet of contaminated water from the now-closed coal ash pond within an hour of a flood event.

IV. Cancer in coal country

Mill Creek has one active coal ash landfill, a roughly 14-story behemoth sandwiched between the Ohio River and Dixie Highway, an artery that helps connect metro Louisville to nearly 1.4 million people. The plant also houses five closed coal ash sites, including a large closed coal ash pond that borders the river and the Mill Creek watershed. Standing in the woods below the terraced rows of gravel, the chemical smell of the closed pond is inescapable. 

Both the landfill and the pond are leaking contaminants into the Ohio River and onto an industrial property south of the plant, according to a January report filed by LG&E. At least 17 out of 29 monitoring wells at Mill Creek had tests showing contaminants above federal groundwater protection standards. Arsenic, lithium and molybdenum exceeded those standards dozens of times across two testing events in April and September of 2025. Cobalt exceeded those standards twice and thallium once.The report said these contaminants weren’t likely to measurably increase concentrations in the Ohio River, where residents boat, fish, and recreate. LG&E reported and made publicly available its own monitoring data, as required under the 2015 rule, but so far no enforcement actions seem to have been taken by the federal or state government to bring the utility into compliance after its most recent report.

Arsenic, a known carcinogen found at least once at Mill Creek at levels 37 times the federal standard, exceeded the groundwater protection standard seven times last year. Lithium exceeded the threshold across at least 10 wells, sometimes measuring more than seven times the standard. Molybdenum at least tripled the groundwater protection standard seven times, exceeding the threshold across eight wells.

For many people, connecting their health concerns to coal ash is exceedingly difficult. Science shows that dozens of elements in coal ash — including arsenic, mercury, lithium, lead, selenium, and radium — can be dangerous and even deadly to humans. But tying coal ash to a specific person's ailments likely requires studies based on evidence of community or workplace exposure, according to Kristina Zierold, a public health professor at the University of Mississippi. 

And so far, little proof exists, which is largely a missed opportunity, Zierold said. While at the University of Louisville, her research focused on communities bordering Mill Creek and Cane Run Generating Station, another former coal plant owned by LG&E/KU that converted to natural gas in 2015 and then spent years closing its coal ash sites. 

Zierold began door knocking in the Cane Run and Mill Creek neighborhoods in 2012. She sent letters about her study through a mailing list of the 12-ZIP code area and slipped flyers under the windshield wipers of teachers’ cars in local schools. She took out Facebook ads and stood in store parking lots near the plants handing out information. Parents told her about learning difficulties, poor school performance, and the prevalence of ADHD among kids in their neighborhood, challenges Zierold knew were also seen in kids exposed to heavy metals. They also reported asthma and respiratory problems, along with trouble sleeping.

Shoeleather epidemiology eventually introduced Zierold and her fellow researchers to roughly 280 kids, aged 6-14 years old, and their families. They would become the participants in an almost $3 million study from the National Institutes of Health exploring how children’s neurobehavioral problems at home and school could be connected to coal ash exposure. Researchers set up devices to collect air samples in their homes, took dust samples in the children’s bedrooms and family rooms, and periodically collected nail clippings from children to test for heavy metals. 

Under a microscope, the air samples showed 43 percent of 261 kids’ homes contained cenospheres. These are glassy, spherical particles that form when minerals melt during combustion and reform in exhaust steam, according to Zierold. Those cenospheres meant coal ash was present in almost half the homes. Children with coal ash in their homes had increased levels of iron, aluminum, and silica in their nails, all contaminants found within coal ash. Zierold worked closely with a psychologist and found a relationship between coal ash exposure and elevated levels of depression and lower school performance among the kids. 

“There needs to be a ton more funding and a ton more research on this,” Zierold said. But she’s struggled to secure funding to move the research forward.  Zierold would have liked to study adults after hearing about high rates of cancer in the communities near Mill Creek and Cane Run from residents. Counties closer to coal-fired impoundments tend to have higher cancer rates, according to a 2026 spatial association analysis led by Charlie Zhang, an urban and health geographer at the University of Louisville also involved in Zierold’s research.

The map below shows the annual cancer incidence rate across the United States, measured as the number of new cancer cases per 100,000 people. Kentucky is highlighted with a red outline.

Much of Kentucky is dark red on one of the study’s maps in Zhang’s research. Kentucky is one of the top five states when it comes to the number of coal ash impoundments, and ranks highest for both cancer incidence and mortality. Those cancer rates are often attributed to social determinants like low education and high poverty rates, with high rates of tobacco-, obesity- and HPV-related cancers. Research connecting cancer to coal ash is often marginalized, according to Zhang, especially in coal country.

Coal ash, Zierold said, “affects so many people, and a lot of people don’t even know they’re being affected by it, and that’s the sad thing. It’s very sad.”

While Zierold was working on her health study, she was approached by lawyers representing a group of workers who alleged they were sickened from cleaning up the Kingston coal ash disaster across the stateline in Tennessee. The lawyers wanted Zierold for consulting, but because her research focused on kids, not adults, she declined. She called the limited research a shame.

Now, the utility in charge of the Kingston spill, the Tennessee Valley Authority, is issuing its own “scientific context” about coal ash. Angie Mummaw,  an organizer with the environmental nonprofit Appalachian Voices,attended a meeting in April about the extended retirement dates for the two coal units near the Cumberland Fossil Plant about 70 miles west of Nashville. Mummaw encountered a woman holding a booklet of TVA fact sheets who told her that the amount of molybdenum, a coal ash contaminant detected at Cumberland, was equivalent to what a person would eat in a serving of black-eyed peas; she also compared the amount of arsenic found at the plant to what a person might get from a glass of wine or a cup of hot chocolate. TVA’s fact sheets read, in part, “Coal Ash is Not Hazardous” and included the statement “the constituents of coal ash are nearly identical to common soil.”

TVA spokesperson Scott Brooks said in an email that the fact sheets referenced were developed to help advance public understanding using information and data from credible third-party sources.

“They are intended to provide scientific context about coal ash and to illustrate that many of its naturally occurring constituents are also found throughout the environment,” Brooks wrote. He said the common narrative around coal ash isn’t rooted in reality or informed by the extensive science, monitoring, and regulatory oversight that govern its management today.

V. ‘Can Kentucky do something?’

Well over one hundred people signed up to speak at the EPA’s virtual public listening session on the coal ash rollback in late May. So many that the agency had to extend the session, keeping people across the country glued to their computer screens from 9 am to 7 pm. The 141 speakers were from faith organizations, environmental groups and nursing associations. They were Tribal members, scientists, attorneys, parents and neighbors living near coal ash sites. 

Susan Wind, an activist who used to live in Lake Norman, North Carolina, spoke about the cancers children in her neighborhood were diagnosed with in a community she said was built on top of coal ash used as fill for the development. They included her daughter, who was diagnosed with thyroid cancer at 16 years old.

“The word of the day is betrayed,” said Wind. “Betrayed not just by a utility company that put profit over people, but by the very agencies sworn to protect us, you especially, the EPA.” 

She came from a state with some of the strongest regulations in the country. After the Dan River disaster in 2014, North Carolina passed the Coal Ash Management Act, going beyond federal regulations, forcing Duke Energy to excavate and close leaking coal ash sites. Michael Regan, former head of the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, helped negotiate Duke Energy’s cleanup, developed the state’s clean energy plan,and later helmed the Biden administration’s EPA. 

“We have a coal ash program that does work,” said SELC’s Torrey, who lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. “It’s the only one like it in the country.” 

A system with loosened regulations on coal ash, like what Trump’s EPA proposed, could allow utilities to pressure regulators into accepting inadequate monitoring or cleanup plans, critics say. Activists like Wind would continue devoting their lives to challenging such plans on a case-by-case basis instead of working with the federal government to protect them. States would become the new watchdog, and most states aren’t ready, let alone interested, in policing the coal industry.

Oklahoma, Georgia, Texas, North Dakota, and Wyoming have authorized state CCR permit programs, the EPA press office said in an emailed statement, and the agency has proposed approval of three other state CCR permit programs in Virginia, Louisiana, and Alabama.

The Kentucky EEC targeted September to formally file regulation changes to join these ranks, pending a comment period and public hearing.

“Can Kentucky do something? Yes, they can,” McGarvey said. “But the reality is the states, including Kentucky, do not have the resources to do this. They know it. That’s why they’re doing this. They’re trying to give coal companies and big corporations a pass so that there is going to be no accountability.” 

Back on Rainbow Drive, Hendricks stood in her front yard. 

“Are the federal rules changing on this? That’s crazy,” Hendricks said. Her neighbor, Roger Mills, a resident in his 70s, stood outside his front door, with his dog peering through the glass. 

“It’s the dirtiest place I’ve ever lived in my life,” Mills said.“It’s got to be unhealthy breathing it.” But he had little information and few resources. Mills spends his days taking care of his wife with dementia, who grew up in the house where they now live. 

While they breathed, the plant burned on.

***

Plumes form from burning coal for electricity at the Mill Creek Generating Station, the last utility-scale coal-fired power plant in Jefferson County, Kentucky. The plant operates between the banks of the Ohio River and a low-income neighborhood called Valley Station less than 15 miles southwest of downtown Louisville. The city has repeatedly failed to meet the EPA’s air quality standards for ozone, becoming one of the 25 smoggiest cities in the U.S., according to the American Lung Association’s 2026 State of the Air report.

Air pollution is a known problem for Hendricks’ community. What’s more obscure are the health risks from the waste left behind by combusted coal, known as coal ash. Proposed federal regulations coming from the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency could make finding and cleaning up that waste even more difficult.

Walking barefoot along the horseshoe of her driveway in May, Hendricks said she’s long worried over the health impacts from the plant.

People are dying of cancer left and right in this subdivision.

That waste, known as coal ash, has been dumped within at least six sites across Mill Creek’s 544-acre footprint, enough to fill more than 6,200 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Contaminants within the ash can cause cancer and other serious health effects. But for decades, coal ash was poorly regulated by the federal government. The grey sludge, often kept in place by mixing the featherlight dust with water, leached from unlined pits into groundwater, surface water, and soils. Meanwhile, dried ash took to the air and traveled for miles into the surrounding communities, landing on windowsills and migrating into children’s bedrooms. 

Coal ash contains higher concentrations of contaminants compared to the original rock. According to a January 2026 report filed by the plant’s owners, Mill Creek’s coal ash sites are leaking heavy metals like arsenic, molybdenum, and lithium. Arsenic is a known carcinogen; molybdenum can cause achy joints and lead to liver and kidney damage; and lithium is a metal associated with multiple health risks, including neurological damage. 

For decades, electric utilities avoided monitoring and cleaning up their waste. Then came a pair of disasters in 2008 and 2014 where coal ash broke from a dam at the Kingston Fossil Plant in Tennessee and a pipe at the Dan River Steam Station in North Carolina, clogging waterways and leveling homes.In 2015, President Barack Obama’s administration finally took action to protect communities from coal ash, requiring groundwater monitoring and cleanup plans. 

The industry’s own data, compiled by Earthjustice, an environmental nonprofit that has litigated numerous coal ash cases, showed that coal ash at nine out of every ten power plants polluted groundwater. In 2023, the EPA announced that cancer risks from arsenic and radiation in soils containing coal ash were high enough to require further regulation. Under President Joe Biden, the EPA doubled down, adding the protection of communities from coal ash contamination to a national priority list as one of its most critical charges. 

But the heyday of federal coal ash oversight has atrophied, and long-fought-for improvements are under threat again. Most states, including Kentucky, rarely regulate coal ash beyond permitting facilities and largely rely on federal oversight for enforcement. 

“Team Kentucky’s focus is to make sure our communities and our natural resources are protected from any adverse effects of coal ash storage. We do this by working with our utility companies and property owners, but also within the constraints of federal and state laws,” Robin Hartman, spokesperson for the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, the state agency responsible for environmental and natural resource regulatory enforcement, said in an email. 

Five days before President Donald Trump was sworn in for the second time, 10 utility executives, including the owner-operator of Mill Creek, asked Lee Zeldin, a fossil fuel evangelist and then-nominee for administrator of the EPA, in a letter to overhaul environmental laws, including nascent regulations on coal combustion residuals, a wonky name for coal ash. The last signator, John R. Crockett III, is president of Kentucky’s two companies that form the state’s largest utility, Louisville Gas and Electric Company and Kentucky Utilities Energy, LLC, or LG&E/KU.

The EPA acquiesced in April, first proposing a new rule that would allow states and utilities to bypass standing regulations for coal ash cleanup, and then reopening a case for a new permitting system that could further weaken requirements. In an emailed statement to The Margin, an EPA spokesperson described the proposed changes as “a major improvement over the Biden-era rule.” They continued, “Under the proposed new compliance pathway, permit authorities could tailor requirements to site-specific risks and incorporate advances in monitoring and corrective technologies.” 

In late June, LG&E/KU filed comments supporting those amendments, highlighting the need to delegate the federal coal ash program to state authorities, enhance flexibility for compliance options, and remove provisions for specific sites called Coal Combustion Residuals Management Units. Earlier that month, the Trump administration doubled down, announcing $700 million in taxpayer funding to keep coal alive. The budget included $124 million on upgrading three coal plants in Kentucky, which is home to eight operating coal plants, the majority of which line the Ohio River. 

“The two things are part and parcel of one another,” said Gavin Kearney, deputy managing attorney for Earthjustice’s clean energy program. “Eliminating coal ash protections is a way of helping coal plants prosper.

Now, the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, the state agency responsible for environmental and natural resource regulatory enforcement, is seeking approval to self-implement permits and efforts to clean up coal combustion residuals (CCR), another name for coal waste.   

“The EEC has been developing new regulations for (CCR) that, if approved, would protect Kentuckians’ public health, ratepayers, and the environment by enabling additional oversight from the state and allowing the cabinet to evaluate each facility individually,” Hartman said in an email. “The proposed regulation would require CCR owners to get a permit similar to those acquired by landfills and require the facility to conduct a comprehensive investigation of the structural stability, groundwater quality, and all remedies for coal ash impoundments."

Advocates warn that under new coal ash proposals, utilities could potentially close coal ash ponds that are in contact with and contaminate groundwater, which the current rule forbids, without first cleaning them up. The rollbacks also relax some monitoring requirements for cleaning up contaminated groundwater. In addition, the proposals could exempt hundreds of large piles of ash from any oversight by rolling back a 2024 rule that expanded the definition of coal ash sites. This proposal could allow state regulators to shortcut or eliminate coal ash protections, leaving citizens to challenge a utility's plans for its coal ash cleanup on a site-by-site basis. This would be a Sisyphean task. In Kentucky, there are at least 87 coal ash sites; across the country there are more than 1,000, according to Earthjustice. Experts said they estimate the weakened rules to be finalized by the end of this year. Mill Creek likely has at least three Coal Combustion Residuals Management Units (CCRMU’s), according to data collected by Earthjustice. 

Folks like Hendricks, who often had multiple jobs at a time while raising two kids and caring for ill relatives, don’t usually have time or resources to play watchdog to powerful utilities. She inherited her house from her mother, who died three years ago from lung cancer, and lives in it with her sister. Her daughter lives in a house Hendricks owns on Rainbow Drive, the last line of homes before the green lawn of the plant property begins. Most families like hers living near coal ash sites depend on federal regulators to ensure their safety from toxic and sometimes unstable ash impoundments.

LG&E told The Margin the utility would publish a report defining its CCRMU sites, in compliance with regulations, which LG&E has asked the EPA to rescind. During the licensing process for two new gas units at Mill Creek, one proposed and one under construction, LG&E disclosed the plants would be built on an old storage site for Posotech, a low-grade concrete material manufactured with coal ash, LG&E/KU spokesperson Andrew Gardner said in an email. He added, “It is likely the Mill Creek site has other CCRMU given the existing rule’s definition of CCRMU.”

Fewer than half of Kentucky’s coal ash sites are reliably monitored by the federal government. Self-reported industry data show that all but one have contamination levels above safe drinking water standards. That includes Mill Creek, where heavy metals can be found at levels triple groundwater protection standards, finding pathways to the Ohio River and off the plant’s southern edge. Regardless, LG&E plans to keep Mill Creek burning coal. 

Gardner said in an email that the utility “is properly managing the site to protect public health and the environment,” and complies with the 2015 Obama-era rule pertaining to closing impoundments, operating its landfill, monitoring groundwater, and notifying regulators about constituents of concerns and remedies.

In June, Congressman Morgan McGarvey, whose district covers Mill Creek, signed a separate letter to Zeldin asking the EPA not to weaken coal ash regulations that could expose working-class communities facing disproportionate environmental burdens to dangerous contaminants. 

“They’re not located in rich neighborhoods,” McGarvey told The Margin of coal ash sites in his state. “They are already in places where it will hurt even worse for people who have suffered from pollution and being dumped on for years and years.

II. Kentucky’s ‘deregulatory mania’

When Thomas Edison began burning coal at Pearl Street Station to illuminate households in lower Manhattan in 1882, the commercial power he created made commercial-scale waste. 

In the century and a half since, billions of tons of coal ash have been stored in landfills (when dry), ponds (when wet), and haphazard holes. Those dumps, largely unlined, often border rivers and streams, since coal plants need water to create steam and cool the generation systems. Pollutants from those sites could continue contaminating groundwater for hundreds of years, according to Nick Torrey, coal ash attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit focused on legal advocacy and environmental protection in six southern states.

It’s basically a forever problem in terms of any normal human scale.

Since the 1980s, the coal industry has found loopholes to avoid the overwhelming scope of its waste problem. After the 1976 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act was enacted, governing the disposal of waste, the 1980 Bevill Amendment granted polluters regulatory relief by classifying coal ash as a non-hazardous waste, which allowed the industry to continue to dispose of it in landfills and ponds. The EPA reaffirmed that decision in 1993 and 2000, but environmentalists have long protested this exception, arguing coal ash contains dozens of heavy metals and radiation that would qualify other materials as hazardous. 

Kentucky has long been a leader in coal power, a trend on the decline. About 67% of the state’s power grid came from coal in 2024, down from more than 90% a decade earlier. Coal power declined as natural gas became cheaper, the coal supply diminished, and the global energy market pulled away from one of the world’s dirtiest fuels. 

While there has been a reduction in coal, a rapid increase in electricity demand and a failure to quickly transition to renewable alternatives means coal continues to stick around. Last year, LG&E/KU projected its energy demand could double in the coming years, largely from data centers. Activists against data centers in Jefferson County are pushing back against LG&E/KU’s request to build more gas and extend coal, which they say will fuel projects like the 400-megawatt data center approved by Louisville regulators about 12 miles north of the plant.

The map below displays coal ash sites and data centers across Kentucky and near its border, with each site's status available by hovering over its location. The Ohio River is highlighted in red to illustrate the concentration of these sites near major waterways. The map also includes county-level census data showing the percentage of residents who identify as people of color.

Meanwhile, state lawmakers have made it exceedingly difficult to transition to cleaner sources of energy. A pair of laws passed in 2023 and 2024 made it more difficult to retire fossil-fired units and to replace fossil fuels with most renewables. Republican legislators during this year’s session proposed rolling back state environmental regulations under a bill that would make it impossible to pass state environmental laws in Kentucky that are stricter than federal laws. 

“There’s a deregulatory mania in Kentucky right now,” said Michael Washburn, executive director of the Kentucky Waterways Alliance, a nonprofit focused on protecting state waterways.

That pro-coal stance could influence older facilities like Mill Creek, which once had four coal-burning units. One retired in 2024, replaced by a gas turbine still under construction. LG&E/KU also asked the state to build a second gas turbine at Mill Creek and extend the life of the third coal unit until at least 2031. Previously, that stack was slated to retire next year. Two more could be retired in 2035, according to LG&E/KU 2024 integrated resource plan, but that decision will be reassessed in the utility’s 2027 plan. 

“We fully believe these investments are in the best interests of our customers and the communities we’re proud to serve, and they build upon our history of continuous environmental improvement initiatives and major equipment investments at Mill Creek,” Gardner wrote in an email.

Keeping coal burning will cost ratepayers, critics say. Coal generation is expensive, and so is building new gas-fired units, according to a 2025 report by the Kentucky Resources Council. The state could save electricity customers $2.6 billion by mid-century if utilities transitioned away from coal and gas to renewable energy and battery storage, according to the report, potentially reaching a 95% clean energy portfolio by 2050 without increasing costs to consumers.

Ann Gunter, a 72-year-old who moved into her home near Mill Creek in 2003, said she was told the plant would be converted to gas by 2006. More than 20 years later, she said she’s still waiting, frustrated by the soot that accumulates on her house and car. LG&E/KU told The Margin it was not familiar with these claims and was actively transitioning portions of generation on the Mill Creek site from coal to natural gas. Gardner said Mill Creek Unit 5, the first combined cycle gas plant at the site, should be operating by spring 2027.

“They keep telling us, ‘next year we’re converting to gas,’” Gunter said from her front porch, wiping dust off the railing. “And next year never comes."

III. Between Rainbow Drive and the ‘Cloud Maker’

Beneath the towering Mill Creek station, along Rainbow Drive and on surrounding streets, dogs bark. Day lilies bloom orange. Tomato and cucumber starts wait in plastic trays on the patio. Robins’ feet click on the gutters, and cardinals perch on the edge of a bird bath shaped like a sunflower. Canadian geese fly against grey clouds. 

Then a flood warning pings cell phones around the time Lauren Hollobaugh opens the front door of her home bordering a grassy beam that functions as a floodwall. The 33-year-old human resources specialist lives on nearby Tennis Boulevard, with her mother and two kids. Her family is beset by several health conditions. Her mom and son have kidney disease. Her daughter and her mother have eczema. She has sensitive skin, so exposure to chlorine or too much sun causes her to develop rashes.

The Margin knocked on more than 60 doors in May. Some residents, especially those with children, expressed concern about their proximity to Mill Creek but struggle to connect their ailments to their high-polluting neighbor beyond anecdote. However, not everyone feels the same about this neighbor. Some support coal keeping the lights on. Others are indifferent. One neighbor insisted the plant did not burn coal anymore. 

Wilbur, a Spanish-speaker from Venezuela who works night shifts as a Walmart custodian, moved here two years ago with his son and a friend. He said he worried at first, but he hadn’t noticed any health issues. Vina Duncan, a woman in her nineties who moved to the neighborhood 30 years ago from Harlan County, said nothing about the plant bothered her.

But many are worried about the risks to their health and property that living so close to the plant poses while having little insight into the federal changes afoot that could remove guardrails for the plant’s pollution. 

Burning coal produces particulate matter, tiny bits of soot that can trigger asthma and cardiovascular issues. Hendricks has suffered from allergies, and Hendricks’ neighbor, Sherry Fitz, developed allergies after moving into the neighborhood. Every morning, she said she smells chemicals. She has to dust every day. 

Fitz moved onto Betsy Ross Drive when her daughter was three years old, making her a “smokestack baby,” a nickname for the little ones who grow up in the neighborhood, Fitz said. The now 12-year-old has allergies and depression, and her 17-year-old sister lives with social anxiety. Fitz said she doesn’t interact very much with LG&E but recalled a book giveaway by the utility at Watson Lane Elementary, then her kids’ school.

“You're hurting my kids’ insides, but you’re going to give them a stupid book?” Fitz recalled thinking. That school has since closed. A second school in the area, Frost Middle School, also closed, and was later purchased by LG&E. In an email, Gardner said the purchase was to support current and future operations at Mill Creek as the utility plans to build a warehouse there to support the operational needs of Mill Creek’s gas units. 

Soot has fallen in the neighborhood, for about half a century. Marla Patterson, who grew up here, moved back in 2000, said fine black residue coated her outdoor toys as a child. She and her family have long lived in the area and, by her account, she has been significantly impacted by the plant. 

Patterson recalled that her grandparents bought one of Valley Station’s first homes back in the 1940s when the neighborhood was sparsely occupied. Years later, it became a subdivision. Patterson was born in 1967, a year before construction began on Mill Creek. After moving back, Patterson was leaving for work one morning in her brand new black Kia Sephia when she saw tiny white flakes floating in the air. She drove to Timmy’s Auto Wash on Dixie Highway to wash off the dots spotting her car, but the soap and water only made the white specks brighter. She called LG&E to complain, but she said the utility only offered a car wash. The paint job on the new car was ruined, Patterson said. Worse, Patterson, who grew up with symptoms of bad asthma, alleged that she ended up with pneumonia after the incident.

“Anything that sits outside is basically destroyed,” Patterson said. 

Her dad, who never drank alcohol or smoked cigarettes, died of liver cancer less than three months after his diagnosis, Patterson recalled. Her mother has dementia. Patterson works in health care, shuttling between three jobs at a local nursing home, a west end hospital, and a teaching gig at Sullivan University.

“I knew living by LG&E was a bad thing,” Patterson said. But she came back to help her family and take care of her grandmother, and she stayed.

Some neighbors who answered the door for The Margin relocated here because homes offer some of the cheapest property values in Louisville, the state’s most populous city. Alfredo Carballo opened the door to his sister’s house, where she lives with her mom and two young children. They get sick more often in this neighborhood, with cold symptoms including a cough, Carballo said. They spent months trying to sell the home but couldn’t find a buyer, so they took the house off the market.

Patricia Myers, 61, was diagnosed with small cell carcinoma, a highly aggressive form of cancer that typically originates in the lungs, last October. She’s lived in her house, bordering a chain link fence with LG&E/KU since 2008, after growing up in the neighborhood. Myers said she lost several childhood friends to cancer, but gesturing to stubbed-out cigarettes on her patio table, she said she couldn’t necessarily attribute her illness to the plant when she’s also been a longtime smoker. 

One woman, who asked not to share her name, spoke through her living room window after peeling back a lace curtain. She said the issue used to be bigger, but the state and the federal government didn’t seem to care very much anymore. Her next door neighbor, she said, died of throat cancer. 

LG&E/KU told The Margin it wasn’t familiar with these complaints.

“LG&E investigates all complaints, operates in strict compliance with operating permits including dust control plans, and strives to be a good neighbor,” Gardner wrote in an email. “We’re continually monitoring, measuring and reporting the plant’s performance to appropriate federal, state and local regulatory agencies, and we operate Mill Creek and all of our power plants under federally enforceable operating permits.”

The neighborhoods around Mill Creek suffer broader cumulative and synergistic effects of environmental injustice, according to Tony Arnold, a law professor at the University of Louisville who runs the Resilience Justice Project, an organization whose work includes a focus on the environmental and community needs around the Mill Creek watershed.

Along with the Mill Creek power plant, there’s the Kosmos Cement Plant across the street from the Mill Creek landfill, the car exhaust along Dixie Highway, and the chemical plants just north in Rubbertown. 

“A lot of communities, a lot of neighborhoods that are marginalized have fewer resources,” Arnold said. That includes a lack of information about the plant, its emissions, and the regulatory bodies that oversee it. Rollbacks on climate science at the federal level also limit research into how climate change, largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels, could impact Mill Creek’s coal ash.

“With extreme flooding, if there’s some sort of accident or unintentional release or if it’s not managed properly, there are all sorts of things that could go wrong, and the fact that we’ve already had discharges in the past tells you that things can go wrong,” Arnold said. 

In a “worst-case” flooding scenario modeled in a 2017 LG&E report, Rainbow Drive, where Hendricks’ daughter lives, could have been under five feet of contaminated water from the now-closed coal ash pond within an hour of a flood event.

IV. Cancer in coal country

Mill Creek has one active coal ash landfill, a roughly 14-story behemoth sandwiched between the Ohio River and Dixie Highway, an artery that helps connect metro Louisville to nearly 1.4 million people. The plant also houses five closed coal ash sites, including a large closed coal ash pond that borders the river and the Mill Creek watershed. Standing in the woods below the terraced rows of gravel, the chemical smell of the closed pond is inescapable. 

Both the landfill and the pond are leaking contaminants into the Ohio River and onto an industrial property south of the plant, according to a January report filed by LG&E. At least 17 out of 29 monitoring wells at Mill Creek had tests showing contaminants above federal groundwater protection standards. Arsenic, lithium and molybdenum exceeded those standards dozens of times across two testing events in April and September of 2025. Cobalt exceeded those standards twice and thallium once.The report said these contaminants weren’t likely to measurably increase concentrations in the Ohio River, where residents boat, fish, and recreate. LG&E reported and made publicly available its own monitoring data, as required under the 2015 rule, but so far no enforcement actions seem to have been taken by the federal or state government to bring the utility into compliance after its most recent report.

Arsenic, a known carcinogen found at least once at Mill Creek at levels 37 times the federal standard, exceeded the groundwater protection standard seven times last year. Lithium exceeded the threshold across at least 10 wells, sometimes measuring more than seven times the standard. Molybdenum at least tripled the groundwater protection standard seven times, exceeding the threshold across eight wells.

For many people, connecting their health concerns to coal ash is exceedingly difficult. Science shows that dozens of elements in coal ash — including arsenic, mercury, lithium, lead, selenium, and radium — can be dangerous and even deadly to humans. But tying coal ash to a specific person's ailments likely requires studies based on evidence of community or workplace exposure, according to Kristina Zierold, a public health professor at the University of Mississippi. 

And so far, little proof exists, which is largely a missed opportunity, Zierold said. While at the University of Louisville, her research focused on communities bordering Mill Creek and Cane Run Generating Station, another former coal plant owned by LG&E/KU that converted to natural gas in 2015 and then spent years closing its coal ash sites. 

Zierold began door knocking in the Cane Run and Mill Creek neighborhoods in 2012. She sent letters about her study through a mailing list of the 12-ZIP code area and slipped flyers under the windshield wipers of teachers’ cars in local schools. She took out Facebook ads and stood in store parking lots near the plants handing out information. Parents told her about learning difficulties, poor school performance, and the prevalence of ADHD among kids in their neighborhood, challenges Zierold knew were also seen in kids exposed to heavy metals. They also reported asthma and respiratory problems, along with trouble sleeping.

Shoeleather epidemiology eventually introduced Zierold and her fellow researchers to roughly 280 kids, aged 6-14 years old, and their families. They would become the participants in an almost $3 million study from the National Institutes of Health exploring how children’s neurobehavioral problems at home and school could be connected to coal ash exposure. Researchers set up devices to collect air samples in their homes, took dust samples in the children’s bedrooms and family rooms, and periodically collected nail clippings from children to test for heavy metals. 

Under a microscope, the air samples showed 43 percent of 261 kids’ homes contained cenospheres. These are glassy, spherical particles that form when minerals melt during combustion and reform in exhaust steam, according to Zierold. Those cenospheres meant coal ash was present in almost half the homes. Children with coal ash in their homes had increased levels of iron, aluminum, and silica in their nails, all contaminants found within coal ash. Zierold worked closely with a psychologist and found a relationship between coal ash exposure and elevated levels of depression and lower school performance among the kids. 

“There needs to be a ton more funding and a ton more research on this,” Zierold said. But she’s struggled to secure funding to move the research forward.  Zierold would have liked to study adults after hearing about high rates of cancer in the communities near Mill Creek and Cane Run from residents. Counties closer to coal-fired impoundments tend to have higher cancer rates, according to a 2026 spatial association analysis led by Charlie Zhang, an urban and health geographer at the University of Louisville also involved in Zierold’s research.

The map below shows the annual cancer incidence rate across the United States, measured as the number of new cancer cases per 100,000 people. Kentucky is highlighted with a red outline.

Much of Kentucky is dark red on one of the study’s maps in Zhang’s research. Kentucky is one of the top five states when it comes to the number of coal ash impoundments, and ranks highest for both cancer incidence and mortality. Those cancer rates are often attributed to social determinants like low education and high poverty rates, with high rates of tobacco-, obesity- and HPV-related cancers. Research connecting cancer to coal ash is often marginalized, according to Zhang, especially in coal country.

Coal ash, Zierold said, “affects so many people, and a lot of people don’t even know they’re being affected by it, and that’s the sad thing. It’s very sad.”

While Zierold was working on her health study, she was approached by lawyers representing a group of workers who alleged they were sickened from cleaning up the Kingston coal ash disaster across the stateline in Tennessee. The lawyers wanted Zierold for consulting, but because her research focused on kids, not adults, she declined. She called the limited research a shame.

Now, the utility in charge of the Kingston spill, the Tennessee Valley Authority, is issuing its own “scientific context” about coal ash. Angie Mummaw,  an organizer with the environmental nonprofit Appalachian Voices,attended a meeting in April about the extended retirement dates for the two coal units near the Cumberland Fossil Plant about 70 miles west of Nashville. Mummaw encountered a woman holding a booklet of TVA fact sheets who told her that the amount of molybdenum, a coal ash contaminant detected at Cumberland, was equivalent to what a person would eat in a serving of black-eyed peas; she also compared the amount of arsenic found at the plant to what a person might get from a glass of wine or a cup of hot chocolate. TVA’s fact sheets read, in part, “Coal Ash is Not Hazardous” and included the statement “the constituents of coal ash are nearly identical to common soil.”

TVA spokesperson Scott Brooks said in an email that the fact sheets referenced were developed to help advance public understanding using information and data from credible third-party sources.

“They are intended to provide scientific context about coal ash and to illustrate that many of its naturally occurring constituents are also found throughout the environment,” Brooks wrote. He said the common narrative around coal ash isn’t rooted in reality or informed by the extensive science, monitoring, and regulatory oversight that govern its management today.

V. ‘Can Kentucky do something?’

Well over one hundred people signed up to speak at the EPA’s virtual public listening session on the coal ash rollback in late May. So many that the agency had to extend the session, keeping people across the country glued to their computer screens from 9 am to 7 pm. The 141 speakers were from faith organizations, environmental groups and nursing associations. They were Tribal members, scientists, attorneys, parents and neighbors living near coal ash sites. 

Susan Wind, an activist who used to live in Lake Norman, North Carolina, spoke about the cancers children in her neighborhood were diagnosed with in a community she said was built on top of coal ash used as fill for the development. They included her daughter, who was diagnosed with thyroid cancer at 16 years old.

“The word of the day is betrayed,” said Wind. “Betrayed not just by a utility company that put profit over people, but by the very agencies sworn to protect us, you especially, the EPA.” 

She came from a state with some of the strongest regulations in the country. After the Dan River disaster in 2014, North Carolina passed the Coal Ash Management Act, going beyond federal regulations, forcing Duke Energy to excavate and close leaking coal ash sites. Michael Regan, former head of the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, helped negotiate Duke Energy’s cleanup, developed the state’s clean energy plan,and later helmed the Biden administration’s EPA. 

“We have a coal ash program that does work,” said SELC’s Torrey, who lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. “It’s the only one like it in the country.” 

A system with loosened regulations on coal ash, like what Trump’s EPA proposed, could allow utilities to pressure regulators into accepting inadequate monitoring or cleanup plans, critics say. Activists like Wind would continue devoting their lives to challenging such plans on a case-by-case basis instead of working with the federal government to protect them. States would become the new watchdog, and most states aren’t ready, let alone interested, in policing the coal industry.

Oklahoma, Georgia, Texas, North Dakota, and Wyoming have authorized state CCR permit programs, the EPA press office said in an emailed statement, and the agency has proposed approval of three other state CCR permit programs in Virginia, Louisiana, and Alabama.

The Kentucky EEC targeted September to formally file regulation changes to join these ranks, pending a comment period and public hearing.

“Can Kentucky do something? Yes, they can,” McGarvey said. “But the reality is the states, including Kentucky, do not have the resources to do this. They know it. That’s why they’re doing this. They’re trying to give coal companies and big corporations a pass so that there is going to be no accountability.” 

Back on Rainbow Drive, Hendricks stood in her front yard. 

“Are the federal rules changing on this? That’s crazy,” Hendricks said. Her neighbor, Roger Mills, a resident in his 70s, stood outside his front door, with his dog peering through the glass. 

“It’s the dirtiest place I’ve ever lived in my life,” Mills said.“It’s got to be unhealthy breathing it.” But he had little information and few resources. Mills spends his days taking care of his wife with dementia, who grew up in the house where they now live. 

While they breathed, the plant burned on.

***

Plumes form from burning coal for electricity at the Mill Creek Generating Station, the last utility-scale coal-fired power plant in Jefferson County, Kentucky. The plant operates between the banks of the Ohio River and a low-income neighborhood called Valley Station less than 15 miles southwest of downtown Louisville. The city has repeatedly failed to meet the EPA’s air quality standards for ozone, becoming one of the 25 smoggiest cities in the U.S., according to the American Lung Association’s 2026 State of the Air report.

Air pollution is a known problem for Hendricks’ community. What’s more obscure are the health risks from the waste left behind by combusted coal, known as coal ash. Proposed federal regulations coming from the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency could make finding and cleaning up that waste even more difficult.

Walking barefoot along the horseshoe of her driveway in May, Hendricks said she’s long worried over the health impacts from the plant.

People are dying of cancer left and right in this subdivision.

That waste, known as coal ash, has been dumped within at least six sites across Mill Creek’s 544-acre footprint, enough to fill more than 6,200 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Contaminants within the ash can cause cancer and other serious health effects. But for decades, coal ash was poorly regulated by the federal government. The grey sludge, often kept in place by mixing the featherlight dust with water, leached from unlined pits into groundwater, surface water, and soils. Meanwhile, dried ash took to the air and traveled for miles into the surrounding communities, landing on windowsills and migrating into children’s bedrooms. 

Coal ash contains higher concentrations of contaminants compared to the original rock. According to a January 2026 report filed by the plant’s owners, Mill Creek’s coal ash sites are leaking heavy metals like arsenic, molybdenum, and lithium. Arsenic is a known carcinogen; molybdenum can cause achy joints and lead to liver and kidney damage; and lithium is a metal associated with multiple health risks, including neurological damage. 

For decades, electric utilities avoided monitoring and cleaning up their waste. Then came a pair of disasters in 2008 and 2014 where coal ash broke from a dam at the Kingston Fossil Plant in Tennessee and a pipe at the Dan River Steam Station in North Carolina, clogging waterways and leveling homes.In 2015, President Barack Obama’s administration finally took action to protect communities from coal ash, requiring groundwater monitoring and cleanup plans. 

The industry’s own data, compiled by Earthjustice, an environmental nonprofit that has litigated numerous coal ash cases, showed that coal ash at nine out of every ten power plants polluted groundwater. In 2023, the EPA announced that cancer risks from arsenic and radiation in soils containing coal ash were high enough to require further regulation. Under President Joe Biden, the EPA doubled down, adding the protection of communities from coal ash contamination to a national priority list as one of its most critical charges. 

But the heyday of federal coal ash oversight has atrophied, and long-fought-for improvements are under threat again. Most states, including Kentucky, rarely regulate coal ash beyond permitting facilities and largely rely on federal oversight for enforcement. 

“Team Kentucky’s focus is to make sure our communities and our natural resources are protected from any adverse effects of coal ash storage. We do this by working with our utility companies and property owners, but also within the constraints of federal and state laws,” Robin Hartman, spokesperson for the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, the state agency responsible for environmental and natural resource regulatory enforcement, said in an email. 

Five days before President Donald Trump was sworn in for the second time, 10 utility executives, including the owner-operator of Mill Creek, asked Lee Zeldin, a fossil fuel evangelist and then-nominee for administrator of the EPA, in a letter to overhaul environmental laws, including nascent regulations on coal combustion residuals, a wonky name for coal ash. The last signator, John R. Crockett III, is president of Kentucky’s two companies that form the state’s largest utility, Louisville Gas and Electric Company and Kentucky Utilities Energy, LLC, or LG&E/KU.

The EPA acquiesced in April, first proposing a new rule that would allow states and utilities to bypass standing regulations for coal ash cleanup, and then reopening a case for a new permitting system that could further weaken requirements. In an emailed statement to The Margin, an EPA spokesperson described the proposed changes as “a major improvement over the Biden-era rule.” They continued, “Under the proposed new compliance pathway, permit authorities could tailor requirements to site-specific risks and incorporate advances in monitoring and corrective technologies.” 

In late June, LG&E/KU filed comments supporting those amendments, highlighting the need to delegate the federal coal ash program to state authorities, enhance flexibility for compliance options, and remove provisions for specific sites called Coal Combustion Residuals Management Units. Earlier that month, the Trump administration doubled down, announcing $700 million in taxpayer funding to keep coal alive. The budget included $124 million on upgrading three coal plants in Kentucky, which is home to eight operating coal plants, the majority of which line the Ohio River. 

“The two things are part and parcel of one another,” said Gavin Kearney, deputy managing attorney for Earthjustice’s clean energy program. “Eliminating coal ash protections is a way of helping coal plants prosper.

Now, the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, the state agency responsible for environmental and natural resource regulatory enforcement, is seeking approval to self-implement permits and efforts to clean up coal combustion residuals (CCR), another name for coal waste.   

“The EEC has been developing new regulations for (CCR) that, if approved, would protect Kentuckians’ public health, ratepayers, and the environment by enabling additional oversight from the state and allowing the cabinet to evaluate each facility individually,” Hartman said in an email. “The proposed regulation would require CCR owners to get a permit similar to those acquired by landfills and require the facility to conduct a comprehensive investigation of the structural stability, groundwater quality, and all remedies for coal ash impoundments."

Advocates warn that under new coal ash proposals, utilities could potentially close coal ash ponds that are in contact with and contaminate groundwater, which the current rule forbids, without first cleaning them up. The rollbacks also relax some monitoring requirements for cleaning up contaminated groundwater. In addition, the proposals could exempt hundreds of large piles of ash from any oversight by rolling back a 2024 rule that expanded the definition of coal ash sites. This proposal could allow state regulators to shortcut or eliminate coal ash protections, leaving citizens to challenge a utility's plans for its coal ash cleanup on a site-by-site basis. This would be a Sisyphean task. In Kentucky, there are at least 87 coal ash sites; across the country there are more than 1,000, according to Earthjustice. Experts said they estimate the weakened rules to be finalized by the end of this year. Mill Creek likely has at least three Coal Combustion Residuals Management Units (CCRMU’s), according to data collected by Earthjustice. 

Folks like Hendricks, who often had multiple jobs at a time while raising two kids and caring for ill relatives, don’t usually have time or resources to play watchdog to powerful utilities. She inherited her house from her mother, who died three years ago from lung cancer, and lives in it with her sister. Her daughter lives in a house Hendricks owns on Rainbow Drive, the last line of homes before the green lawn of the plant property begins. Most families like hers living near coal ash sites depend on federal regulators to ensure their safety from toxic and sometimes unstable ash impoundments.

LG&E told The Margin the utility would publish a report defining its CCRMU sites, in compliance with regulations, which LG&E has asked the EPA to rescind. During the licensing process for two new gas units at Mill Creek, one proposed and one under construction, LG&E disclosed the plants would be built on an old storage site for Posotech, a low-grade concrete material manufactured with coal ash, LG&E/KU spokesperson Andrew Gardner said in an email. He added, “It is likely the Mill Creek site has other CCRMU given the existing rule’s definition of CCRMU.”

Fewer than half of Kentucky’s coal ash sites are reliably monitored by the federal government. Self-reported industry data show that all but one have contamination levels above safe drinking water standards. That includes Mill Creek, where heavy metals can be found at levels triple groundwater protection standards, finding pathways to the Ohio River and off the plant’s southern edge. Regardless, LG&E plans to keep Mill Creek burning coal. 

Gardner said in an email that the utility “is properly managing the site to protect public health and the environment,” and complies with the 2015 Obama-era rule pertaining to closing impoundments, operating its landfill, monitoring groundwater, and notifying regulators about constituents of concerns and remedies.

In June, Congressman Morgan McGarvey, whose district covers Mill Creek, signed a separate letter to Zeldin asking the EPA not to weaken coal ash regulations that could expose working-class communities facing disproportionate environmental burdens to dangerous contaminants. 

“They’re not located in rich neighborhoods,” McGarvey told The Margin of coal ash sites in his state. “They are already in places where it will hurt even worse for people who have suffered from pollution and being dumped on for years and years.

II. Kentucky’s ‘deregulatory mania’

When Thomas Edison began burning coal at Pearl Street Station to illuminate households in lower Manhattan in 1882, the commercial power he created made commercial-scale waste. 

In the century and a half since, billions of tons of coal ash have been stored in landfills (when dry), ponds (when wet), and haphazard holes. Those dumps, largely unlined, often border rivers and streams, since coal plants need water to create steam and cool the generation systems. Pollutants from those sites could continue contaminating groundwater for hundreds of years, according to Nick Torrey, coal ash attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit focused on legal advocacy and environmental protection in six southern states.

It’s basically a forever problem in terms of any normal human scale.

Since the 1980s, the coal industry has found loopholes to avoid the overwhelming scope of its waste problem. After the 1976 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act was enacted, governing the disposal of waste, the 1980 Bevill Amendment granted polluters regulatory relief by classifying coal ash as a non-hazardous waste, which allowed the industry to continue to dispose of it in landfills and ponds. The EPA reaffirmed that decision in 1993 and 2000, but environmentalists have long protested this exception, arguing coal ash contains dozens of heavy metals and radiation that would qualify other materials as hazardous. 

Kentucky has long been a leader in coal power, a trend on the decline. About 67% of the state’s power grid came from coal in 2024, down from more than 90% a decade earlier. Coal power declined as natural gas became cheaper, the coal supply diminished, and the global energy market pulled away from one of the world’s dirtiest fuels. 

While there has been a reduction in coal, a rapid increase in electricity demand and a failure to quickly transition to renewable alternatives means coal continues to stick around. Last year, LG&E/KU projected its energy demand could double in the coming years, largely from data centers. Activists against data centers in Jefferson County are pushing back against LG&E/KU’s request to build more gas and extend coal, which they say will fuel projects like the 400-megawatt data center approved by Louisville regulators about 12 miles north of the plant.

The map below displays coal ash sites and data centers across Kentucky and near its border, with each site's status available by hovering over its location. The Ohio River is highlighted in red to illustrate the concentration of these sites near major waterways. The map also includes county-level census data showing the percentage of residents who identify as people of color.

Meanwhile, state lawmakers have made it exceedingly difficult to transition to cleaner sources of energy. A pair of laws passed in 2023 and 2024 made it more difficult to retire fossil-fired units and to replace fossil fuels with most renewables. Republican legislators during this year’s session proposed rolling back state environmental regulations under a bill that would make it impossible to pass state environmental laws in Kentucky that are stricter than federal laws. 

“There’s a deregulatory mania in Kentucky right now,” said Michael Washburn, executive director of the Kentucky Waterways Alliance, a nonprofit focused on protecting state waterways.

That pro-coal stance could influence older facilities like Mill Creek, which once had four coal-burning units. One retired in 2024, replaced by a gas turbine still under construction. LG&E/KU also asked the state to build a second gas turbine at Mill Creek and extend the life of the third coal unit until at least 2031. Previously, that stack was slated to retire next year. Two more could be retired in 2035, according to LG&E/KU 2024 integrated resource plan, but that decision will be reassessed in the utility’s 2027 plan. 

“We fully believe these investments are in the best interests of our customers and the communities we’re proud to serve, and they build upon our history of continuous environmental improvement initiatives and major equipment investments at Mill Creek,” Gardner wrote in an email.

Keeping coal burning will cost ratepayers, critics say. Coal generation is expensive, and so is building new gas-fired units, according to a 2025 report by the Kentucky Resources Council. The state could save electricity customers $2.6 billion by mid-century if utilities transitioned away from coal and gas to renewable energy and battery storage, according to the report, potentially reaching a 95% clean energy portfolio by 2050 without increasing costs to consumers.

Ann Gunter, a 72-year-old who moved into her home near Mill Creek in 2003, said she was told the plant would be converted to gas by 2006. More than 20 years later, she said she’s still waiting, frustrated by the soot that accumulates on her house and car. LG&E/KU told The Margin it was not familiar with these claims and was actively transitioning portions of generation on the Mill Creek site from coal to natural gas. Gardner said Mill Creek Unit 5, the first combined cycle gas plant at the site, should be operating by spring 2027.

“They keep telling us, ‘next year we’re converting to gas,’” Gunter said from her front porch, wiping dust off the railing. “And next year never comes."

III. Between Rainbow Drive and the ‘Cloud Maker’

Beneath the towering Mill Creek station, along Rainbow Drive and on surrounding streets, dogs bark. Day lilies bloom orange. Tomato and cucumber starts wait in plastic trays on the patio. Robins’ feet click on the gutters, and cardinals perch on the edge of a bird bath shaped like a sunflower. Canadian geese fly against grey clouds. 

Then a flood warning pings cell phones around the time Lauren Hollobaugh opens the front door of her home bordering a grassy beam that functions as a floodwall. The 33-year-old human resources specialist lives on nearby Tennis Boulevard, with her mother and two kids. Her family is beset by several health conditions. Her mom and son have kidney disease. Her daughter and her mother have eczema. She has sensitive skin, so exposure to chlorine or too much sun causes her to develop rashes.

The Margin knocked on more than 60 doors in May. Some residents, especially those with children, expressed concern about their proximity to Mill Creek but struggle to connect their ailments to their high-polluting neighbor beyond anecdote. However, not everyone feels the same about this neighbor. Some support coal keeping the lights on. Others are indifferent. One neighbor insisted the plant did not burn coal anymore. 

Wilbur, a Spanish-speaker from Venezuela who works night shifts as a Walmart custodian, moved here two years ago with his son and a friend. He said he worried at first, but he hadn’t noticed any health issues. Vina Duncan, a woman in her nineties who moved to the neighborhood 30 years ago from Harlan County, said nothing about the plant bothered her.

But many are worried about the risks to their health and property that living so close to the plant poses while having little insight into the federal changes afoot that could remove guardrails for the plant’s pollution. 

Burning coal produces particulate matter, tiny bits of soot that can trigger asthma and cardiovascular issues. Hendricks has suffered from allergies, and Hendricks’ neighbor, Sherry Fitz, developed allergies after moving into the neighborhood. Every morning, she said she smells chemicals. She has to dust every day. 

Fitz moved onto Betsy Ross Drive when her daughter was three years old, making her a “smokestack baby,” a nickname for the little ones who grow up in the neighborhood, Fitz said. The now 12-year-old has allergies and depression, and her 17-year-old sister lives with social anxiety. Fitz said she doesn’t interact very much with LG&E but recalled a book giveaway by the utility at Watson Lane Elementary, then her kids’ school.

“You're hurting my kids’ insides, but you’re going to give them a stupid book?” Fitz recalled thinking. That school has since closed. A second school in the area, Frost Middle School, also closed, and was later purchased by LG&E. In an email, Gardner said the purchase was to support current and future operations at Mill Creek as the utility plans to build a warehouse there to support the operational needs of Mill Creek’s gas units. 

Soot has fallen in the neighborhood, for about half a century. Marla Patterson, who grew up here, moved back in 2000, said fine black residue coated her outdoor toys as a child. She and her family have long lived in the area and, by her account, she has been significantly impacted by the plant. 

Patterson recalled that her grandparents bought one of Valley Station’s first homes back in the 1940s when the neighborhood was sparsely occupied. Years later, it became a subdivision. Patterson was born in 1967, a year before construction began on Mill Creek. After moving back, Patterson was leaving for work one morning in her brand new black Kia Sephia when she saw tiny white flakes floating in the air. She drove to Timmy’s Auto Wash on Dixie Highway to wash off the dots spotting her car, but the soap and water only made the white specks brighter. She called LG&E to complain, but she said the utility only offered a car wash. The paint job on the new car was ruined, Patterson said. Worse, Patterson, who grew up with symptoms of bad asthma, alleged that she ended up with pneumonia after the incident.

“Anything that sits outside is basically destroyed,” Patterson said. 

Her dad, who never drank alcohol or smoked cigarettes, died of liver cancer less than three months after his diagnosis, Patterson recalled. Her mother has dementia. Patterson works in health care, shuttling between three jobs at a local nursing home, a west end hospital, and a teaching gig at Sullivan University.

“I knew living by LG&E was a bad thing,” Patterson said. But she came back to help her family and take care of her grandmother, and she stayed.

Some neighbors who answered the door for The Margin relocated here because homes offer some of the cheapest property values in Louisville, the state’s most populous city. Alfredo Carballo opened the door to his sister’s house, where she lives with her mom and two young children. They get sick more often in this neighborhood, with cold symptoms including a cough, Carballo said. They spent months trying to sell the home but couldn’t find a buyer, so they took the house off the market.

Patricia Myers, 61, was diagnosed with small cell carcinoma, a highly aggressive form of cancer that typically originates in the lungs, last October. She’s lived in her house, bordering a chain link fence with LG&E/KU since 2008, after growing up in the neighborhood. Myers said she lost several childhood friends to cancer, but gesturing to stubbed-out cigarettes on her patio table, she said she couldn’t necessarily attribute her illness to the plant when she’s also been a longtime smoker. 

One woman, who asked not to share her name, spoke through her living room window after peeling back a lace curtain. She said the issue used to be bigger, but the state and the federal government didn’t seem to care very much anymore. Her next door neighbor, she said, died of throat cancer. 

LG&E/KU told The Margin it wasn’t familiar with these complaints.

“LG&E investigates all complaints, operates in strict compliance with operating permits including dust control plans, and strives to be a good neighbor,” Gardner wrote in an email. “We’re continually monitoring, measuring and reporting the plant’s performance to appropriate federal, state and local regulatory agencies, and we operate Mill Creek and all of our power plants under federally enforceable operating permits.”

The neighborhoods around Mill Creek suffer broader cumulative and synergistic effects of environmental injustice, according to Tony Arnold, a law professor at the University of Louisville who runs the Resilience Justice Project, an organization whose work includes a focus on the environmental and community needs around the Mill Creek watershed.

Along with the Mill Creek power plant, there’s the Kosmos Cement Plant across the street from the Mill Creek landfill, the car exhaust along Dixie Highway, and the chemical plants just north in Rubbertown. 

“A lot of communities, a lot of neighborhoods that are marginalized have fewer resources,” Arnold said. That includes a lack of information about the plant, its emissions, and the regulatory bodies that oversee it. Rollbacks on climate science at the federal level also limit research into how climate change, largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels, could impact Mill Creek’s coal ash.

“With extreme flooding, if there’s some sort of accident or unintentional release or if it’s not managed properly, there are all sorts of things that could go wrong, and the fact that we’ve already had discharges in the past tells you that things can go wrong,” Arnold said. 

In a “worst-case” flooding scenario modeled in a 2017 LG&E report, Rainbow Drive, where Hendricks’ daughter lives, could have been under five feet of contaminated water from the now-closed coal ash pond within an hour of a flood event.

IV. Cancer in coal country

Mill Creek has one active coal ash landfill, a roughly 14-story behemoth sandwiched between the Ohio River and Dixie Highway, an artery that helps connect metro Louisville to nearly 1.4 million people. The plant also houses five closed coal ash sites, including a large closed coal ash pond that borders the river and the Mill Creek watershed. Standing in the woods below the terraced rows of gravel, the chemical smell of the closed pond is inescapable. 

Both the landfill and the pond are leaking contaminants into the Ohio River and onto an industrial property south of the plant, according to a January report filed by LG&E. At least 17 out of 29 monitoring wells at Mill Creek had tests showing contaminants above federal groundwater protection standards. Arsenic, lithium and molybdenum exceeded those standards dozens of times across two testing events in April and September of 2025. Cobalt exceeded those standards twice and thallium once.The report said these contaminants weren’t likely to measurably increase concentrations in the Ohio River, where residents boat, fish, and recreate. LG&E reported and made publicly available its own monitoring data, as required under the 2015 rule, but so far no enforcement actions seem to have been taken by the federal or state government to bring the utility into compliance after its most recent report.

Arsenic, a known carcinogen found at least once at Mill Creek at levels 37 times the federal standard, exceeded the groundwater protection standard seven times last year. Lithium exceeded the threshold across at least 10 wells, sometimes measuring more than seven times the standard. Molybdenum at least tripled the groundwater protection standard seven times, exceeding the threshold across eight wells.

For many people, connecting their health concerns to coal ash is exceedingly difficult. Science shows that dozens of elements in coal ash — including arsenic, mercury, lithium, lead, selenium, and radium — can be dangerous and even deadly to humans. But tying coal ash to a specific person's ailments likely requires studies based on evidence of community or workplace exposure, according to Kristina Zierold, a public health professor at the University of Mississippi. 

And so far, little proof exists, which is largely a missed opportunity, Zierold said. While at the University of Louisville, her research focused on communities bordering Mill Creek and Cane Run Generating Station, another former coal plant owned by LG&E/KU that converted to natural gas in 2015 and then spent years closing its coal ash sites. 

Zierold began door knocking in the Cane Run and Mill Creek neighborhoods in 2012. She sent letters about her study through a mailing list of the 12-ZIP code area and slipped flyers under the windshield wipers of teachers’ cars in local schools. She took out Facebook ads and stood in store parking lots near the plants handing out information. Parents told her about learning difficulties, poor school performance, and the prevalence of ADHD among kids in their neighborhood, challenges Zierold knew were also seen in kids exposed to heavy metals. They also reported asthma and respiratory problems, along with trouble sleeping.

Shoeleather epidemiology eventually introduced Zierold and her fellow researchers to roughly 280 kids, aged 6-14 years old, and their families. They would become the participants in an almost $3 million study from the National Institutes of Health exploring how children’s neurobehavioral problems at home and school could be connected to coal ash exposure. Researchers set up devices to collect air samples in their homes, took dust samples in the children’s bedrooms and family rooms, and periodically collected nail clippings from children to test for heavy metals. 

Under a microscope, the air samples showed 43 percent of 261 kids’ homes contained cenospheres. These are glassy, spherical particles that form when minerals melt during combustion and reform in exhaust steam, according to Zierold. Those cenospheres meant coal ash was present in almost half the homes. Children with coal ash in their homes had increased levels of iron, aluminum, and silica in their nails, all contaminants found within coal ash. Zierold worked closely with a psychologist and found a relationship between coal ash exposure and elevated levels of depression and lower school performance among the kids. 

“There needs to be a ton more funding and a ton more research on this,” Zierold said. But she’s struggled to secure funding to move the research forward.  Zierold would have liked to study adults after hearing about high rates of cancer in the communities near Mill Creek and Cane Run from residents. Counties closer to coal-fired impoundments tend to have higher cancer rates, according to a 2026 spatial association analysis led by Charlie Zhang, an urban and health geographer at the University of Louisville also involved in Zierold’s research.

The map below shows the annual cancer incidence rate across the United States, measured as the number of new cancer cases per 100,000 people. Kentucky is highlighted with a red outline.

Much of Kentucky is dark red on one of the study’s maps in Zhang’s research. Kentucky is one of the top five states when it comes to the number of coal ash impoundments, and ranks highest for both cancer incidence and mortality. Those cancer rates are often attributed to social determinants like low education and high poverty rates, with high rates of tobacco-, obesity- and HPV-related cancers. Research connecting cancer to coal ash is often marginalized, according to Zhang, especially in coal country.

Coal ash, Zierold said, “affects so many people, and a lot of people don’t even know they’re being affected by it, and that’s the sad thing. It’s very sad.”

While Zierold was working on her health study, she was approached by lawyers representing a group of workers who alleged they were sickened from cleaning up the Kingston coal ash disaster across the stateline in Tennessee. The lawyers wanted Zierold for consulting, but because her research focused on kids, not adults, she declined. She called the limited research a shame.

Now, the utility in charge of the Kingston spill, the Tennessee Valley Authority, is issuing its own “scientific context” about coal ash. Angie Mummaw,  an organizer with the environmental nonprofit Appalachian Voices,attended a meeting in April about the extended retirement dates for the two coal units near the Cumberland Fossil Plant about 70 miles west of Nashville. Mummaw encountered a woman holding a booklet of TVA fact sheets who told her that the amount of molybdenum, a coal ash contaminant detected at Cumberland, was equivalent to what a person would eat in a serving of black-eyed peas; she also compared the amount of arsenic found at the plant to what a person might get from a glass of wine or a cup of hot chocolate. TVA’s fact sheets read, in part, “Coal Ash is Not Hazardous” and included the statement “the constituents of coal ash are nearly identical to common soil.”

TVA spokesperson Scott Brooks said in an email that the fact sheets referenced were developed to help advance public understanding using information and data from credible third-party sources.

“They are intended to provide scientific context about coal ash and to illustrate that many of its naturally occurring constituents are also found throughout the environment,” Brooks wrote. He said the common narrative around coal ash isn’t rooted in reality or informed by the extensive science, monitoring, and regulatory oversight that govern its management today.

V. ‘Can Kentucky do something?’

Well over one hundred people signed up to speak at the EPA’s virtual public listening session on the coal ash rollback in late May. So many that the agency had to extend the session, keeping people across the country glued to their computer screens from 9 am to 7 pm. The 141 speakers were from faith organizations, environmental groups and nursing associations. They were Tribal members, scientists, attorneys, parents and neighbors living near coal ash sites. 

Susan Wind, an activist who used to live in Lake Norman, North Carolina, spoke about the cancers children in her neighborhood were diagnosed with in a community she said was built on top of coal ash used as fill for the development. They included her daughter, who was diagnosed with thyroid cancer at 16 years old.

“The word of the day is betrayed,” said Wind. “Betrayed not just by a utility company that put profit over people, but by the very agencies sworn to protect us, you especially, the EPA.” 

She came from a state with some of the strongest regulations in the country. After the Dan River disaster in 2014, North Carolina passed the Coal Ash Management Act, going beyond federal regulations, forcing Duke Energy to excavate and close leaking coal ash sites. Michael Regan, former head of the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, helped negotiate Duke Energy’s cleanup, developed the state’s clean energy plan,and later helmed the Biden administration’s EPA. 

“We have a coal ash program that does work,” said SELC’s Torrey, who lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. “It’s the only one like it in the country.” 

A system with loosened regulations on coal ash, like what Trump’s EPA proposed, could allow utilities to pressure regulators into accepting inadequate monitoring or cleanup plans, critics say. Activists like Wind would continue devoting their lives to challenging such plans on a case-by-case basis instead of working with the federal government to protect them. States would become the new watchdog, and most states aren’t ready, let alone interested, in policing the coal industry.

Oklahoma, Georgia, Texas, North Dakota, and Wyoming have authorized state CCR permit programs, the EPA press office said in an emailed statement, and the agency has proposed approval of three other state CCR permit programs in Virginia, Louisiana, and Alabama.

The Kentucky EEC targeted September to formally file regulation changes to join these ranks, pending a comment period and public hearing.

“Can Kentucky do something? Yes, they can,” McGarvey said. “But the reality is the states, including Kentucky, do not have the resources to do this. They know it. That’s why they’re doing this. They’re trying to give coal companies and big corporations a pass so that there is going to be no accountability.” 

Back on Rainbow Drive, Hendricks stood in her front yard. 

“Are the federal rules changing on this? That’s crazy,” Hendricks said. Her neighbor, Roger Mills, a resident in his 70s, stood outside his front door, with his dog peering through the glass. 

“It’s the dirtiest place I’ve ever lived in my life,” Mills said.“It’s got to be unhealthy breathing it.” But he had little information and few resources. Mills spends his days taking care of his wife with dementia, who grew up in the house where they now live. 

While they breathed, the plant burned on.

***

Plumes form from burning coal for electricity at the Mill Creek Generating Station, the last utility-scale coal-fired power plant in Jefferson County, Kentucky. The plant operates between the banks of the Ohio River and a low-income neighborhood called Valley Station less than 15 miles southwest of downtown Louisville. The city has repeatedly failed to meet the EPA’s air quality standards for ozone, becoming one of the 25 smoggiest cities in the U.S., according to the American Lung Association’s 2026 State of the Air report.

Air pollution is a known problem for Hendricks’ community. What’s more obscure are the health risks from the waste left behind by combusted coal, known as coal ash. Proposed federal regulations coming from the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency could make finding and cleaning up that waste even more difficult.

Walking barefoot along the horseshoe of her driveway in May, Hendricks said she’s long worried over the health impacts from the plant.

People are dying of cancer left and right in this subdivision.

That waste, known as coal ash, has been dumped within at least six sites across Mill Creek’s 544-acre footprint, enough to fill more than 6,200 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Contaminants within the ash can cause cancer and other serious health effects. But for decades, coal ash was poorly regulated by the federal government. The grey sludge, often kept in place by mixing the featherlight dust with water, leached from unlined pits into groundwater, surface water, and soils. Meanwhile, dried ash took to the air and traveled for miles into the surrounding communities, landing on windowsills and migrating into children’s bedrooms. 

Coal ash contains higher concentrations of contaminants compared to the original rock. According to a January 2026 report filed by the plant’s owners, Mill Creek’s coal ash sites are leaking heavy metals like arsenic, molybdenum, and lithium. Arsenic is a known carcinogen; molybdenum can cause achy joints and lead to liver and kidney damage; and lithium is a metal associated with multiple health risks, including neurological damage. 

For decades, electric utilities avoided monitoring and cleaning up their waste. Then came a pair of disasters in 2008 and 2014 where coal ash broke from a dam at the Kingston Fossil Plant in Tennessee and a pipe at the Dan River Steam Station in North Carolina, clogging waterways and leveling homes.In 2015, President Barack Obama’s administration finally took action to protect communities from coal ash, requiring groundwater monitoring and cleanup plans. 

The industry’s own data, compiled by Earthjustice, an environmental nonprofit that has litigated numerous coal ash cases, showed that coal ash at nine out of every ten power plants polluted groundwater. In 2023, the EPA announced that cancer risks from arsenic and radiation in soils containing coal ash were high enough to require further regulation. Under President Joe Biden, the EPA doubled down, adding the protection of communities from coal ash contamination to a national priority list as one of its most critical charges. 

But the heyday of federal coal ash oversight has atrophied, and long-fought-for improvements are under threat again. Most states, including Kentucky, rarely regulate coal ash beyond permitting facilities and largely rely on federal oversight for enforcement. 

“Team Kentucky’s focus is to make sure our communities and our natural resources are protected from any adverse effects of coal ash storage. We do this by working with our utility companies and property owners, but also within the constraints of federal and state laws,” Robin Hartman, spokesperson for the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, the state agency responsible for environmental and natural resource regulatory enforcement, said in an email. 

Five days before President Donald Trump was sworn in for the second time, 10 utility executives, including the owner-operator of Mill Creek, asked Lee Zeldin, a fossil fuel evangelist and then-nominee for administrator of the EPA, in a letter to overhaul environmental laws, including nascent regulations on coal combustion residuals, a wonky name for coal ash. The last signator, John R. Crockett III, is president of Kentucky’s two companies that form the state’s largest utility, Louisville Gas and Electric Company and Kentucky Utilities Energy, LLC, or LG&E/KU.

The EPA acquiesced in April, first proposing a new rule that would allow states and utilities to bypass standing regulations for coal ash cleanup, and then reopening a case for a new permitting system that could further weaken requirements. In an emailed statement to The Margin, an EPA spokesperson described the proposed changes as “a major improvement over the Biden-era rule.” They continued, “Under the proposed new compliance pathway, permit authorities could tailor requirements to site-specific risks and incorporate advances in monitoring and corrective technologies.” 

In late June, LG&E/KU filed comments supporting those amendments, highlighting the need to delegate the federal coal ash program to state authorities, enhance flexibility for compliance options, and remove provisions for specific sites called Coal Combustion Residuals Management Units. Earlier that month, the Trump administration doubled down, announcing $700 million in taxpayer funding to keep coal alive. The budget included $124 million on upgrading three coal plants in Kentucky, which is home to eight operating coal plants, the majority of which line the Ohio River. 

“The two things are part and parcel of one another,” said Gavin Kearney, deputy managing attorney for Earthjustice’s clean energy program. “Eliminating coal ash protections is a way of helping coal plants prosper.

Now, the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, the state agency responsible for environmental and natural resource regulatory enforcement, is seeking approval to self-implement permits and efforts to clean up coal combustion residuals (CCR), another name for coal waste.   

“The EEC has been developing new regulations for (CCR) that, if approved, would protect Kentuckians’ public health, ratepayers, and the environment by enabling additional oversight from the state and allowing the cabinet to evaluate each facility individually,” Hartman said in an email. “The proposed regulation would require CCR owners to get a permit similar to those acquired by landfills and require the facility to conduct a comprehensive investigation of the structural stability, groundwater quality, and all remedies for coal ash impoundments."

Advocates warn that under new coal ash proposals, utilities could potentially close coal ash ponds that are in contact with and contaminate groundwater, which the current rule forbids, without first cleaning them up. The rollbacks also relax some monitoring requirements for cleaning up contaminated groundwater. In addition, the proposals could exempt hundreds of large piles of ash from any oversight by rolling back a 2024 rule that expanded the definition of coal ash sites. This proposal could allow state regulators to shortcut or eliminate coal ash protections, leaving citizens to challenge a utility's plans for its coal ash cleanup on a site-by-site basis. This would be a Sisyphean task. In Kentucky, there are at least 87 coal ash sites; across the country there are more than 1,000, according to Earthjustice. Experts said they estimate the weakened rules to be finalized by the end of this year. Mill Creek likely has at least three Coal Combustion Residuals Management Units (CCRMU’s), according to data collected by Earthjustice. 

Folks like Hendricks, who often had multiple jobs at a time while raising two kids and caring for ill relatives, don’t usually have time or resources to play watchdog to powerful utilities. She inherited her house from her mother, who died three years ago from lung cancer, and lives in it with her sister. Her daughter lives in a house Hendricks owns on Rainbow Drive, the last line of homes before the green lawn of the plant property begins. Most families like hers living near coal ash sites depend on federal regulators to ensure their safety from toxic and sometimes unstable ash impoundments.

LG&E told The Margin the utility would publish a report defining its CCRMU sites, in compliance with regulations, which LG&E has asked the EPA to rescind. During the licensing process for two new gas units at Mill Creek, one proposed and one under construction, LG&E disclosed the plants would be built on an old storage site for Posotech, a low-grade concrete material manufactured with coal ash, LG&E/KU spokesperson Andrew Gardner said in an email. He added, “It is likely the Mill Creek site has other CCRMU given the existing rule’s definition of CCRMU.”

Fewer than half of Kentucky’s coal ash sites are reliably monitored by the federal government. Self-reported industry data show that all but one have contamination levels above safe drinking water standards. That includes Mill Creek, where heavy metals can be found at levels triple groundwater protection standards, finding pathways to the Ohio River and off the plant’s southern edge. Regardless, LG&E plans to keep Mill Creek burning coal. 

Gardner said in an email that the utility “is properly managing the site to protect public health and the environment,” and complies with the 2015 Obama-era rule pertaining to closing impoundments, operating its landfill, monitoring groundwater, and notifying regulators about constituents of concerns and remedies.

In June, Congressman Morgan McGarvey, whose district covers Mill Creek, signed a separate letter to Zeldin asking the EPA not to weaken coal ash regulations that could expose working-class communities facing disproportionate environmental burdens to dangerous contaminants. 

“They’re not located in rich neighborhoods,” McGarvey told The Margin of coal ash sites in his state. “They are already in places where it will hurt even worse for people who have suffered from pollution and being dumped on for years and years.

II. Kentucky’s ‘deregulatory mania’

When Thomas Edison began burning coal at Pearl Street Station to illuminate households in lower Manhattan in 1882, the commercial power he created made commercial-scale waste. 

In the century and a half since, billions of tons of coal ash have been stored in landfills (when dry), ponds (when wet), and haphazard holes. Those dumps, largely unlined, often border rivers and streams, since coal plants need water to create steam and cool the generation systems. Pollutants from those sites could continue contaminating groundwater for hundreds of years, according to Nick Torrey, coal ash attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit focused on legal advocacy and environmental protection in six southern states.

It’s basically a forever problem in terms of any normal human scale.

Since the 1980s, the coal industry has found loopholes to avoid the overwhelming scope of its waste problem. After the 1976 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act was enacted, governing the disposal of waste, the 1980 Bevill Amendment granted polluters regulatory relief by classifying coal ash as a non-hazardous waste, which allowed the industry to continue to dispose of it in landfills and ponds. The EPA reaffirmed that decision in 1993 and 2000, but environmentalists have long protested this exception, arguing coal ash contains dozens of heavy metals and radiation that would qualify other materials as hazardous. 

Kentucky has long been a leader in coal power, a trend on the decline. About 67% of the state’s power grid came from coal in 2024, down from more than 90% a decade earlier. Coal power declined as natural gas became cheaper, the coal supply diminished, and the global energy market pulled away from one of the world’s dirtiest fuels. 

While there has been a reduction in coal, a rapid increase in electricity demand and a failure to quickly transition to renewable alternatives means coal continues to stick around. Last year, LG&E/KU projected its energy demand could double in the coming years, largely from data centers. Activists against data centers in Jefferson County are pushing back against LG&E/KU’s request to build more gas and extend coal, which they say will fuel projects like the 400-megawatt data center approved by Louisville regulators about 12 miles north of the plant.

The map below displays coal ash sites and data centers across Kentucky and near its border, with each site's status available by hovering over its location. The Ohio River is highlighted in red to illustrate the concentration of these sites near major waterways. The map also includes county-level census data showing the percentage of residents who identify as people of color.

Meanwhile, state lawmakers have made it exceedingly difficult to transition to cleaner sources of energy. A pair of laws passed in 2023 and 2024 made it more difficult to retire fossil-fired units and to replace fossil fuels with most renewables. Republican legislators during this year’s session proposed rolling back state environmental regulations under a bill that would make it impossible to pass state environmental laws in Kentucky that are stricter than federal laws. 

“There’s a deregulatory mania in Kentucky right now,” said Michael Washburn, executive director of the Kentucky Waterways Alliance, a nonprofit focused on protecting state waterways.

That pro-coal stance could influence older facilities like Mill Creek, which once had four coal-burning units. One retired in 2024, replaced by a gas turbine still under construction. LG&E/KU also asked the state to build a second gas turbine at Mill Creek and extend the life of the third coal unit until at least 2031. Previously, that stack was slated to retire next year. Two more could be retired in 2035, according to LG&E/KU 2024 integrated resource plan, but that decision will be reassessed in the utility’s 2027 plan. 

“We fully believe these investments are in the best interests of our customers and the communities we’re proud to serve, and they build upon our history of continuous environmental improvement initiatives and major equipment investments at Mill Creek,” Gardner wrote in an email.

Keeping coal burning will cost ratepayers, critics say. Coal generation is expensive, and so is building new gas-fired units, according to a 2025 report by the Kentucky Resources Council. The state could save electricity customers $2.6 billion by mid-century if utilities transitioned away from coal and gas to renewable energy and battery storage, according to the report, potentially reaching a 95% clean energy portfolio by 2050 without increasing costs to consumers.

Ann Gunter, a 72-year-old who moved into her home near Mill Creek in 2003, said she was told the plant would be converted to gas by 2006. More than 20 years later, she said she’s still waiting, frustrated by the soot that accumulates on her house and car. LG&E/KU told The Margin it was not familiar with these claims and was actively transitioning portions of generation on the Mill Creek site from coal to natural gas. Gardner said Mill Creek Unit 5, the first combined cycle gas plant at the site, should be operating by spring 2027.

“They keep telling us, ‘next year we’re converting to gas,’” Gunter said from her front porch, wiping dust off the railing. “And next year never comes."

III. Between Rainbow Drive and the ‘Cloud Maker’

Beneath the towering Mill Creek station, along Rainbow Drive and on surrounding streets, dogs bark. Day lilies bloom orange. Tomato and cucumber starts wait in plastic trays on the patio. Robins’ feet click on the gutters, and cardinals perch on the edge of a bird bath shaped like a sunflower. Canadian geese fly against grey clouds. 

Then a flood warning pings cell phones around the time Lauren Hollobaugh opens the front door of her home bordering a grassy beam that functions as a floodwall. The 33-year-old human resources specialist lives on nearby Tennis Boulevard, with her mother and two kids. Her family is beset by several health conditions. Her mom and son have kidney disease. Her daughter and her mother have eczema. She has sensitive skin, so exposure to chlorine or too much sun causes her to develop rashes.

The Margin knocked on more than 60 doors in May. Some residents, especially those with children, expressed concern about their proximity to Mill Creek but struggle to connect their ailments to their high-polluting neighbor beyond anecdote. However, not everyone feels the same about this neighbor. Some support coal keeping the lights on. Others are indifferent. One neighbor insisted the plant did not burn coal anymore. 

Wilbur, a Spanish-speaker from Venezuela who works night shifts as a Walmart custodian, moved here two years ago with his son and a friend. He said he worried at first, but he hadn’t noticed any health issues. Vina Duncan, a woman in her nineties who moved to the neighborhood 30 years ago from Harlan County, said nothing about the plant bothered her.

But many are worried about the risks to their health and property that living so close to the plant poses while having little insight into the federal changes afoot that could remove guardrails for the plant’s pollution. 

Burning coal produces particulate matter, tiny bits of soot that can trigger asthma and cardiovascular issues. Hendricks has suffered from allergies, and Hendricks’ neighbor, Sherry Fitz, developed allergies after moving into the neighborhood. Every morning, she said she smells chemicals. She has to dust every day. 

Fitz moved onto Betsy Ross Drive when her daughter was three years old, making her a “smokestack baby,” a nickname for the little ones who grow up in the neighborhood, Fitz said. The now 12-year-old has allergies and depression, and her 17-year-old sister lives with social anxiety. Fitz said she doesn’t interact very much with LG&E but recalled a book giveaway by the utility at Watson Lane Elementary, then her kids’ school.

“You're hurting my kids’ insides, but you’re going to give them a stupid book?” Fitz recalled thinking. That school has since closed. A second school in the area, Frost Middle School, also closed, and was later purchased by LG&E. In an email, Gardner said the purchase was to support current and future operations at Mill Creek as the utility plans to build a warehouse there to support the operational needs of Mill Creek’s gas units. 

Soot has fallen in the neighborhood, for about half a century. Marla Patterson, who grew up here, moved back in 2000, said fine black residue coated her outdoor toys as a child. She and her family have long lived in the area and, by her account, she has been significantly impacted by the plant. 

Patterson recalled that her grandparents bought one of Valley Station’s first homes back in the 1940s when the neighborhood was sparsely occupied. Years later, it became a subdivision. Patterson was born in 1967, a year before construction began on Mill Creek. After moving back, Patterson was leaving for work one morning in her brand new black Kia Sephia when she saw tiny white flakes floating in the air. She drove to Timmy’s Auto Wash on Dixie Highway to wash off the dots spotting her car, but the soap and water only made the white specks brighter. She called LG&E to complain, but she said the utility only offered a car wash. The paint job on the new car was ruined, Patterson said. Worse, Patterson, who grew up with symptoms of bad asthma, alleged that she ended up with pneumonia after the incident.

“Anything that sits outside is basically destroyed,” Patterson said. 

Her dad, who never drank alcohol or smoked cigarettes, died of liver cancer less than three months after his diagnosis, Patterson recalled. Her mother has dementia. Patterson works in health care, shuttling between three jobs at a local nursing home, a west end hospital, and a teaching gig at Sullivan University.

“I knew living by LG&E was a bad thing,” Patterson said. But she came back to help her family and take care of her grandmother, and she stayed.

Some neighbors who answered the door for The Margin relocated here because homes offer some of the cheapest property values in Louisville, the state’s most populous city. Alfredo Carballo opened the door to his sister’s house, where she lives with her mom and two young children. They get sick more often in this neighborhood, with cold symptoms including a cough, Carballo said. They spent months trying to sell the home but couldn’t find a buyer, so they took the house off the market.

Patricia Myers, 61, was diagnosed with small cell carcinoma, a highly aggressive form of cancer that typically originates in the lungs, last October. She’s lived in her house, bordering a chain link fence with LG&E/KU since 2008, after growing up in the neighborhood. Myers said she lost several childhood friends to cancer, but gesturing to stubbed-out cigarettes on her patio table, she said she couldn’t necessarily attribute her illness to the plant when she’s also been a longtime smoker. 

One woman, who asked not to share her name, spoke through her living room window after peeling back a lace curtain. She said the issue used to be bigger, but the state and the federal government didn’t seem to care very much anymore. Her next door neighbor, she said, died of throat cancer. 

LG&E/KU told The Margin it wasn’t familiar with these complaints.

“LG&E investigates all complaints, operates in strict compliance with operating permits including dust control plans, and strives to be a good neighbor,” Gardner wrote in an email. “We’re continually monitoring, measuring and reporting the plant’s performance to appropriate federal, state and local regulatory agencies, and we operate Mill Creek and all of our power plants under federally enforceable operating permits.”

The neighborhoods around Mill Creek suffer broader cumulative and synergistic effects of environmental injustice, according to Tony Arnold, a law professor at the University of Louisville who runs the Resilience Justice Project, an organization whose work includes a focus on the environmental and community needs around the Mill Creek watershed.

Along with the Mill Creek power plant, there’s the Kosmos Cement Plant across the street from the Mill Creek landfill, the car exhaust along Dixie Highway, and the chemical plants just north in Rubbertown. 

“A lot of communities, a lot of neighborhoods that are marginalized have fewer resources,” Arnold said. That includes a lack of information about the plant, its emissions, and the regulatory bodies that oversee it. Rollbacks on climate science at the federal level also limit research into how climate change, largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels, could impact Mill Creek’s coal ash.

“With extreme flooding, if there’s some sort of accident or unintentional release or if it’s not managed properly, there are all sorts of things that could go wrong, and the fact that we’ve already had discharges in the past tells you that things can go wrong,” Arnold said. 

In a “worst-case” flooding scenario modeled in a 2017 LG&E report, Rainbow Drive, where Hendricks’ daughter lives, could have been under five feet of contaminated water from the now-closed coal ash pond within an hour of a flood event.

IV. Cancer in coal country

Mill Creek has one active coal ash landfill, a roughly 14-story behemoth sandwiched between the Ohio River and Dixie Highway, an artery that helps connect metro Louisville to nearly 1.4 million people. The plant also houses five closed coal ash sites, including a large closed coal ash pond that borders the river and the Mill Creek watershed. Standing in the woods below the terraced rows of gravel, the chemical smell of the closed pond is inescapable. 

Both the landfill and the pond are leaking contaminants into the Ohio River and onto an industrial property south of the plant, according to a January report filed by LG&E. At least 17 out of 29 monitoring wells at Mill Creek had tests showing contaminants above federal groundwater protection standards. Arsenic, lithium and molybdenum exceeded those standards dozens of times across two testing events in April and September of 2025. Cobalt exceeded those standards twice and thallium once.The report said these contaminants weren’t likely to measurably increase concentrations in the Ohio River, where residents boat, fish, and recreate. LG&E reported and made publicly available its own monitoring data, as required under the 2015 rule, but so far no enforcement actions seem to have been taken by the federal or state government to bring the utility into compliance after its most recent report.

Arsenic, a known carcinogen found at least once at Mill Creek at levels 37 times the federal standard, exceeded the groundwater protection standard seven times last year. Lithium exceeded the threshold across at least 10 wells, sometimes measuring more than seven times the standard. Molybdenum at least tripled the groundwater protection standard seven times, exceeding the threshold across eight wells.

For many people, connecting their health concerns to coal ash is exceedingly difficult. Science shows that dozens of elements in coal ash — including arsenic, mercury, lithium, lead, selenium, and radium — can be dangerous and even deadly to humans. But tying coal ash to a specific person's ailments likely requires studies based on evidence of community or workplace exposure, according to Kristina Zierold, a public health professor at the University of Mississippi. 

And so far, little proof exists, which is largely a missed opportunity, Zierold said. While at the University of Louisville, her research focused on communities bordering Mill Creek and Cane Run Generating Station, another former coal plant owned by LG&E/KU that converted to natural gas in 2015 and then spent years closing its coal ash sites. 

Zierold began door knocking in the Cane Run and Mill Creek neighborhoods in 2012. She sent letters about her study through a mailing list of the 12-ZIP code area and slipped flyers under the windshield wipers of teachers’ cars in local schools. She took out Facebook ads and stood in store parking lots near the plants handing out information. Parents told her about learning difficulties, poor school performance, and the prevalence of ADHD among kids in their neighborhood, challenges Zierold knew were also seen in kids exposed to heavy metals. They also reported asthma and respiratory problems, along with trouble sleeping.

Shoeleather epidemiology eventually introduced Zierold and her fellow researchers to roughly 280 kids, aged 6-14 years old, and their families. They would become the participants in an almost $3 million study from the National Institutes of Health exploring how children’s neurobehavioral problems at home and school could be connected to coal ash exposure. Researchers set up devices to collect air samples in their homes, took dust samples in the children’s bedrooms and family rooms, and periodically collected nail clippings from children to test for heavy metals. 

Under a microscope, the air samples showed 43 percent of 261 kids’ homes contained cenospheres. These are glassy, spherical particles that form when minerals melt during combustion and reform in exhaust steam, according to Zierold. Those cenospheres meant coal ash was present in almost half the homes. Children with coal ash in their homes had increased levels of iron, aluminum, and silica in their nails, all contaminants found within coal ash. Zierold worked closely with a psychologist and found a relationship between coal ash exposure and elevated levels of depression and lower school performance among the kids. 

“There needs to be a ton more funding and a ton more research on this,” Zierold said. But she’s struggled to secure funding to move the research forward.  Zierold would have liked to study adults after hearing about high rates of cancer in the communities near Mill Creek and Cane Run from residents. Counties closer to coal-fired impoundments tend to have higher cancer rates, according to a 2026 spatial association analysis led by Charlie Zhang, an urban and health geographer at the University of Louisville also involved in Zierold’s research.

The map below shows the annual cancer incidence rate across the United States, measured as the number of new cancer cases per 100,000 people. Kentucky is highlighted with a red outline.

Much of Kentucky is dark red on one of the study’s maps in Zhang’s research. Kentucky is one of the top five states when it comes to the number of coal ash impoundments, and ranks highest for both cancer incidence and mortality. Those cancer rates are often attributed to social determinants like low education and high poverty rates, with high rates of tobacco-, obesity- and HPV-related cancers. Research connecting cancer to coal ash is often marginalized, according to Zhang, especially in coal country.

Coal ash, Zierold said, “affects so many people, and a lot of people don’t even know they’re being affected by it, and that’s the sad thing. It’s very sad.”

While Zierold was working on her health study, she was approached by lawyers representing a group of workers who alleged they were sickened from cleaning up the Kingston coal ash disaster across the stateline in Tennessee. The lawyers wanted Zierold for consulting, but because her research focused on kids, not adults, she declined. She called the limited research a shame.

Now, the utility in charge of the Kingston spill, the Tennessee Valley Authority, is issuing its own “scientific context” about coal ash. Angie Mummaw,  an organizer with the environmental nonprofit Appalachian Voices,attended a meeting in April about the extended retirement dates for the two coal units near the Cumberland Fossil Plant about 70 miles west of Nashville. Mummaw encountered a woman holding a booklet of TVA fact sheets who told her that the amount of molybdenum, a coal ash contaminant detected at Cumberland, was equivalent to what a person would eat in a serving of black-eyed peas; she also compared the amount of arsenic found at the plant to what a person might get from a glass of wine or a cup of hot chocolate. TVA’s fact sheets read, in part, “Coal Ash is Not Hazardous” and included the statement “the constituents of coal ash are nearly identical to common soil.”

TVA spokesperson Scott Brooks said in an email that the fact sheets referenced were developed to help advance public understanding using information and data from credible third-party sources.

“They are intended to provide scientific context about coal ash and to illustrate that many of its naturally occurring constituents are also found throughout the environment,” Brooks wrote. He said the common narrative around coal ash isn’t rooted in reality or informed by the extensive science, monitoring, and regulatory oversight that govern its management today.

V. ‘Can Kentucky do something?’

Well over one hundred people signed up to speak at the EPA’s virtual public listening session on the coal ash rollback in late May. So many that the agency had to extend the session, keeping people across the country glued to their computer screens from 9 am to 7 pm. The 141 speakers were from faith organizations, environmental groups and nursing associations. They were Tribal members, scientists, attorneys, parents and neighbors living near coal ash sites. 

Susan Wind, an activist who used to live in Lake Norman, North Carolina, spoke about the cancers children in her neighborhood were diagnosed with in a community she said was built on top of coal ash used as fill for the development. They included her daughter, who was diagnosed with thyroid cancer at 16 years old.

“The word of the day is betrayed,” said Wind. “Betrayed not just by a utility company that put profit over people, but by the very agencies sworn to protect us, you especially, the EPA.” 

She came from a state with some of the strongest regulations in the country. After the Dan River disaster in 2014, North Carolina passed the Coal Ash Management Act, going beyond federal regulations, forcing Duke Energy to excavate and close leaking coal ash sites. Michael Regan, former head of the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, helped negotiate Duke Energy’s cleanup, developed the state’s clean energy plan,and later helmed the Biden administration’s EPA. 

“We have a coal ash program that does work,” said SELC’s Torrey, who lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. “It’s the only one like it in the country.” 

A system with loosened regulations on coal ash, like what Trump’s EPA proposed, could allow utilities to pressure regulators into accepting inadequate monitoring or cleanup plans, critics say. Activists like Wind would continue devoting their lives to challenging such plans on a case-by-case basis instead of working with the federal government to protect them. States would become the new watchdog, and most states aren’t ready, let alone interested, in policing the coal industry.

Oklahoma, Georgia, Texas, North Dakota, and Wyoming have authorized state CCR permit programs, the EPA press office said in an emailed statement, and the agency has proposed approval of three other state CCR permit programs in Virginia, Louisiana, and Alabama.

The Kentucky EEC targeted September to formally file regulation changes to join these ranks, pending a comment period and public hearing.

“Can Kentucky do something? Yes, they can,” McGarvey said. “But the reality is the states, including Kentucky, do not have the resources to do this. They know it. That’s why they’re doing this. They’re trying to give coal companies and big corporations a pass so that there is going to be no accountability.” 

Back on Rainbow Drive, Hendricks stood in her front yard. 

“Are the federal rules changing on this? That’s crazy,” Hendricks said. Her neighbor, Roger Mills, a resident in his 70s, stood outside his front door, with his dog peering through the glass. 

“It’s the dirtiest place I’ve ever lived in my life,” Mills said.“It’s got to be unhealthy breathing it.” But he had little information and few resources. Mills spends his days taking care of his wife with dementia, who grew up in the house where they now live. 

While they breathed, the plant burned on.

***

Plumes form from burning coal for electricity at the Mill Creek Generating Station, the last utility-scale coal-fired power plant in Jefferson County, Kentucky. The plant operates between the banks of the Ohio River and a low-income neighborhood called Valley Station less than 15 miles southwest of downtown Louisville. The city has repeatedly failed to meet the EPA’s air quality standards for ozone, becoming one of the 25 smoggiest cities in the U.S., according to the American Lung Association’s 2026 State of the Air report.

Air pollution is a known problem for Hendricks’ community. What’s more obscure are the health risks from the waste left behind by combusted coal, known as coal ash. Proposed federal regulations coming from the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency could make finding and cleaning up that waste even more difficult.

Walking barefoot along the horseshoe of her driveway in May, Hendricks said she’s long worried over the health impacts from the plant.

People are dying of cancer left and right in this subdivision.

That waste, known as coal ash, has been dumped within at least six sites across Mill Creek’s 544-acre footprint, enough to fill more than 6,200 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Contaminants within the ash can cause cancer and other serious health effects. But for decades, coal ash was poorly regulated by the federal government. The grey sludge, often kept in place by mixing the featherlight dust with water, leached from unlined pits into groundwater, surface water, and soils. Meanwhile, dried ash took to the air and traveled for miles into the surrounding communities, landing on windowsills and migrating into children’s bedrooms. 

Coal ash contains higher concentrations of contaminants compared to the original rock. According to a January 2026 report filed by the plant’s owners, Mill Creek’s coal ash sites are leaking heavy metals like arsenic, molybdenum, and lithium. Arsenic is a known carcinogen; molybdenum can cause achy joints and lead to liver and kidney damage; and lithium is a metal associated with multiple health risks, including neurological damage. 

For decades, electric utilities avoided monitoring and cleaning up their waste. Then came a pair of disasters in 2008 and 2014 where coal ash broke from a dam at the Kingston Fossil Plant in Tennessee and a pipe at the Dan River Steam Station in North Carolina, clogging waterways and leveling homes.In 2015, President Barack Obama’s administration finally took action to protect communities from coal ash, requiring groundwater monitoring and cleanup plans. 

The industry’s own data, compiled by Earthjustice, an environmental nonprofit that has litigated numerous coal ash cases, showed that coal ash at nine out of every ten power plants polluted groundwater. In 2023, the EPA announced that cancer risks from arsenic and radiation in soils containing coal ash were high enough to require further regulation. Under President Joe Biden, the EPA doubled down, adding the protection of communities from coal ash contamination to a national priority list as one of its most critical charges. 

But the heyday of federal coal ash oversight has atrophied, and long-fought-for improvements are under threat again. Most states, including Kentucky, rarely regulate coal ash beyond permitting facilities and largely rely on federal oversight for enforcement. 

“Team Kentucky’s focus is to make sure our communities and our natural resources are protected from any adverse effects of coal ash storage. We do this by working with our utility companies and property owners, but also within the constraints of federal and state laws,” Robin Hartman, spokesperson for the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, the state agency responsible for environmental and natural resource regulatory enforcement, said in an email. 

Five days before President Donald Trump was sworn in for the second time, 10 utility executives, including the owner-operator of Mill Creek, asked Lee Zeldin, a fossil fuel evangelist and then-nominee for administrator of the EPA, in a letter to overhaul environmental laws, including nascent regulations on coal combustion residuals, a wonky name for coal ash. The last signator, John R. Crockett III, is president of Kentucky’s two companies that form the state’s largest utility, Louisville Gas and Electric Company and Kentucky Utilities Energy, LLC, or LG&E/KU.

The EPA acquiesced in April, first proposing a new rule that would allow states and utilities to bypass standing regulations for coal ash cleanup, and then reopening a case for a new permitting system that could further weaken requirements. In an emailed statement to The Margin, an EPA spokesperson described the proposed changes as “a major improvement over the Biden-era rule.” They continued, “Under the proposed new compliance pathway, permit authorities could tailor requirements to site-specific risks and incorporate advances in monitoring and corrective technologies.” 

In late June, LG&E/KU filed comments supporting those amendments, highlighting the need to delegate the federal coal ash program to state authorities, enhance flexibility for compliance options, and remove provisions for specific sites called Coal Combustion Residuals Management Units. Earlier that month, the Trump administration doubled down, announcing $700 million in taxpayer funding to keep coal alive. The budget included $124 million on upgrading three coal plants in Kentucky, which is home to eight operating coal plants, the majority of which line the Ohio River. 

“The two things are part and parcel of one another,” said Gavin Kearney, deputy managing attorney for Earthjustice’s clean energy program. “Eliminating coal ash protections is a way of helping coal plants prosper.

Now, the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, the state agency responsible for environmental and natural resource regulatory enforcement, is seeking approval to self-implement permits and efforts to clean up coal combustion residuals (CCR), another name for coal waste.   

“The EEC has been developing new regulations for (CCR) that, if approved, would protect Kentuckians’ public health, ratepayers, and the environment by enabling additional oversight from the state and allowing the cabinet to evaluate each facility individually,” Hartman said in an email. “The proposed regulation would require CCR owners to get a permit similar to those acquired by landfills and require the facility to conduct a comprehensive investigation of the structural stability, groundwater quality, and all remedies for coal ash impoundments."

Advocates warn that under new coal ash proposals, utilities could potentially close coal ash ponds that are in contact with and contaminate groundwater, which the current rule forbids, without first cleaning them up. The rollbacks also relax some monitoring requirements for cleaning up contaminated groundwater. In addition, the proposals could exempt hundreds of large piles of ash from any oversight by rolling back a 2024 rule that expanded the definition of coal ash sites. This proposal could allow state regulators to shortcut or eliminate coal ash protections, leaving citizens to challenge a utility's plans for its coal ash cleanup on a site-by-site basis. This would be a Sisyphean task. In Kentucky, there are at least 87 coal ash sites; across the country there are more than 1,000, according to Earthjustice. Experts said they estimate the weakened rules to be finalized by the end of this year. Mill Creek likely has at least three Coal Combustion Residuals Management Units (CCRMU’s), according to data collected by Earthjustice. 

Folks like Hendricks, who often had multiple jobs at a time while raising two kids and caring for ill relatives, don’t usually have time or resources to play watchdog to powerful utilities. She inherited her house from her mother, who died three years ago from lung cancer, and lives in it with her sister. Her daughter lives in a house Hendricks owns on Rainbow Drive, the last line of homes before the green lawn of the plant property begins. Most families like hers living near coal ash sites depend on federal regulators to ensure their safety from toxic and sometimes unstable ash impoundments.

LG&E told The Margin the utility would publish a report defining its CCRMU sites, in compliance with regulations, which LG&E has asked the EPA to rescind. During the licensing process for two new gas units at Mill Creek, one proposed and one under construction, LG&E disclosed the plants would be built on an old storage site for Posotech, a low-grade concrete material manufactured with coal ash, LG&E/KU spokesperson Andrew Gardner said in an email. He added, “It is likely the Mill Creek site has other CCRMU given the existing rule’s definition of CCRMU.”

Fewer than half of Kentucky’s coal ash sites are reliably monitored by the federal government. Self-reported industry data show that all but one have contamination levels above safe drinking water standards. That includes Mill Creek, where heavy metals can be found at levels triple groundwater protection standards, finding pathways to the Ohio River and off the plant’s southern edge. Regardless, LG&E plans to keep Mill Creek burning coal. 

Gardner said in an email that the utility “is properly managing the site to protect public health and the environment,” and complies with the 2015 Obama-era rule pertaining to closing impoundments, operating its landfill, monitoring groundwater, and notifying regulators about constituents of concerns and remedies.

In June, Congressman Morgan McGarvey, whose district covers Mill Creek, signed a separate letter to Zeldin asking the EPA not to weaken coal ash regulations that could expose working-class communities facing disproportionate environmental burdens to dangerous contaminants. 

“They’re not located in rich neighborhoods,” McGarvey told The Margin of coal ash sites in his state. “They are already in places where it will hurt even worse for people who have suffered from pollution and being dumped on for years and years.

II. Kentucky’s ‘deregulatory mania’

When Thomas Edison began burning coal at Pearl Street Station to illuminate households in lower Manhattan in 1882, the commercial power he created made commercial-scale waste. 

In the century and a half since, billions of tons of coal ash have been stored in landfills (when dry), ponds (when wet), and haphazard holes. Those dumps, largely unlined, often border rivers and streams, since coal plants need water to create steam and cool the generation systems. Pollutants from those sites could continue contaminating groundwater for hundreds of years, according to Nick Torrey, coal ash attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit focused on legal advocacy and environmental protection in six southern states.

It’s basically a forever problem in terms of any normal human scale.

Since the 1980s, the coal industry has found loopholes to avoid the overwhelming scope of its waste problem. After the 1976 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act was enacted, governing the disposal of waste, the 1980 Bevill Amendment granted polluters regulatory relief by classifying coal ash as a non-hazardous waste, which allowed the industry to continue to dispose of it in landfills and ponds. The EPA reaffirmed that decision in 1993 and 2000, but environmentalists have long protested this exception, arguing coal ash contains dozens of heavy metals and radiation that would qualify other materials as hazardous. 

Kentucky has long been a leader in coal power, a trend on the decline. About 67% of the state’s power grid came from coal in 2024, down from more than 90% a decade earlier. Coal power declined as natural gas became cheaper, the coal supply diminished, and the global energy market pulled away from one of the world’s dirtiest fuels. 

While there has been a reduction in coal, a rapid increase in electricity demand and a failure to quickly transition to renewable alternatives means coal continues to stick around. Last year, LG&E/KU projected its energy demand could double in the coming years, largely from data centers. Activists against data centers in Jefferson County are pushing back against LG&E/KU’s request to build more gas and extend coal, which they say will fuel projects like the 400-megawatt data center approved by Louisville regulators about 12 miles north of the plant.

The map below displays coal ash sites and data centers across Kentucky and near its border, with each site's status available by hovering over its location. The Ohio River is highlighted in red to illustrate the concentration of these sites near major waterways. The map also includes county-level census data showing the percentage of residents who identify as people of color.

Meanwhile, state lawmakers have made it exceedingly difficult to transition to cleaner sources of energy. A pair of laws passed in 2023 and 2024 made it more difficult to retire fossil-fired units and to replace fossil fuels with most renewables. Republican legislators during this year’s session proposed rolling back state environmental regulations under a bill that would make it impossible to pass state environmental laws in Kentucky that are stricter than federal laws. 

“There’s a deregulatory mania in Kentucky right now,” said Michael Washburn, executive director of the Kentucky Waterways Alliance, a nonprofit focused on protecting state waterways.

That pro-coal stance could influence older facilities like Mill Creek, which once had four coal-burning units. One retired in 2024, replaced by a gas turbine still under construction. LG&E/KU also asked the state to build a second gas turbine at Mill Creek and extend the life of the third coal unit until at least 2031. Previously, that stack was slated to retire next year. Two more could be retired in 2035, according to LG&E/KU 2024 integrated resource plan, but that decision will be reassessed in the utility’s 2027 plan. 

“We fully believe these investments are in the best interests of our customers and the communities we’re proud to serve, and they build upon our history of continuous environmental improvement initiatives and major equipment investments at Mill Creek,” Gardner wrote in an email.

Keeping coal burning will cost ratepayers, critics say. Coal generation is expensive, and so is building new gas-fired units, according to a 2025 report by the Kentucky Resources Council. The state could save electricity customers $2.6 billion by mid-century if utilities transitioned away from coal and gas to renewable energy and battery storage, according to the report, potentially reaching a 95% clean energy portfolio by 2050 without increasing costs to consumers.

Ann Gunter, a 72-year-old who moved into her home near Mill Creek in 2003, said she was told the plant would be converted to gas by 2006. More than 20 years later, she said she’s still waiting, frustrated by the soot that accumulates on her house and car. LG&E/KU told The Margin it was not familiar with these claims and was actively transitioning portions of generation on the Mill Creek site from coal to natural gas. Gardner said Mill Creek Unit 5, the first combined cycle gas plant at the site, should be operating by spring 2027.

“They keep telling us, ‘next year we’re converting to gas,’” Gunter said from her front porch, wiping dust off the railing. “And next year never comes."

III. Between Rainbow Drive and the ‘Cloud Maker’

Beneath the towering Mill Creek station, along Rainbow Drive and on surrounding streets, dogs bark. Day lilies bloom orange. Tomato and cucumber starts wait in plastic trays on the patio. Robins’ feet click on the gutters, and cardinals perch on the edge of a bird bath shaped like a sunflower. Canadian geese fly against grey clouds. 

Then a flood warning pings cell phones around the time Lauren Hollobaugh opens the front door of her home bordering a grassy beam that functions as a floodwall. The 33-year-old human resources specialist lives on nearby Tennis Boulevard, with her mother and two kids. Her family is beset by several health conditions. Her mom and son have kidney disease. Her daughter and her mother have eczema. She has sensitive skin, so exposure to chlorine or too much sun causes her to develop rashes.

The Margin knocked on more than 60 doors in May. Some residents, especially those with children, expressed concern about their proximity to Mill Creek but struggle to connect their ailments to their high-polluting neighbor beyond anecdote. However, not everyone feels the same about this neighbor. Some support coal keeping the lights on. Others are indifferent. One neighbor insisted the plant did not burn coal anymore. 

Wilbur, a Spanish-speaker from Venezuela who works night shifts as a Walmart custodian, moved here two years ago with his son and a friend. He said he worried at first, but he hadn’t noticed any health issues. Vina Duncan, a woman in her nineties who moved to the neighborhood 30 years ago from Harlan County, said nothing about the plant bothered her.

But many are worried about the risks to their health and property that living so close to the plant poses while having little insight into the federal changes afoot that could remove guardrails for the plant’s pollution. 

Burning coal produces particulate matter, tiny bits of soot that can trigger asthma and cardiovascular issues. Hendricks has suffered from allergies, and Hendricks’ neighbor, Sherry Fitz, developed allergies after moving into the neighborhood. Every morning, she said she smells chemicals. She has to dust every day. 

Fitz moved onto Betsy Ross Drive when her daughter was three years old, making her a “smokestack baby,” a nickname for the little ones who grow up in the neighborhood, Fitz said. The now 12-year-old has allergies and depression, and her 17-year-old sister lives with social anxiety. Fitz said she doesn’t interact very much with LG&E but recalled a book giveaway by the utility at Watson Lane Elementary, then her kids’ school.

“You're hurting my kids’ insides, but you’re going to give them a stupid book?” Fitz recalled thinking. That school has since closed. A second school in the area, Frost Middle School, also closed, and was later purchased by LG&E. In an email, Gardner said the purchase was to support current and future operations at Mill Creek as the utility plans to build a warehouse there to support the operational needs of Mill Creek’s gas units. 

Soot has fallen in the neighborhood, for about half a century. Marla Patterson, who grew up here, moved back in 2000, said fine black residue coated her outdoor toys as a child. She and her family have long lived in the area and, by her account, she has been significantly impacted by the plant. 

Patterson recalled that her grandparents bought one of Valley Station’s first homes back in the 1940s when the neighborhood was sparsely occupied. Years later, it became a subdivision. Patterson was born in 1967, a year before construction began on Mill Creek. After moving back, Patterson was leaving for work one morning in her brand new black Kia Sephia when she saw tiny white flakes floating in the air. She drove to Timmy’s Auto Wash on Dixie Highway to wash off the dots spotting her car, but the soap and water only made the white specks brighter. She called LG&E to complain, but she said the utility only offered a car wash. The paint job on the new car was ruined, Patterson said. Worse, Patterson, who grew up with symptoms of bad asthma, alleged that she ended up with pneumonia after the incident.

“Anything that sits outside is basically destroyed,” Patterson said. 

Her dad, who never drank alcohol or smoked cigarettes, died of liver cancer less than three months after his diagnosis, Patterson recalled. Her mother has dementia. Patterson works in health care, shuttling between three jobs at a local nursing home, a west end hospital, and a teaching gig at Sullivan University.

“I knew living by LG&E was a bad thing,” Patterson said. But she came back to help her family and take care of her grandmother, and she stayed.

Some neighbors who answered the door for The Margin relocated here because homes offer some of the cheapest property values in Louisville, the state’s most populous city. Alfredo Carballo opened the door to his sister’s house, where she lives with her mom and two young children. They get sick more often in this neighborhood, with cold symptoms including a cough, Carballo said. They spent months trying to sell the home but couldn’t find a buyer, so they took the house off the market.

Patricia Myers, 61, was diagnosed with small cell carcinoma, a highly aggressive form of cancer that typically originates in the lungs, last October. She’s lived in her house, bordering a chain link fence with LG&E/KU since 2008, after growing up in the neighborhood. Myers said she lost several childhood friends to cancer, but gesturing to stubbed-out cigarettes on her patio table, she said she couldn’t necessarily attribute her illness to the plant when she’s also been a longtime smoker. 

One woman, who asked not to share her name, spoke through her living room window after peeling back a lace curtain. She said the issue used to be bigger, but the state and the federal government didn’t seem to care very much anymore. Her next door neighbor, she said, died of throat cancer. 

LG&E/KU told The Margin it wasn’t familiar with these complaints.

“LG&E investigates all complaints, operates in strict compliance with operating permits including dust control plans, and strives to be a good neighbor,” Gardner wrote in an email. “We’re continually monitoring, measuring and reporting the plant’s performance to appropriate federal, state and local regulatory agencies, and we operate Mill Creek and all of our power plants under federally enforceable operating permits.”

The neighborhoods around Mill Creek suffer broader cumulative and synergistic effects of environmental injustice, according to Tony Arnold, a law professor at the University of Louisville who runs the Resilience Justice Project, an organization whose work includes a focus on the environmental and community needs around the Mill Creek watershed.

Along with the Mill Creek power plant, there’s the Kosmos Cement Plant across the street from the Mill Creek landfill, the car exhaust along Dixie Highway, and the chemical plants just north in Rubbertown. 

“A lot of communities, a lot of neighborhoods that are marginalized have fewer resources,” Arnold said. That includes a lack of information about the plant, its emissions, and the regulatory bodies that oversee it. Rollbacks on climate science at the federal level also limit research into how climate change, largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels, could impact Mill Creek’s coal ash.

“With extreme flooding, if there’s some sort of accident or unintentional release or if it’s not managed properly, there are all sorts of things that could go wrong, and the fact that we’ve already had discharges in the past tells you that things can go wrong,” Arnold said. 

In a “worst-case” flooding scenario modeled in a 2017 LG&E report, Rainbow Drive, where Hendricks’ daughter lives, could have been under five feet of contaminated water from the now-closed coal ash pond within an hour of a flood event.

IV. Cancer in coal country

Mill Creek has one active coal ash landfill, a roughly 14-story behemoth sandwiched between the Ohio River and Dixie Highway, an artery that helps connect metro Louisville to nearly 1.4 million people. The plant also houses five closed coal ash sites, including a large closed coal ash pond that borders the river and the Mill Creek watershed. Standing in the woods below the terraced rows of gravel, the chemical smell of the closed pond is inescapable. 

Both the landfill and the pond are leaking contaminants into the Ohio River and onto an industrial property south of the plant, according to a January report filed by LG&E. At least 17 out of 29 monitoring wells at Mill Creek had tests showing contaminants above federal groundwater protection standards. Arsenic, lithium and molybdenum exceeded those standards dozens of times across two testing events in April and September of 2025. Cobalt exceeded those standards twice and thallium once.The report said these contaminants weren’t likely to measurably increase concentrations in the Ohio River, where residents boat, fish, and recreate. LG&E reported and made publicly available its own monitoring data, as required under the 2015 rule, but so far no enforcement actions seem to have been taken by the federal or state government to bring the utility into compliance after its most recent report.

Arsenic, a known carcinogen found at least once at Mill Creek at levels 37 times the federal standard, exceeded the groundwater protection standard seven times last year. Lithium exceeded the threshold across at least 10 wells, sometimes measuring more than seven times the standard. Molybdenum at least tripled the groundwater protection standard seven times, exceeding the threshold across eight wells.

For many people, connecting their health concerns to coal ash is exceedingly difficult. Science shows that dozens of elements in coal ash — including arsenic, mercury, lithium, lead, selenium, and radium — can be dangerous and even deadly to humans. But tying coal ash to a specific person's ailments likely requires studies based on evidence of community or workplace exposure, according to Kristina Zierold, a public health professor at the University of Mississippi. 

And so far, little proof exists, which is largely a missed opportunity, Zierold said. While at the University of Louisville, her research focused on communities bordering Mill Creek and Cane Run Generating Station, another former coal plant owned by LG&E/KU that converted to natural gas in 2015 and then spent years closing its coal ash sites. 

Zierold began door knocking in the Cane Run and Mill Creek neighborhoods in 2012. She sent letters about her study through a mailing list of the 12-ZIP code area and slipped flyers under the windshield wipers of teachers’ cars in local schools. She took out Facebook ads and stood in store parking lots near the plants handing out information. Parents told her about learning difficulties, poor school performance, and the prevalence of ADHD among kids in their neighborhood, challenges Zierold knew were also seen in kids exposed to heavy metals. They also reported asthma and respiratory problems, along with trouble sleeping.

Shoeleather epidemiology eventually introduced Zierold and her fellow researchers to roughly 280 kids, aged 6-14 years old, and their families. They would become the participants in an almost $3 million study from the National Institutes of Health exploring how children’s neurobehavioral problems at home and school could be connected to coal ash exposure. Researchers set up devices to collect air samples in their homes, took dust samples in the children’s bedrooms and family rooms, and periodically collected nail clippings from children to test for heavy metals. 

Under a microscope, the air samples showed 43 percent of 261 kids’ homes contained cenospheres. These are glassy, spherical particles that form when minerals melt during combustion and reform in exhaust steam, according to Zierold. Those cenospheres meant coal ash was present in almost half the homes. Children with coal ash in their homes had increased levels of iron, aluminum, and silica in their nails, all contaminants found within coal ash. Zierold worked closely with a psychologist and found a relationship between coal ash exposure and elevated levels of depression and lower school performance among the kids. 

“There needs to be a ton more funding and a ton more research on this,” Zierold said. But she’s struggled to secure funding to move the research forward.  Zierold would have liked to study adults after hearing about high rates of cancer in the communities near Mill Creek and Cane Run from residents. Counties closer to coal-fired impoundments tend to have higher cancer rates, according to a 2026 spatial association analysis led by Charlie Zhang, an urban and health geographer at the University of Louisville also involved in Zierold’s research.

The map below shows the annual cancer incidence rate across the United States, measured as the number of new cancer cases per 100,000 people. Kentucky is highlighted with a red outline.

Much of Kentucky is dark red on one of the study’s maps in Zhang’s research. Kentucky is one of the top five states when it comes to the number of coal ash impoundments, and ranks highest for both cancer incidence and mortality. Those cancer rates are often attributed to social determinants like low education and high poverty rates, with high rates of tobacco-, obesity- and HPV-related cancers. Research connecting cancer to coal ash is often marginalized, according to Zhang, especially in coal country.

Coal ash, Zierold said, “affects so many people, and a lot of people don’t even know they’re being affected by it, and that’s the sad thing. It’s very sad.”

While Zierold was working on her health study, she was approached by lawyers representing a group of workers who alleged they were sickened from cleaning up the Kingston coal ash disaster across the stateline in Tennessee. The lawyers wanted Zierold for consulting, but because her research focused on kids, not adults, she declined. She called the limited research a shame.

Now, the utility in charge of the Kingston spill, the Tennessee Valley Authority, is issuing its own “scientific context” about coal ash. Angie Mummaw,  an organizer with the environmental nonprofit Appalachian Voices,attended a meeting in April about the extended retirement dates for the two coal units near the Cumberland Fossil Plant about 70 miles west of Nashville. Mummaw encountered a woman holding a booklet of TVA fact sheets who told her that the amount of molybdenum, a coal ash contaminant detected at Cumberland, was equivalent to what a person would eat in a serving of black-eyed peas; she also compared the amount of arsenic found at the plant to what a person might get from a glass of wine or a cup of hot chocolate. TVA’s fact sheets read, in part, “Coal Ash is Not Hazardous” and included the statement “the constituents of coal ash are nearly identical to common soil.”

TVA spokesperson Scott Brooks said in an email that the fact sheets referenced were developed to help advance public understanding using information and data from credible third-party sources.

“They are intended to provide scientific context about coal ash and to illustrate that many of its naturally occurring constituents are also found throughout the environment,” Brooks wrote. He said the common narrative around coal ash isn’t rooted in reality or informed by the extensive science, monitoring, and regulatory oversight that govern its management today.

V. ‘Can Kentucky do something?’

Well over one hundred people signed up to speak at the EPA’s virtual public listening session on the coal ash rollback in late May. So many that the agency had to extend the session, keeping people across the country glued to their computer screens from 9 am to 7 pm. The 141 speakers were from faith organizations, environmental groups and nursing associations. They were Tribal members, scientists, attorneys, parents and neighbors living near coal ash sites. 

Susan Wind, an activist who used to live in Lake Norman, North Carolina, spoke about the cancers children in her neighborhood were diagnosed with in a community she said was built on top of coal ash used as fill for the development. They included her daughter, who was diagnosed with thyroid cancer at 16 years old.

“The word of the day is betrayed,” said Wind. “Betrayed not just by a utility company that put profit over people, but by the very agencies sworn to protect us, you especially, the EPA.” 

She came from a state with some of the strongest regulations in the country. After the Dan River disaster in 2014, North Carolina passed the Coal Ash Management Act, going beyond federal regulations, forcing Duke Energy to excavate and close leaking coal ash sites. Michael Regan, former head of the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, helped negotiate Duke Energy’s cleanup, developed the state’s clean energy plan,and later helmed the Biden administration’s EPA. 

“We have a coal ash program that does work,” said SELC’s Torrey, who lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. “It’s the only one like it in the country.” 

A system with loosened regulations on coal ash, like what Trump’s EPA proposed, could allow utilities to pressure regulators into accepting inadequate monitoring or cleanup plans, critics say. Activists like Wind would continue devoting their lives to challenging such plans on a case-by-case basis instead of working with the federal government to protect them. States would become the new watchdog, and most states aren’t ready, let alone interested, in policing the coal industry.

Oklahoma, Georgia, Texas, North Dakota, and Wyoming have authorized state CCR permit programs, the EPA press office said in an emailed statement, and the agency has proposed approval of three other state CCR permit programs in Virginia, Louisiana, and Alabama.

The Kentucky EEC targeted September to formally file regulation changes to join these ranks, pending a comment period and public hearing.

“Can Kentucky do something? Yes, they can,” McGarvey said. “But the reality is the states, including Kentucky, do not have the resources to do this. They know it. That’s why they’re doing this. They’re trying to give coal companies and big corporations a pass so that there is going to be no accountability.” 

Back on Rainbow Drive, Hendricks stood in her front yard. 

“Are the federal rules changing on this? That’s crazy,” Hendricks said. Her neighbor, Roger Mills, a resident in his 70s, stood outside his front door, with his dog peering through the glass. 

“It’s the dirtiest place I’ve ever lived in my life,” Mills said.“It’s got to be unhealthy breathing it.” But he had little information and few resources. Mills spends his days taking care of his wife with dementia, who grew up in the house where they now live. 

While they breathed, the plant burned on.

***

Plumes form from burning coal for electricity at the Mill Creek Generating Station, the last utility-scale coal-fired power plant in Jefferson County, Kentucky. The plant operates between the banks of the Ohio River and a low-income neighborhood called Valley Station less than 15 miles southwest of downtown Louisville. The city has repeatedly failed to meet the EPA’s air quality standards for ozone, becoming one of the 25 smoggiest cities in the U.S., according to the American Lung Association’s 2026 State of the Air report.

Air pollution is a known problem for Hendricks’ community. What’s more obscure are the health risks from the waste left behind by combusted coal, known as coal ash. Proposed federal regulations coming from the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency could make finding and cleaning up that waste even more difficult.

Walking barefoot along the horseshoe of her driveway in May, Hendricks said she’s long worried over the health impacts from the plant.

People are dying of cancer left and right in this subdivision.

That waste, known as coal ash, has been dumped within at least six sites across Mill Creek’s 544-acre footprint, enough to fill more than 6,200 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Contaminants within the ash can cause cancer and other serious health effects. But for decades, coal ash was poorly regulated by the federal government. The grey sludge, often kept in place by mixing the featherlight dust with water, leached from unlined pits into groundwater, surface water, and soils. Meanwhile, dried ash took to the air and traveled for miles into the surrounding communities, landing on windowsills and migrating into children’s bedrooms. 

Coal ash contains higher concentrations of contaminants compared to the original rock. According to a January 2026 report filed by the plant’s owners, Mill Creek’s coal ash sites are leaking heavy metals like arsenic, molybdenum, and lithium. Arsenic is a known carcinogen; molybdenum can cause achy joints and lead to liver and kidney damage; and lithium is a metal associated with multiple health risks, including neurological damage. 

For decades, electric utilities avoided monitoring and cleaning up their waste. Then came a pair of disasters in 2008 and 2014 where coal ash broke from a dam at the Kingston Fossil Plant in Tennessee and a pipe at the Dan River Steam Station in North Carolina, clogging waterways and leveling homes.In 2015, President Barack Obama’s administration finally took action to protect communities from coal ash, requiring groundwater monitoring and cleanup plans. 

The industry’s own data, compiled by Earthjustice, an environmental nonprofit that has litigated numerous coal ash cases, showed that coal ash at nine out of every ten power plants polluted groundwater. In 2023, the EPA announced that cancer risks from arsenic and radiation in soils containing coal ash were high enough to require further regulation. Under President Joe Biden, the EPA doubled down, adding the protection of communities from coal ash contamination to a national priority list as one of its most critical charges. 

But the heyday of federal coal ash oversight has atrophied, and long-fought-for improvements are under threat again. Most states, including Kentucky, rarely regulate coal ash beyond permitting facilities and largely rely on federal oversight for enforcement. 

“Team Kentucky’s focus is to make sure our communities and our natural resources are protected from any adverse effects of coal ash storage. We do this by working with our utility companies and property owners, but also within the constraints of federal and state laws,” Robin Hartman, spokesperson for the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, the state agency responsible for environmental and natural resource regulatory enforcement, said in an email. 

Five days before President Donald Trump was sworn in for the second time, 10 utility executives, including the owner-operator of Mill Creek, asked Lee Zeldin, a fossil fuel evangelist and then-nominee for administrator of the EPA, in a letter to overhaul environmental laws, including nascent regulations on coal combustion residuals, a wonky name for coal ash. The last signator, John R. Crockett III, is president of Kentucky’s two companies that form the state’s largest utility, Louisville Gas and Electric Company and Kentucky Utilities Energy, LLC, or LG&E/KU.

The EPA acquiesced in April, first proposing a new rule that would allow states and utilities to bypass standing regulations for coal ash cleanup, and then reopening a case for a new permitting system that could further weaken requirements. In an emailed statement to The Margin, an EPA spokesperson described the proposed changes as “a major improvement over the Biden-era rule.” They continued, “Under the proposed new compliance pathway, permit authorities could tailor requirements to site-specific risks and incorporate advances in monitoring and corrective technologies.” 

In late June, LG&E/KU filed comments supporting those amendments, highlighting the need to delegate the federal coal ash program to state authorities, enhance flexibility for compliance options, and remove provisions for specific sites called Coal Combustion Residuals Management Units. Earlier that month, the Trump administration doubled down, announcing $700 million in taxpayer funding to keep coal alive. The budget included $124 million on upgrading three coal plants in Kentucky, which is home to eight operating coal plants, the majority of which line the Ohio River. 

“The two things are part and parcel of one another,” said Gavin Kearney, deputy managing attorney for Earthjustice’s clean energy program. “Eliminating coal ash protections is a way of helping coal plants prosper.

Now, the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, the state agency responsible for environmental and natural resource regulatory enforcement, is seeking approval to self-implement permits and efforts to clean up coal combustion residuals (CCR), another name for coal waste.   

“The EEC has been developing new regulations for (CCR) that, if approved, would protect Kentuckians’ public health, ratepayers, and the environment by enabling additional oversight from the state and allowing the cabinet to evaluate each facility individually,” Hartman said in an email. “The proposed regulation would require CCR owners to get a permit similar to those acquired by landfills and require the facility to conduct a comprehensive investigation of the structural stability, groundwater quality, and all remedies for coal ash impoundments."

Advocates warn that under new coal ash proposals, utilities could potentially close coal ash ponds that are in contact with and contaminate groundwater, which the current rule forbids, without first cleaning them up. The rollbacks also relax some monitoring requirements for cleaning up contaminated groundwater. In addition, the proposals could exempt hundreds of large piles of ash from any oversight by rolling back a 2024 rule that expanded the definition of coal ash sites. This proposal could allow state regulators to shortcut or eliminate coal ash protections, leaving citizens to challenge a utility's plans for its coal ash cleanup on a site-by-site basis. This would be a Sisyphean task. In Kentucky, there are at least 87 coal ash sites; across the country there are more than 1,000, according to Earthjustice. Experts said they estimate the weakened rules to be finalized by the end of this year. Mill Creek likely has at least three Coal Combustion Residuals Management Units (CCRMU’s), according to data collected by Earthjustice. 

Folks like Hendricks, who often had multiple jobs at a time while raising two kids and caring for ill relatives, don’t usually have time or resources to play watchdog to powerful utilities. She inherited her house from her mother, who died three years ago from lung cancer, and lives in it with her sister. Her daughter lives in a house Hendricks owns on Rainbow Drive, the last line of homes before the green lawn of the plant property begins. Most families like hers living near coal ash sites depend on federal regulators to ensure their safety from toxic and sometimes unstable ash impoundments.

LG&E told The Margin the utility would publish a report defining its CCRMU sites, in compliance with regulations, which LG&E has asked the EPA to rescind. During the licensing process for two new gas units at Mill Creek, one proposed and one under construction, LG&E disclosed the plants would be built on an old storage site for Posotech, a low-grade concrete material manufactured with coal ash, LG&E/KU spokesperson Andrew Gardner said in an email. He added, “It is likely the Mill Creek site has other CCRMU given the existing rule’s definition of CCRMU.”

Fewer than half of Kentucky’s coal ash sites are reliably monitored by the federal government. Self-reported industry data show that all but one have contamination levels above safe drinking water standards. That includes Mill Creek, where heavy metals can be found at levels triple groundwater protection standards, finding pathways to the Ohio River and off the plant’s southern edge. Regardless, LG&E plans to keep Mill Creek burning coal. 

Gardner said in an email that the utility “is properly managing the site to protect public health and the environment,” and complies with the 2015 Obama-era rule pertaining to closing impoundments, operating its landfill, monitoring groundwater, and notifying regulators about constituents of concerns and remedies.

In June, Congressman Morgan McGarvey, whose district covers Mill Creek, signed a separate letter to Zeldin asking the EPA not to weaken coal ash regulations that could expose working-class communities facing disproportionate environmental burdens to dangerous contaminants. 

“They’re not located in rich neighborhoods,” McGarvey told The Margin of coal ash sites in his state. “They are already in places where it will hurt even worse for people who have suffered from pollution and being dumped on for years and years.

II. Kentucky’s ‘deregulatory mania’

When Thomas Edison began burning coal at Pearl Street Station to illuminate households in lower Manhattan in 1882, the commercial power he created made commercial-scale waste. 

In the century and a half since, billions of tons of coal ash have been stored in landfills (when dry), ponds (when wet), and haphazard holes. Those dumps, largely unlined, often border rivers and streams, since coal plants need water to create steam and cool the generation systems. Pollutants from those sites could continue contaminating groundwater for hundreds of years, according to Nick Torrey, coal ash attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit focused on legal advocacy and environmental protection in six southern states.

It’s basically a forever problem in terms of any normal human scale.

Since the 1980s, the coal industry has found loopholes to avoid the overwhelming scope of its waste problem. After the 1976 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act was enacted, governing the disposal of waste, the 1980 Bevill Amendment granted polluters regulatory relief by classifying coal ash as a non-hazardous waste, which allowed the industry to continue to dispose of it in landfills and ponds. The EPA reaffirmed that decision in 1993 and 2000, but environmentalists have long protested this exception, arguing coal ash contains dozens of heavy metals and radiation that would qualify other materials as hazardous. 

Kentucky has long been a leader in coal power, a trend on the decline. About 67% of the state’s power grid came from coal in 2024, down from more than 90% a decade earlier. Coal power declined as natural gas became cheaper, the coal supply diminished, and the global energy market pulled away from one of the world’s dirtiest fuels. 

While there has been a reduction in coal, a rapid increase in electricity demand and a failure to quickly transition to renewable alternatives means coal continues to stick around. Last year, LG&E/KU projected its energy demand could double in the coming years, largely from data centers. Activists against data centers in Jefferson County are pushing back against LG&E/KU’s request to build more gas and extend coal, which they say will fuel projects like the 400-megawatt data center approved by Louisville regulators about 12 miles north of the plant.

The map below displays coal ash sites and data centers across Kentucky and near its border, with each site's status available by hovering over its location. The Ohio River is highlighted in red to illustrate the concentration of these sites near major waterways. The map also includes county-level census data showing the percentage of residents who identify as people of color.

Meanwhile, state lawmakers have made it exceedingly difficult to transition to cleaner sources of energy. A pair of laws passed in 2023 and 2024 made it more difficult to retire fossil-fired units and to replace fossil fuels with most renewables. Republican legislators during this year’s session proposed rolling back state environmental regulations under a bill that would make it impossible to pass state environmental laws in Kentucky that are stricter than federal laws. 

“There’s a deregulatory mania in Kentucky right now,” said Michael Washburn, executive director of the Kentucky Waterways Alliance, a nonprofit focused on protecting state waterways.

That pro-coal stance could influence older facilities like Mill Creek, which once had four coal-burning units. One retired in 2024, replaced by a gas turbine still under construction. LG&E/KU also asked the state to build a second gas turbine at Mill Creek and extend the life of the third coal unit until at least 2031. Previously, that stack was slated to retire next year. Two more could be retired in 2035, according to LG&E/KU 2024 integrated resource plan, but that decision will be reassessed in the utility’s 2027 plan. 

“We fully believe these investments are in the best interests of our customers and the communities we’re proud to serve, and they build upon our history of continuous environmental improvement initiatives and major equipment investments at Mill Creek,” Gardner wrote in an email.

Keeping coal burning will cost ratepayers, critics say. Coal generation is expensive, and so is building new gas-fired units, according to a 2025 report by the Kentucky Resources Council. The state could save electricity customers $2.6 billion by mid-century if utilities transitioned away from coal and gas to renewable energy and battery storage, according to the report, potentially reaching a 95% clean energy portfolio by 2050 without increasing costs to consumers.

Ann Gunter, a 72-year-old who moved into her home near Mill Creek in 2003, said she was told the plant would be converted to gas by 2006. More than 20 years later, she said she’s still waiting, frustrated by the soot that accumulates on her house and car. LG&E/KU told The Margin it was not familiar with these claims and was actively transitioning portions of generation on the Mill Creek site from coal to natural gas. Gardner said Mill Creek Unit 5, the first combined cycle gas plant at the site, should be operating by spring 2027.

“They keep telling us, ‘next year we’re converting to gas,’” Gunter said from her front porch, wiping dust off the railing. “And next year never comes."

III. Between Rainbow Drive and the ‘Cloud Maker’

Beneath the towering Mill Creek station, along Rainbow Drive and on surrounding streets, dogs bark. Day lilies bloom orange. Tomato and cucumber starts wait in plastic trays on the patio. Robins’ feet click on the gutters, and cardinals perch on the edge of a bird bath shaped like a sunflower. Canadian geese fly against grey clouds. 

Then a flood warning pings cell phones around the time Lauren Hollobaugh opens the front door of her home bordering a grassy beam that functions as a floodwall. The 33-year-old human resources specialist lives on nearby Tennis Boulevard, with her mother and two kids. Her family is beset by several health conditions. Her mom and son have kidney disease. Her daughter and her mother have eczema. She has sensitive skin, so exposure to chlorine or too much sun causes her to develop rashes.

The Margin knocked on more than 60 doors in May. Some residents, especially those with children, expressed concern about their proximity to Mill Creek but struggle to connect their ailments to their high-polluting neighbor beyond anecdote. However, not everyone feels the same about this neighbor. Some support coal keeping the lights on. Others are indifferent. One neighbor insisted the plant did not burn coal anymore. 

Wilbur, a Spanish-speaker from Venezuela who works night shifts as a Walmart custodian, moved here two years ago with his son and a friend. He said he worried at first, but he hadn’t noticed any health issues. Vina Duncan, a woman in her nineties who moved to the neighborhood 30 years ago from Harlan County, said nothing about the plant bothered her.

But many are worried about the risks to their health and property that living so close to the plant poses while having little insight into the federal changes afoot that could remove guardrails for the plant’s pollution. 

Burning coal produces particulate matter, tiny bits of soot that can trigger asthma and cardiovascular issues. Hendricks has suffered from allergies, and Hendricks’ neighbor, Sherry Fitz, developed allergies after moving into the neighborhood. Every morning, she said she smells chemicals. She has to dust every day. 

Fitz moved onto Betsy Ross Drive when her daughter was three years old, making her a “smokestack baby,” a nickname for the little ones who grow up in the neighborhood, Fitz said. The now 12-year-old has allergies and depression, and her 17-year-old sister lives with social anxiety. Fitz said she doesn’t interact very much with LG&E but recalled a book giveaway by the utility at Watson Lane Elementary, then her kids’ school.

“You're hurting my kids’ insides, but you’re going to give them a stupid book?” Fitz recalled thinking. That school has since closed. A second school in the area, Frost Middle School, also closed, and was later purchased by LG&E. In an email, Gardner said the purchase was to support current and future operations at Mill Creek as the utility plans to build a warehouse there to support the operational needs of Mill Creek’s gas units. 

Soot has fallen in the neighborhood, for about half a century. Marla Patterson, who grew up here, moved back in 2000, said fine black residue coated her outdoor toys as a child. She and her family have long lived in the area and, by her account, she has been significantly impacted by the plant. 

Patterson recalled that her grandparents bought one of Valley Station’s first homes back in the 1940s when the neighborhood was sparsely occupied. Years later, it became a subdivision. Patterson was born in 1967, a year before construction began on Mill Creek. After moving back, Patterson was leaving for work one morning in her brand new black Kia Sephia when she saw tiny white flakes floating in the air. She drove to Timmy’s Auto Wash on Dixie Highway to wash off the dots spotting her car, but the soap and water only made the white specks brighter. She called LG&E to complain, but she said the utility only offered a car wash. The paint job on the new car was ruined, Patterson said. Worse, Patterson, who grew up with symptoms of bad asthma, alleged that she ended up with pneumonia after the incident.

“Anything that sits outside is basically destroyed,” Patterson said. 

Her dad, who never drank alcohol or smoked cigarettes, died of liver cancer less than three months after his diagnosis, Patterson recalled. Her mother has dementia. Patterson works in health care, shuttling between three jobs at a local nursing home, a west end hospital, and a teaching gig at Sullivan University.

“I knew living by LG&E was a bad thing,” Patterson said. But she came back to help her family and take care of her grandmother, and she stayed.

Some neighbors who answered the door for The Margin relocated here because homes offer some of the cheapest property values in Louisville, the state’s most populous city. Alfredo Carballo opened the door to his sister’s house, where she lives with her mom and two young children. They get sick more often in this neighborhood, with cold symptoms including a cough, Carballo said. They spent months trying to sell the home but couldn’t find a buyer, so they took the house off the market.

Patricia Myers, 61, was diagnosed with small cell carcinoma, a highly aggressive form of cancer that typically originates in the lungs, last October. She’s lived in her house, bordering a chain link fence with LG&E/KU since 2008, after growing up in the neighborhood. Myers said she lost several childhood friends to cancer, but gesturing to stubbed-out cigarettes on her patio table, she said she couldn’t necessarily attribute her illness to the plant when she’s also been a longtime smoker. 

One woman, who asked not to share her name, spoke through her living room window after peeling back a lace curtain. She said the issue used to be bigger, but the state and the federal government didn’t seem to care very much anymore. Her next door neighbor, she said, died of throat cancer. 

LG&E/KU told The Margin it wasn’t familiar with these complaints.

“LG&E investigates all complaints, operates in strict compliance with operating permits including dust control plans, and strives to be a good neighbor,” Gardner wrote in an email. “We’re continually monitoring, measuring and reporting the plant’s performance to appropriate federal, state and local regulatory agencies, and we operate Mill Creek and all of our power plants under federally enforceable operating permits.”

The neighborhoods around Mill Creek suffer broader cumulative and synergistic effects of environmental injustice, according to Tony Arnold, a law professor at the University of Louisville who runs the Resilience Justice Project, an organization whose work includes a focus on the environmental and community needs around the Mill Creek watershed.

Along with the Mill Creek power plant, there’s the Kosmos Cement Plant across the street from the Mill Creek landfill, the car exhaust along Dixie Highway, and the chemical plants just north in Rubbertown. 

“A lot of communities, a lot of neighborhoods that are marginalized have fewer resources,” Arnold said. That includes a lack of information about the plant, its emissions, and the regulatory bodies that oversee it. Rollbacks on climate science at the federal level also limit research into how climate change, largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels, could impact Mill Creek’s coal ash.

“With extreme flooding, if there’s some sort of accident or unintentional release or if it’s not managed properly, there are all sorts of things that could go wrong, and the fact that we’ve already had discharges in the past tells you that things can go wrong,” Arnold said. 

In a “worst-case” flooding scenario modeled in a 2017 LG&E report, Rainbow Drive, where Hendricks’ daughter lives, could have been under five feet of contaminated water from the now-closed coal ash pond within an hour of a flood event.

IV. Cancer in coal country

Mill Creek has one active coal ash landfill, a roughly 14-story behemoth sandwiched between the Ohio River and Dixie Highway, an artery that helps connect metro Louisville to nearly 1.4 million people. The plant also houses five closed coal ash sites, including a large closed coal ash pond that borders the river and the Mill Creek watershed. Standing in the woods below the terraced rows of gravel, the chemical smell of the closed pond is inescapable. 

Both the landfill and the pond are leaking contaminants into the Ohio River and onto an industrial property south of the plant, according to a January report filed by LG&E. At least 17 out of 29 monitoring wells at Mill Creek had tests showing contaminants above federal groundwater protection standards. Arsenic, lithium and molybdenum exceeded those standards dozens of times across two testing events in April and September of 2025. Cobalt exceeded those standards twice and thallium once.The report said these contaminants weren’t likely to measurably increase concentrations in the Ohio River, where residents boat, fish, and recreate. LG&E reported and made publicly available its own monitoring data, as required under the 2015 rule, but so far no enforcement actions seem to have been taken by the federal or state government to bring the utility into compliance after its most recent report.

Arsenic, a known carcinogen found at least once at Mill Creek at levels 37 times the federal standard, exceeded the groundwater protection standard seven times last year. Lithium exceeded the threshold across at least 10 wells, sometimes measuring more than seven times the standard. Molybdenum at least tripled the groundwater protection standard seven times, exceeding the threshold across eight wells.

For many people, connecting their health concerns to coal ash is exceedingly difficult. Science shows that dozens of elements in coal ash — including arsenic, mercury, lithium, lead, selenium, and radium — can be dangerous and even deadly to humans. But tying coal ash to a specific person's ailments likely requires studies based on evidence of community or workplace exposure, according to Kristina Zierold, a public health professor at the University of Mississippi. 

And so far, little proof exists, which is largely a missed opportunity, Zierold said. While at the University of Louisville, her research focused on communities bordering Mill Creek and Cane Run Generating Station, another former coal plant owned by LG&E/KU that converted to natural gas in 2015 and then spent years closing its coal ash sites. 

Zierold began door knocking in the Cane Run and Mill Creek neighborhoods in 2012. She sent letters about her study through a mailing list of the 12-ZIP code area and slipped flyers under the windshield wipers of teachers’ cars in local schools. She took out Facebook ads and stood in store parking lots near the plants handing out information. Parents told her about learning difficulties, poor school performance, and the prevalence of ADHD among kids in their neighborhood, challenges Zierold knew were also seen in kids exposed to heavy metals. They also reported asthma and respiratory problems, along with trouble sleeping.

Shoeleather epidemiology eventually introduced Zierold and her fellow researchers to roughly 280 kids, aged 6-14 years old, and their families. They would become the participants in an almost $3 million study from the National Institutes of Health exploring how children’s neurobehavioral problems at home and school could be connected to coal ash exposure. Researchers set up devices to collect air samples in their homes, took dust samples in the children’s bedrooms and family rooms, and periodically collected nail clippings from children to test for heavy metals. 

Under a microscope, the air samples showed 43 percent of 261 kids’ homes contained cenospheres. These are glassy, spherical particles that form when minerals melt during combustion and reform in exhaust steam, according to Zierold. Those cenospheres meant coal ash was present in almost half the homes. Children with coal ash in their homes had increased levels of iron, aluminum, and silica in their nails, all contaminants found within coal ash. Zierold worked closely with a psychologist and found a relationship between coal ash exposure and elevated levels of depression and lower school performance among the kids. 

“There needs to be a ton more funding and a ton more research on this,” Zierold said. But she’s struggled to secure funding to move the research forward.  Zierold would have liked to study adults after hearing about high rates of cancer in the communities near Mill Creek and Cane Run from residents. Counties closer to coal-fired impoundments tend to have higher cancer rates, according to a 2026 spatial association analysis led by Charlie Zhang, an urban and health geographer at the University of Louisville also involved in Zierold’s research.

The map below shows the annual cancer incidence rate across the United States, measured as the number of new cancer cases per 100,000 people. Kentucky is highlighted with a red outline.

Much of Kentucky is dark red on one of the study’s maps in Zhang’s research. Kentucky is one of the top five states when it comes to the number of coal ash impoundments, and ranks highest for both cancer incidence and mortality. Those cancer rates are often attributed to social determinants like low education and high poverty rates, with high rates of tobacco-, obesity- and HPV-related cancers. Research connecting cancer to coal ash is often marginalized, according to Zhang, especially in coal country.

Coal ash, Zierold said, “affects so many people, and a lot of people don’t even know they’re being affected by it, and that’s the sad thing. It’s very sad.”

While Zierold was working on her health study, she was approached by lawyers representing a group of workers who alleged they were sickened from cleaning up the Kingston coal ash disaster across the stateline in Tennessee. The lawyers wanted Zierold for consulting, but because her research focused on kids, not adults, she declined. She called the limited research a shame.

Now, the utility in charge of the Kingston spill, the Tennessee Valley Authority, is issuing its own “scientific context” about coal ash. Angie Mummaw,  an organizer with the environmental nonprofit Appalachian Voices,attended a meeting in April about the extended retirement dates for the two coal units near the Cumberland Fossil Plant about 70 miles west of Nashville. Mummaw encountered a woman holding a booklet of TVA fact sheets who told her that the amount of molybdenum, a coal ash contaminant detected at Cumberland, was equivalent to what a person would eat in a serving of black-eyed peas; she also compared the amount of arsenic found at the plant to what a person might get from a glass of wine or a cup of hot chocolate. TVA’s fact sheets read, in part, “Coal Ash is Not Hazardous” and included the statement “the constituents of coal ash are nearly identical to common soil.”

TVA spokesperson Scott Brooks said in an email that the fact sheets referenced were developed to help advance public understanding using information and data from credible third-party sources.

“They are intended to provide scientific context about coal ash and to illustrate that many of its naturally occurring constituents are also found throughout the environment,” Brooks wrote. He said the common narrative around coal ash isn’t rooted in reality or informed by the extensive science, monitoring, and regulatory oversight that govern its management today.

V. ‘Can Kentucky do something?’

Well over one hundred people signed up to speak at the EPA’s virtual public listening session on the coal ash rollback in late May. So many that the agency had to extend the session, keeping people across the country glued to their computer screens from 9 am to 7 pm. The 141 speakers were from faith organizations, environmental groups and nursing associations. They were Tribal members, scientists, attorneys, parents and neighbors living near coal ash sites. 

Susan Wind, an activist who used to live in Lake Norman, North Carolina, spoke about the cancers children in her neighborhood were diagnosed with in a community she said was built on top of coal ash used as fill for the development. They included her daughter, who was diagnosed with thyroid cancer at 16 years old.

“The word of the day is betrayed,” said Wind. “Betrayed not just by a utility company that put profit over people, but by the very agencies sworn to protect us, you especially, the EPA.” 

She came from a state with some of the strongest regulations in the country. After the Dan River disaster in 2014, North Carolina passed the Coal Ash Management Act, going beyond federal regulations, forcing Duke Energy to excavate and close leaking coal ash sites. Michael Regan, former head of the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, helped negotiate Duke Energy’s cleanup, developed the state’s clean energy plan,and later helmed the Biden administration’s EPA. 

“We have a coal ash program that does work,” said SELC’s Torrey, who lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. “It’s the only one like it in the country.” 

A system with loosened regulations on coal ash, like what Trump’s EPA proposed, could allow utilities to pressure regulators into accepting inadequate monitoring or cleanup plans, critics say. Activists like Wind would continue devoting their lives to challenging such plans on a case-by-case basis instead of working with the federal government to protect them. States would become the new watchdog, and most states aren’t ready, let alone interested, in policing the coal industry.

Oklahoma, Georgia, Texas, North Dakota, and Wyoming have authorized state CCR permit programs, the EPA press office said in an emailed statement, and the agency has proposed approval of three other state CCR permit programs in Virginia, Louisiana, and Alabama.

The Kentucky EEC targeted September to formally file regulation changes to join these ranks, pending a comment period and public hearing.

“Can Kentucky do something? Yes, they can,” McGarvey said. “But the reality is the states, including Kentucky, do not have the resources to do this. They know it. That’s why they’re doing this. They’re trying to give coal companies and big corporations a pass so that there is going to be no accountability.” 

Back on Rainbow Drive, Hendricks stood in her front yard. 

“Are the federal rules changing on this? That’s crazy,” Hendricks said. Her neighbor, Roger Mills, a resident in his 70s, stood outside his front door, with his dog peering through the glass. 

“It’s the dirtiest place I’ve ever lived in my life,” Mills said.“It’s got to be unhealthy breathing it.” But he had little information and few resources. Mills spends his days taking care of his wife with dementia, who grew up in the house where they now live. 

While they breathed, the plant burned on.

***

Plumes form from burning coal for electricity at the Mill Creek Generating Station, the last utility-scale coal-fired power plant in Jefferson County, Kentucky. The plant operates between the banks of the Ohio River and a low-income neighborhood called Valley Station less than 15 miles southwest of downtown Louisville. The city has repeatedly failed to meet the EPA’s air quality standards for ozone, becoming one of the 25 smoggiest cities in the U.S., according to the American Lung Association’s 2026 State of the Air report.

Air pollution is a known problem for Hendricks’ community. What’s more obscure are the health risks from the waste left behind by combusted coal, known as coal ash. Proposed federal regulations coming from the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency could make finding and cleaning up that waste even more difficult.

Walking barefoot along the horseshoe of her driveway in May, Hendricks said she’s long worried over the health impacts from the plant.

People are dying of cancer left and right in this subdivision.

That waste, known as coal ash, has been dumped within at least six sites across Mill Creek’s 544-acre footprint, enough to fill more than 6,200 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Contaminants within the ash can cause cancer and other serious health effects. But for decades, coal ash was poorly regulated by the federal government. The grey sludge, often kept in place by mixing the featherlight dust with water, leached from unlined pits into groundwater, surface water, and soils. Meanwhile, dried ash took to the air and traveled for miles into the surrounding communities, landing on windowsills and migrating into children’s bedrooms. 

Coal ash contains higher concentrations of contaminants compared to the original rock. According to a January 2026 report filed by the plant’s owners, Mill Creek’s coal ash sites are leaking heavy metals like arsenic, molybdenum, and lithium. Arsenic is a known carcinogen; molybdenum can cause achy joints and lead to liver and kidney damage; and lithium is a metal associated with multiple health risks, including neurological damage. 

For decades, electric utilities avoided monitoring and cleaning up their waste. Then came a pair of disasters in 2008 and 2014 where coal ash broke from a dam at the Kingston Fossil Plant in Tennessee and a pipe at the Dan River Steam Station in North Carolina, clogging waterways and leveling homes.In 2015, President Barack Obama’s administration finally took action to protect communities from coal ash, requiring groundwater monitoring and cleanup plans. 

The industry’s own data, compiled by Earthjustice, an environmental nonprofit that has litigated numerous coal ash cases, showed that coal ash at nine out of every ten power plants polluted groundwater. In 2023, the EPA announced that cancer risks from arsenic and radiation in soils containing coal ash were high enough to require further regulation. Under President Joe Biden, the EPA doubled down, adding the protection of communities from coal ash contamination to a national priority list as one of its most critical charges. 

But the heyday of federal coal ash oversight has atrophied, and long-fought-for improvements are under threat again. Most states, including Kentucky, rarely regulate coal ash beyond permitting facilities and largely rely on federal oversight for enforcement. 

“Team Kentucky’s focus is to make sure our communities and our natural resources are protected from any adverse effects of coal ash storage. We do this by working with our utility companies and property owners, but also within the constraints of federal and state laws,” Robin Hartman, spokesperson for the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, the state agency responsible for environmental and natural resource regulatory enforcement, said in an email. 

Five days before President Donald Trump was sworn in for the second time, 10 utility executives, including the owner-operator of Mill Creek, asked Lee Zeldin, a fossil fuel evangelist and then-nominee for administrator of the EPA, in a letter to overhaul environmental laws, including nascent regulations on coal combustion residuals, a wonky name for coal ash. The last signator, John R. Crockett III, is president of Kentucky’s two companies that form the state’s largest utility, Louisville Gas and Electric Company and Kentucky Utilities Energy, LLC, or LG&E/KU.

The EPA acquiesced in April, first proposing a new rule that would allow states and utilities to bypass standing regulations for coal ash cleanup, and then reopening a case for a new permitting system that could further weaken requirements. In an emailed statement to The Margin, an EPA spokesperson described the proposed changes as “a major improvement over the Biden-era rule.” They continued, “Under the proposed new compliance pathway, permit authorities could tailor requirements to site-specific risks and incorporate advances in monitoring and corrective technologies.” 

In late June, LG&E/KU filed comments supporting those amendments, highlighting the need to delegate the federal coal ash program to state authorities, enhance flexibility for compliance options, and remove provisions for specific sites called Coal Combustion Residuals Management Units. Earlier that month, the Trump administration doubled down, announcing $700 million in taxpayer funding to keep coal alive. The budget included $124 million on upgrading three coal plants in Kentucky, which is home to eight operating coal plants, the majority of which line the Ohio River. 

“The two things are part and parcel of one another,” said Gavin Kearney, deputy managing attorney for Earthjustice’s clean energy program. “Eliminating coal ash protections is a way of helping coal plants prosper.

Now, the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, the state agency responsible for environmental and natural resource regulatory enforcement, is seeking approval to self-implement permits and efforts to clean up coal combustion residuals (CCR), another name for coal waste.   

“The EEC has been developing new regulations for (CCR) that, if approved, would protect Kentuckians’ public health, ratepayers, and the environment by enabling additional oversight from the state and allowing the cabinet to evaluate each facility individually,” Hartman said in an email. “The proposed regulation would require CCR owners to get a permit similar to those acquired by landfills and require the facility to conduct a comprehensive investigation of the structural stability, groundwater quality, and all remedies for coal ash impoundments."

Advocates warn that under new coal ash proposals, utilities could potentially close coal ash ponds that are in contact with and contaminate groundwater, which the current rule forbids, without first cleaning them up. The rollbacks also relax some monitoring requirements for cleaning up contaminated groundwater. In addition, the proposals could exempt hundreds of large piles of ash from any oversight by rolling back a 2024 rule that expanded the definition of coal ash sites. This proposal could allow state regulators to shortcut or eliminate coal ash protections, leaving citizens to challenge a utility's plans for its coal ash cleanup on a site-by-site basis. This would be a Sisyphean task. In Kentucky, there are at least 87 coal ash sites; across the country there are more than 1,000, according to Earthjustice. Experts said they estimate the weakened rules to be finalized by the end of this year. Mill Creek likely has at least three Coal Combustion Residuals Management Units (CCRMU’s), according to data collected by Earthjustice. 

Folks like Hendricks, who often had multiple jobs at a time while raising two kids and caring for ill relatives, don’t usually have time or resources to play watchdog to powerful utilities. She inherited her house from her mother, who died three years ago from lung cancer, and lives in it with her sister. Her daughter lives in a house Hendricks owns on Rainbow Drive, the last line of homes before the green lawn of the plant property begins. Most families like hers living near coal ash sites depend on federal regulators to ensure their safety from toxic and sometimes unstable ash impoundments.

LG&E told The Margin the utility would publish a report defining its CCRMU sites, in compliance with regulations, which LG&E has asked the EPA to rescind. During the licensing process for two new gas units at Mill Creek, one proposed and one under construction, LG&E disclosed the plants would be built on an old storage site for Posotech, a low-grade concrete material manufactured with coal ash, LG&E/KU spokesperson Andrew Gardner said in an email. He added, “It is likely the Mill Creek site has other CCRMU given the existing rule’s definition of CCRMU.”

Fewer than half of Kentucky’s coal ash sites are reliably monitored by the federal government. Self-reported industry data show that all but one have contamination levels above safe drinking water standards. That includes Mill Creek, where heavy metals can be found at levels triple groundwater protection standards, finding pathways to the Ohio River and off the plant’s southern edge. Regardless, LG&E plans to keep Mill Creek burning coal. 

Gardner said in an email that the utility “is properly managing the site to protect public health and the environment,” and complies with the 2015 Obama-era rule pertaining to closing impoundments, operating its landfill, monitoring groundwater, and notifying regulators about constituents of concerns and remedies.

In June, Congressman Morgan McGarvey, whose district covers Mill Creek, signed a separate letter to Zeldin asking the EPA not to weaken coal ash regulations that could expose working-class communities facing disproportionate environmental burdens to dangerous contaminants. 

“They’re not located in rich neighborhoods,” McGarvey told The Margin of coal ash sites in his state. “They are already in places where it will hurt even worse for people who have suffered from pollution and being dumped on for years and years.

II. Kentucky’s ‘deregulatory mania’

When Thomas Edison began burning coal at Pearl Street Station to illuminate households in lower Manhattan in 1882, the commercial power he created made commercial-scale waste. 

In the century and a half since, billions of tons of coal ash have been stored in landfills (when dry), ponds (when wet), and haphazard holes. Those dumps, largely unlined, often border rivers and streams, since coal plants need water to create steam and cool the generation systems. Pollutants from those sites could continue contaminating groundwater for hundreds of years, according to Nick Torrey, coal ash attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit focused on legal advocacy and environmental protection in six southern states.

It’s basically a forever problem in terms of any normal human scale.

Since the 1980s, the coal industry has found loopholes to avoid the overwhelming scope of its waste problem. After the 1976 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act was enacted, governing the disposal of waste, the 1980 Bevill Amendment granted polluters regulatory relief by classifying coal ash as a non-hazardous waste, which allowed the industry to continue to dispose of it in landfills and ponds. The EPA reaffirmed that decision in 1993 and 2000, but environmentalists have long protested this exception, arguing coal ash contains dozens of heavy metals and radiation that would qualify other materials as hazardous. 

Kentucky has long been a leader in coal power, a trend on the decline. About 67% of the state’s power grid came from coal in 2024, down from more than 90% a decade earlier. Coal power declined as natural gas became cheaper, the coal supply diminished, and the global energy market pulled away from one of the world’s dirtiest fuels. 

While there has been a reduction in coal, a rapid increase in electricity demand and a failure to quickly transition to renewable alternatives means coal continues to stick around. Last year, LG&E/KU projected its energy demand could double in the coming years, largely from data centers. Activists against data centers in Jefferson County are pushing back against LG&E/KU’s request to build more gas and extend coal, which they say will fuel projects like the 400-megawatt data center approved by Louisville regulators about 12 miles north of the plant.

The map below displays coal ash sites and data centers across Kentucky and near its border, with each site's status available by hovering over its location. The Ohio River is highlighted in red to illustrate the concentration of these sites near major waterways. The map also includes county-level census data showing the percentage of residents who identify as people of color.

Meanwhile, state lawmakers have made it exceedingly difficult to transition to cleaner sources of energy. A pair of laws passed in 2023 and 2024 made it more difficult to retire fossil-fired units and to replace fossil fuels with most renewables. Republican legislators during this year’s session proposed rolling back state environmental regulations under a bill that would make it impossible to pass state environmental laws in Kentucky that are stricter than federal laws. 

“There’s a deregulatory mania in Kentucky right now,” said Michael Washburn, executive director of the Kentucky Waterways Alliance, a nonprofit focused on protecting state waterways.

That pro-coal stance could influence older facilities like Mill Creek, which once had four coal-burning units. One retired in 2024, replaced by a gas turbine still under construction. LG&E/KU also asked the state to build a second gas turbine at Mill Creek and extend the life of the third coal unit until at least 2031. Previously, that stack was slated to retire next year. Two more could be retired in 2035, according to LG&E/KU 2024 integrated resource plan, but that decision will be reassessed in the utility’s 2027 plan. 

“We fully believe these investments are in the best interests of our customers and the communities we’re proud to serve, and they build upon our history of continuous environmental improvement initiatives and major equipment investments at Mill Creek,” Gardner wrote in an email.

Keeping coal burning will cost ratepayers, critics say. Coal generation is expensive, and so is building new gas-fired units, according to a 2025 report by the Kentucky Resources Council. The state could save electricity customers $2.6 billion by mid-century if utilities transitioned away from coal and gas to renewable energy and battery storage, according to the report, potentially reaching a 95% clean energy portfolio by 2050 without increasing costs to consumers.

Ann Gunter, a 72-year-old who moved into her home near Mill Creek in 2003, said she was told the plant would be converted to gas by 2006. More than 20 years later, she said she’s still waiting, frustrated by the soot that accumulates on her house and car. LG&E/KU told The Margin it was not familiar with these claims and was actively transitioning portions of generation on the Mill Creek site from coal to natural gas. Gardner said Mill Creek Unit 5, the first combined cycle gas plant at the site, should be operating by spring 2027.

“They keep telling us, ‘next year we’re converting to gas,’” Gunter said from her front porch, wiping dust off the railing. “And next year never comes."

III. Between Rainbow Drive and the ‘Cloud Maker’

Beneath the towering Mill Creek station, along Rainbow Drive and on surrounding streets, dogs bark. Day lilies bloom orange. Tomato and cucumber starts wait in plastic trays on the patio. Robins’ feet click on the gutters, and cardinals perch on the edge of a bird bath shaped like a sunflower. Canadian geese fly against grey clouds. 

Then a flood warning pings cell phones around the time Lauren Hollobaugh opens the front door of her home bordering a grassy beam that functions as a floodwall. The 33-year-old human resources specialist lives on nearby Tennis Boulevard, with her mother and two kids. Her family is beset by several health conditions. Her mom and son have kidney disease. Her daughter and her mother have eczema. She has sensitive skin, so exposure to chlorine or too much sun causes her to develop rashes.

The Margin knocked on more than 60 doors in May. Some residents, especially those with children, expressed concern about their proximity to Mill Creek but struggle to connect their ailments to their high-polluting neighbor beyond anecdote. However, not everyone feels the same about this neighbor. Some support coal keeping the lights on. Others are indifferent. One neighbor insisted the plant did not burn coal anymore. 

Wilbur, a Spanish-speaker from Venezuela who works night shifts as a Walmart custodian, moved here two years ago with his son and a friend. He said he worried at first, but he hadn’t noticed any health issues. Vina Duncan, a woman in her nineties who moved to the neighborhood 30 years ago from Harlan County, said nothing about the plant bothered her.

But many are worried about the risks to their health and property that living so close to the plant poses while having little insight into the federal changes afoot that could remove guardrails for the plant’s pollution. 

Burning coal produces particulate matter, tiny bits of soot that can trigger asthma and cardiovascular issues. Hendricks has suffered from allergies, and Hendricks’ neighbor, Sherry Fitz, developed allergies after moving into the neighborhood. Every morning, she said she smells chemicals. She has to dust every day. 

Fitz moved onto Betsy Ross Drive when her daughter was three years old, making her a “smokestack baby,” a nickname for the little ones who grow up in the neighborhood, Fitz said. The now 12-year-old has allergies and depression, and her 17-year-old sister lives with social anxiety. Fitz said she doesn’t interact very much with LG&E but recalled a book giveaway by the utility at Watson Lane Elementary, then her kids’ school.

“You're hurting my kids’ insides, but you’re going to give them a stupid book?” Fitz recalled thinking. That school has since closed. A second school in the area, Frost Middle School, also closed, and was later purchased by LG&E. In an email, Gardner said the purchase was to support current and future operations at Mill Creek as the utility plans to build a warehouse there to support the operational needs of Mill Creek’s gas units. 

Soot has fallen in the neighborhood, for about half a century. Marla Patterson, who grew up here, moved back in 2000, said fine black residue coated her outdoor toys as a child. She and her family have long lived in the area and, by her account, she has been significantly impacted by the plant. 

Patterson recalled that her grandparents bought one of Valley Station’s first homes back in the 1940s when the neighborhood was sparsely occupied. Years later, it became a subdivision. Patterson was born in 1967, a year before construction began on Mill Creek. After moving back, Patterson was leaving for work one morning in her brand new black Kia Sephia when she saw tiny white flakes floating in the air. She drove to Timmy’s Auto Wash on Dixie Highway to wash off the dots spotting her car, but the soap and water only made the white specks brighter. She called LG&E to complain, but she said the utility only offered a car wash. The paint job on the new car was ruined, Patterson said. Worse, Patterson, who grew up with symptoms of bad asthma, alleged that she ended up with pneumonia after the incident.

“Anything that sits outside is basically destroyed,” Patterson said. 

Her dad, who never drank alcohol or smoked cigarettes, died of liver cancer less than three months after his diagnosis, Patterson recalled. Her mother has dementia. Patterson works in health care, shuttling between three jobs at a local nursing home, a west end hospital, and a teaching gig at Sullivan University.

“I knew living by LG&E was a bad thing,” Patterson said. But she came back to help her family and take care of her grandmother, and she stayed.

Some neighbors who answered the door for The Margin relocated here because homes offer some of the cheapest property values in Louisville, the state’s most populous city. Alfredo Carballo opened the door to his sister’s house, where she lives with her mom and two young children. They get sick more often in this neighborhood, with cold symptoms including a cough, Carballo said. They spent months trying to sell the home but couldn’t find a buyer, so they took the house off the market.

Patricia Myers, 61, was diagnosed with small cell carcinoma, a highly aggressive form of cancer that typically originates in the lungs, last October. She’s lived in her house, bordering a chain link fence with LG&E/KU since 2008, after growing up in the neighborhood. Myers said she lost several childhood friends to cancer, but gesturing to stubbed-out cigarettes on her patio table, she said she couldn’t necessarily attribute her illness to the plant when she’s also been a longtime smoker. 

One woman, who asked not to share her name, spoke through her living room window after peeling back a lace curtain. She said the issue used to be bigger, but the state and the federal government didn’t seem to care very much anymore. Her next door neighbor, she said, died of throat cancer. 

LG&E/KU told The Margin it wasn’t familiar with these complaints.

“LG&E investigates all complaints, operates in strict compliance with operating permits including dust control plans, and strives to be a good neighbor,” Gardner wrote in an email. “We’re continually monitoring, measuring and reporting the plant’s performance to appropriate federal, state and local regulatory agencies, and we operate Mill Creek and all of our power plants under federally enforceable operating permits.”

The neighborhoods around Mill Creek suffer broader cumulative and synergistic effects of environmental injustice, according to Tony Arnold, a law professor at the University of Louisville who runs the Resilience Justice Project, an organization whose work includes a focus on the environmental and community needs around the Mill Creek watershed.

Along with the Mill Creek power plant, there’s the Kosmos Cement Plant across the street from the Mill Creek landfill, the car exhaust along Dixie Highway, and the chemical plants just north in Rubbertown. 

“A lot of communities, a lot of neighborhoods that are marginalized have fewer resources,” Arnold said. That includes a lack of information about the plant, its emissions, and the regulatory bodies that oversee it. Rollbacks on climate science at the federal level also limit research into how climate change, largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels, could impact Mill Creek’s coal ash.

“With extreme flooding, if there’s some sort of accident or unintentional release or if it’s not managed properly, there are all sorts of things that could go wrong, and the fact that we’ve already had discharges in the past tells you that things can go wrong,” Arnold said. 

In a “worst-case” flooding scenario modeled in a 2017 LG&E report, Rainbow Drive, where Hendricks’ daughter lives, could have been under five feet of contaminated water from the now-closed coal ash pond within an hour of a flood event.

IV. Cancer in coal country

Mill Creek has one active coal ash landfill, a roughly 14-story behemoth sandwiched between the Ohio River and Dixie Highway, an artery that helps connect metro Louisville to nearly 1.4 million people. The plant also houses five closed coal ash sites, including a large closed coal ash pond that borders the river and the Mill Creek watershed. Standing in the woods below the terraced rows of gravel, the chemical smell of the closed pond is inescapable. 

Both the landfill and the pond are leaking contaminants into the Ohio River and onto an industrial property south of the plant, according to a January report filed by LG&E. At least 17 out of 29 monitoring wells at Mill Creek had tests showing contaminants above federal groundwater protection standards. Arsenic, lithium and molybdenum exceeded those standards dozens of times across two testing events in April and September of 2025. Cobalt exceeded those standards twice and thallium once.The report said these contaminants weren’t likely to measurably increase concentrations in the Ohio River, where residents boat, fish, and recreate. LG&E reported and made publicly available its own monitoring data, as required under the 2015 rule, but so far no enforcement actions seem to have been taken by the federal or state government to bring the utility into compliance after its most recent report.

Arsenic, a known carcinogen found at least once at Mill Creek at levels 37 times the federal standard, exceeded the groundwater protection standard seven times last year. Lithium exceeded the threshold across at least 10 wells, sometimes measuring more than seven times the standard. Molybdenum at least tripled the groundwater protection standard seven times, exceeding the threshold across eight wells.

For many people, connecting their health concerns to coal ash is exceedingly difficult. Science shows that dozens of elements in coal ash — including arsenic, mercury, lithium, lead, selenium, and radium — can be dangerous and even deadly to humans. But tying coal ash to a specific person's ailments likely requires studies based on evidence of community or workplace exposure, according to Kristina Zierold, a public health professor at the University of Mississippi. 

And so far, little proof exists, which is largely a missed opportunity, Zierold said. While at the University of Louisville, her research focused on communities bordering Mill Creek and Cane Run Generating Station, another former coal plant owned by LG&E/KU that converted to natural gas in 2015 and then spent years closing its coal ash sites. 

Zierold began door knocking in the Cane Run and Mill Creek neighborhoods in 2012. She sent letters about her study through a mailing list of the 12-ZIP code area and slipped flyers under the windshield wipers of teachers’ cars in local schools. She took out Facebook ads and stood in store parking lots near the plants handing out information. Parents told her about learning difficulties, poor school performance, and the prevalence of ADHD among kids in their neighborhood, challenges Zierold knew were also seen in kids exposed to heavy metals. They also reported asthma and respiratory problems, along with trouble sleeping.

Shoeleather epidemiology eventually introduced Zierold and her fellow researchers to roughly 280 kids, aged 6-14 years old, and their families. They would become the participants in an almost $3 million study from the National Institutes of Health exploring how children’s neurobehavioral problems at home and school could be connected to coal ash exposure. Researchers set up devices to collect air samples in their homes, took dust samples in the children’s bedrooms and family rooms, and periodically collected nail clippings from children to test for heavy metals. 

Under a microscope, the air samples showed 43 percent of 261 kids’ homes contained cenospheres. These are glassy, spherical particles that form when minerals melt during combustion and reform in exhaust steam, according to Zierold. Those cenospheres meant coal ash was present in almost half the homes. Children with coal ash in their homes had increased levels of iron, aluminum, and silica in their nails, all contaminants found within coal ash. Zierold worked closely with a psychologist and found a relationship between coal ash exposure and elevated levels of depression and lower school performance among the kids. 

“There needs to be a ton more funding and a ton more research on this,” Zierold said. But she’s struggled to secure funding to move the research forward.  Zierold would have liked to study adults after hearing about high rates of cancer in the communities near Mill Creek and Cane Run from residents. Counties closer to coal-fired impoundments tend to have higher cancer rates, according to a 2026 spatial association analysis led by Charlie Zhang, an urban and health geographer at the University of Louisville also involved in Zierold’s research.

The map below shows the annual cancer incidence rate across the United States, measured as the number of new cancer cases per 100,000 people. Kentucky is highlighted with a red outline.

Much of Kentucky is dark red on one of the study’s maps in Zhang’s research. Kentucky is one of the top five states when it comes to the number of coal ash impoundments, and ranks highest for both cancer incidence and mortality. Those cancer rates are often attributed to social determinants like low education and high poverty rates, with high rates of tobacco-, obesity- and HPV-related cancers. Research connecting cancer to coal ash is often marginalized, according to Zhang, especially in coal country.

Coal ash, Zierold said, “affects so many people, and a lot of people don’t even know they’re being affected by it, and that’s the sad thing. It’s very sad.”

While Zierold was working on her health study, she was approached by lawyers representing a group of workers who alleged they were sickened from cleaning up the Kingston coal ash disaster across the stateline in Tennessee. The lawyers wanted Zierold for consulting, but because her research focused on kids, not adults, she declined. She called the limited research a shame.

Now, the utility in charge of the Kingston spill, the Tennessee Valley Authority, is issuing its own “scientific context” about coal ash. Angie Mummaw,  an organizer with the environmental nonprofit Appalachian Voices,attended a meeting in April about the extended retirement dates for the two coal units near the Cumberland Fossil Plant about 70 miles west of Nashville. Mummaw encountered a woman holding a booklet of TVA fact sheets who told her that the amount of molybdenum, a coal ash contaminant detected at Cumberland, was equivalent to what a person would eat in a serving of black-eyed peas; she also compared the amount of arsenic found at the plant to what a person might get from a glass of wine or a cup of hot chocolate. TVA’s fact sheets read, in part, “Coal Ash is Not Hazardous” and included the statement “the constituents of coal ash are nearly identical to common soil.”

TVA spokesperson Scott Brooks said in an email that the fact sheets referenced were developed to help advance public understanding using information and data from credible third-party sources.

“They are intended to provide scientific context about coal ash and to illustrate that many of its naturally occurring constituents are also found throughout the environment,” Brooks wrote. He said the common narrative around coal ash isn’t rooted in reality or informed by the extensive science, monitoring, and regulatory oversight that govern its management today.

V. ‘Can Kentucky do something?’

Well over one hundred people signed up to speak at the EPA’s virtual public listening session on the coal ash rollback in late May. So many that the agency had to extend the session, keeping people across the country glued to their computer screens from 9 am to 7 pm. The 141 speakers were from faith organizations, environmental groups and nursing associations. They were Tribal members, scientists, attorneys, parents and neighbors living near coal ash sites. 

Susan Wind, an activist who used to live in Lake Norman, North Carolina, spoke about the cancers children in her neighborhood were diagnosed with in a community she said was built on top of coal ash used as fill for the development. They included her daughter, who was diagnosed with thyroid cancer at 16 years old.

“The word of the day is betrayed,” said Wind. “Betrayed not just by a utility company that put profit over people, but by the very agencies sworn to protect us, you especially, the EPA.” 

She came from a state with some of the strongest regulations in the country. After the Dan River disaster in 2014, North Carolina passed the Coal Ash Management Act, going beyond federal regulations, forcing Duke Energy to excavate and close leaking coal ash sites. Michael Regan, former head of the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, helped negotiate Duke Energy’s cleanup, developed the state’s clean energy plan,and later helmed the Biden administration’s EPA. 

“We have a coal ash program that does work,” said SELC’s Torrey, who lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. “It’s the only one like it in the country.” 

A system with loosened regulations on coal ash, like what Trump’s EPA proposed, could allow utilities to pressure regulators into accepting inadequate monitoring or cleanup plans, critics say. Activists like Wind would continue devoting their lives to challenging such plans on a case-by-case basis instead of working with the federal government to protect them. States would become the new watchdog, and most states aren’t ready, let alone interested, in policing the coal industry.

Oklahoma, Georgia, Texas, North Dakota, and Wyoming have authorized state CCR permit programs, the EPA press office said in an emailed statement, and the agency has proposed approval of three other state CCR permit programs in Virginia, Louisiana, and Alabama.

The Kentucky EEC targeted September to formally file regulation changes to join these ranks, pending a comment period and public hearing.

“Can Kentucky do something? Yes, they can,” McGarvey said. “But the reality is the states, including Kentucky, do not have the resources to do this. They know it. That’s why they’re doing this. They’re trying to give coal companies and big corporations a pass so that there is going to be no accountability.” 

Back on Rainbow Drive, Hendricks stood in her front yard. 

“Are the federal rules changing on this? That’s crazy,” Hendricks said. Her neighbor, Roger Mills, a resident in his 70s, stood outside his front door, with his dog peering through the glass. 

“It’s the dirtiest place I’ve ever lived in my life,” Mills said.“It’s got to be unhealthy breathing it.” But he had little information and few resources. Mills spends his days taking care of his wife with dementia, who grew up in the house where they now live. 

While they breathed, the plant burned on.

***

Plumes form from burning coal for electricity at the Mill Creek Generating Station, the last utility-scale coal-fired power plant in Jefferson County, Kentucky. The plant operates between the banks of the Ohio River and a low-income neighborhood called Valley Station less than 15 miles southwest of downtown Louisville. The city has repeatedly failed to meet the EPA’s air quality standards for ozone, becoming one of the 25 smoggiest cities in the U.S., according to the American Lung Association’s 2026 State of the Air report.

Air pollution is a known problem for Hendricks’ community. What’s more obscure are the health risks from the waste left behind by combusted coal, known as coal ash. Proposed federal regulations coming from the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency could make finding and cleaning up that waste even more difficult.

Walking barefoot along the horseshoe of her driveway in May, Hendricks said she’s long worried over the health impacts from the plant.

People are dying of cancer left and right in this subdivision.

That waste, known as coal ash, has been dumped within at least six sites across Mill Creek’s 544-acre footprint, enough to fill more than 6,200 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Contaminants within the ash can cause cancer and other serious health effects. But for decades, coal ash was poorly regulated by the federal government. The grey sludge, often kept in place by mixing the featherlight dust with water, leached from unlined pits into groundwater, surface water, and soils. Meanwhile, dried ash took to the air and traveled for miles into the surrounding communities, landing on windowsills and migrating into children’s bedrooms. 

Coal ash contains higher concentrations of contaminants compared to the original rock. According to a January 2026 report filed by the plant’s owners, Mill Creek’s coal ash sites are leaking heavy metals like arsenic, molybdenum, and lithium. Arsenic is a known carcinogen; molybdenum can cause achy joints and lead to liver and kidney damage; and lithium is a metal associated with multiple health risks, including neurological damage. 

For decades, electric utilities avoided monitoring and cleaning up their waste. Then came a pair of disasters in 2008 and 2014 where coal ash broke from a dam at the Kingston Fossil Plant in Tennessee and a pipe at the Dan River Steam Station in North Carolina, clogging waterways and leveling homes.In 2015, President Barack Obama’s administration finally took action to protect communities from coal ash, requiring groundwater monitoring and cleanup plans. 

The industry’s own data, compiled by Earthjustice, an environmental nonprofit that has litigated numerous coal ash cases, showed that coal ash at nine out of every ten power plants polluted groundwater. In 2023, the EPA announced that cancer risks from arsenic and radiation in soils containing coal ash were high enough to require further regulation. Under President Joe Biden, the EPA doubled down, adding the protection of communities from coal ash contamination to a national priority list as one of its most critical charges. 

But the heyday of federal coal ash oversight has atrophied, and long-fought-for improvements are under threat again. Most states, including Kentucky, rarely regulate coal ash beyond permitting facilities and largely rely on federal oversight for enforcement. 

“Team Kentucky’s focus is to make sure our communities and our natural resources are protected from any adverse effects of coal ash storage. We do this by working with our utility companies and property owners, but also within the constraints of federal and state laws,” Robin Hartman, spokesperson for the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, the state agency responsible for environmental and natural resource regulatory enforcement, said in an email. 

Five days before President Donald Trump was sworn in for the second time, 10 utility executives, including the owner-operator of Mill Creek, asked Lee Zeldin, a fossil fuel evangelist and then-nominee for administrator of the EPA, in a letter to overhaul environmental laws, including nascent regulations on coal combustion residuals, a wonky name for coal ash. The last signator, John R. Crockett III, is president of Kentucky’s two companies that form the state’s largest utility, Louisville Gas and Electric Company and Kentucky Utilities Energy, LLC, or LG&E/KU.

The EPA acquiesced in April, first proposing a new rule that would allow states and utilities to bypass standing regulations for coal ash cleanup, and then reopening a case for a new permitting system that could further weaken requirements. In an emailed statement to The Margin, an EPA spokesperson described the proposed changes as “a major improvement over the Biden-era rule.” They continued, “Under the proposed new compliance pathway, permit authorities could tailor requirements to site-specific risks and incorporate advances in monitoring and corrective technologies.” 

In late June, LG&E/KU filed comments supporting those amendments, highlighting the need to delegate the federal coal ash program to state authorities, enhance flexibility for compliance options, and remove provisions for specific sites called Coal Combustion Residuals Management Units. Earlier that month, the Trump administration doubled down, announcing $700 million in taxpayer funding to keep coal alive. The budget included $124 million on upgrading three coal plants in Kentucky, which is home to eight operating coal plants, the majority of which line the Ohio River. 

“The two things are part and parcel of one another,” said Gavin Kearney, deputy managing attorney for Earthjustice’s clean energy program. “Eliminating coal ash protections is a way of helping coal plants prosper.

Now, the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, the state agency responsible for environmental and natural resource regulatory enforcement, is seeking approval to self-implement permits and efforts to clean up coal combustion residuals (CCR), another name for coal waste.   

“The EEC has been developing new regulations for (CCR) that, if approved, would protect Kentuckians’ public health, ratepayers, and the environment by enabling additional oversight from the state and allowing the cabinet to evaluate each facility individually,” Hartman said in an email. “The proposed regulation would require CCR owners to get a permit similar to those acquired by landfills and require the facility to conduct a comprehensive investigation of the structural stability, groundwater quality, and all remedies for coal ash impoundments."

Advocates warn that under new coal ash proposals, utilities could potentially close coal ash ponds that are in contact with and contaminate groundwater, which the current rule forbids, without first cleaning them up. The rollbacks also relax some monitoring requirements for cleaning up contaminated groundwater. In addition, the proposals could exempt hundreds of large piles of ash from any oversight by rolling back a 2024 rule that expanded the definition of coal ash sites. This proposal could allow state regulators to shortcut or eliminate coal ash protections, leaving citizens to challenge a utility's plans for its coal ash cleanup on a site-by-site basis. This would be a Sisyphean task. In Kentucky, there are at least 87 coal ash sites; across the country there are more than 1,000, according to Earthjustice. Experts said they estimate the weakened rules to be finalized by the end of this year. Mill Creek likely has at least three Coal Combustion Residuals Management Units (CCRMU’s), according to data collected by Earthjustice. 

Folks like Hendricks, who often had multiple jobs at a time while raising two kids and caring for ill relatives, don’t usually have time or resources to play watchdog to powerful utilities. She inherited her house from her mother, who died three years ago from lung cancer, and lives in it with her sister. Her daughter lives in a house Hendricks owns on Rainbow Drive, the last line of homes before the green lawn of the plant property begins. Most families like hers living near coal ash sites depend on federal regulators to ensure their safety from toxic and sometimes unstable ash impoundments.

LG&E told The Margin the utility would publish a report defining its CCRMU sites, in compliance with regulations, which LG&E has asked the EPA to rescind. During the licensing process for two new gas units at Mill Creek, one proposed and one under construction, LG&E disclosed the plants would be built on an old storage site for Posotech, a low-grade concrete material manufactured with coal ash, LG&E/KU spokesperson Andrew Gardner said in an email. He added, “It is likely the Mill Creek site has other CCRMU given the existing rule’s definition of CCRMU.”

Fewer than half of Kentucky’s coal ash sites are reliably monitored by the federal government. Self-reported industry data show that all but one have contamination levels above safe drinking water standards. That includes Mill Creek, where heavy metals can be found at levels triple groundwater protection standards, finding pathways to the Ohio River and off the plant’s southern edge. Regardless, LG&E plans to keep Mill Creek burning coal. 

Gardner said in an email that the utility “is properly managing the site to protect public health and the environment,” and complies with the 2015 Obama-era rule pertaining to closing impoundments, operating its landfill, monitoring groundwater, and notifying regulators about constituents of concerns and remedies.

In June, Congressman Morgan McGarvey, whose district covers Mill Creek, signed a separate letter to Zeldin asking the EPA not to weaken coal ash regulations that could expose working-class communities facing disproportionate environmental burdens to dangerous contaminants. 

“They’re not located in rich neighborhoods,” McGarvey told The Margin of coal ash sites in his state. “They are already in places where it will hurt even worse for people who have suffered from pollution and being dumped on for years and years.

II. Kentucky’s ‘deregulatory mania’

When Thomas Edison began burning coal at Pearl Street Station to illuminate households in lower Manhattan in 1882, the commercial power he created made commercial-scale waste. 

In the century and a half since, billions of tons of coal ash have been stored in landfills (when dry), ponds (when wet), and haphazard holes. Those dumps, largely unlined, often border rivers and streams, since coal plants need water to create steam and cool the generation systems. Pollutants from those sites could continue contaminating groundwater for hundreds of years, according to Nick Torrey, coal ash attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit focused on legal advocacy and environmental protection in six southern states.

It’s basically a forever problem in terms of any normal human scale.

Since the 1980s, the coal industry has found loopholes to avoid the overwhelming scope of its waste problem. After the 1976 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act was enacted, governing the disposal of waste, the 1980 Bevill Amendment granted polluters regulatory relief by classifying coal ash as a non-hazardous waste, which allowed the industry to continue to dispose of it in landfills and ponds. The EPA reaffirmed that decision in 1993 and 2000, but environmentalists have long protested this exception, arguing coal ash contains dozens of heavy metals and radiation that would qualify other materials as hazardous. 

Kentucky has long been a leader in coal power, a trend on the decline. About 67% of the state’s power grid came from coal in 2024, down from more than 90% a decade earlier. Coal power declined as natural gas became cheaper, the coal supply diminished, and the global energy market pulled away from one of the world’s dirtiest fuels. 

While there has been a reduction in coal, a rapid increase in electricity demand and a failure to quickly transition to renewable alternatives means coal continues to stick around. Last year, LG&E/KU projected its energy demand could double in the coming years, largely from data centers. Activists against data centers in Jefferson County are pushing back against LG&E/KU’s request to build more gas and extend coal, which they say will fuel projects like the 400-megawatt data center approved by Louisville regulators about 12 miles north of the plant.

The map below displays coal ash sites and data centers across Kentucky and near its border, with each site's status available by hovering over its location. The Ohio River is highlighted in red to illustrate the concentration of these sites near major waterways. The map also includes county-level census data showing the percentage of residents who identify as people of color.

Meanwhile, state lawmakers have made it exceedingly difficult to transition to cleaner sources of energy. A pair of laws passed in 2023 and 2024 made it more difficult to retire fossil-fired units and to replace fossil fuels with most renewables. Republican legislators during this year’s session proposed rolling back state environmental regulations under a bill that would make it impossible to pass state environmental laws in Kentucky that are stricter than federal laws. 

“There’s a deregulatory mania in Kentucky right now,” said Michael Washburn, executive director of the Kentucky Waterways Alliance, a nonprofit focused on protecting state waterways.

That pro-coal stance could influence older facilities like Mill Creek, which once had four coal-burning units. One retired in 2024, replaced by a gas turbine still under construction. LG&E/KU also asked the state to build a second gas turbine at Mill Creek and extend the life of the third coal unit until at least 2031. Previously, that stack was slated to retire next year. Two more could be retired in 2035, according to LG&E/KU 2024 integrated resource plan, but that decision will be reassessed in the utility’s 2027 plan. 

“We fully believe these investments are in the best interests of our customers and the communities we’re proud to serve, and they build upon our history of continuous environmental improvement initiatives and major equipment investments at Mill Creek,” Gardner wrote in an email.

Keeping coal burning will cost ratepayers, critics say. Coal generation is expensive, and so is building new gas-fired units, according to a 2025 report by the Kentucky Resources Council. The state could save electricity customers $2.6 billion by mid-century if utilities transitioned away from coal and gas to renewable energy and battery storage, according to the report, potentially reaching a 95% clean energy portfolio by 2050 without increasing costs to consumers.

Ann Gunter, a 72-year-old who moved into her home near Mill Creek in 2003, said she was told the plant would be converted to gas by 2006. More than 20 years later, she said she’s still waiting, frustrated by the soot that accumulates on her house and car. LG&E/KU told The Margin it was not familiar with these claims and was actively transitioning portions of generation on the Mill Creek site from coal to natural gas. Gardner said Mill Creek Unit 5, the first combined cycle gas plant at the site, should be operating by spring 2027.

“They keep telling us, ‘next year we’re converting to gas,’” Gunter said from her front porch, wiping dust off the railing. “And next year never comes."

III. Between Rainbow Drive and the ‘Cloud Maker’

Beneath the towering Mill Creek station, along Rainbow Drive and on surrounding streets, dogs bark. Day lilies bloom orange. Tomato and cucumber starts wait in plastic trays on the patio. Robins’ feet click on the gutters, and cardinals perch on the edge of a bird bath shaped like a sunflower. Canadian geese fly against grey clouds. 

Then a flood warning pings cell phones around the time Lauren Hollobaugh opens the front door of her home bordering a grassy beam that functions as a floodwall. The 33-year-old human resources specialist lives on nearby Tennis Boulevard, with her mother and two kids. Her family is beset by several health conditions. Her mom and son have kidney disease. Her daughter and her mother have eczema. She has sensitive skin, so exposure to chlorine or too much sun causes her to develop rashes.

The Margin knocked on more than 60 doors in May. Some residents, especially those with children, expressed concern about their proximity to Mill Creek but struggle to connect their ailments to their high-polluting neighbor beyond anecdote. However, not everyone feels the same about this neighbor. Some support coal keeping the lights on. Others are indifferent. One neighbor insisted the plant did not burn coal anymore. 

Wilbur, a Spanish-speaker from Venezuela who works night shifts as a Walmart custodian, moved here two years ago with his son and a friend. He said he worried at first, but he hadn’t noticed any health issues. Vina Duncan, a woman in her nineties who moved to the neighborhood 30 years ago from Harlan County, said nothing about the plant bothered her.

But many are worried about the risks to their health and property that living so close to the plant poses while having little insight into the federal changes afoot that could remove guardrails for the plant’s pollution. 

Burning coal produces particulate matter, tiny bits of soot that can trigger asthma and cardiovascular issues. Hendricks has suffered from allergies, and Hendricks’ neighbor, Sherry Fitz, developed allergies after moving into the neighborhood. Every morning, she said she smells chemicals. She has to dust every day. 

Fitz moved onto Betsy Ross Drive when her daughter was three years old, making her a “smokestack baby,” a nickname for the little ones who grow up in the neighborhood, Fitz said. The now 12-year-old has allergies and depression, and her 17-year-old sister lives with social anxiety. Fitz said she doesn’t interact very much with LG&E but recalled a book giveaway by the utility at Watson Lane Elementary, then her kids’ school.

“You're hurting my kids’ insides, but you’re going to give them a stupid book?” Fitz recalled thinking. That school has since closed. A second school in the area, Frost Middle School, also closed, and was later purchased by LG&E. In an email, Gardner said the purchase was to support current and future operations at Mill Creek as the utility plans to build a warehouse there to support the operational needs of Mill Creek’s gas units. 

Soot has fallen in the neighborhood, for about half a century. Marla Patterson, who grew up here, moved back in 2000, said fine black residue coated her outdoor toys as a child. She and her family have long lived in the area and, by her account, she has been significantly impacted by the plant. 

Patterson recalled that her grandparents bought one of Valley Station’s first homes back in the 1940s when the neighborhood was sparsely occupied. Years later, it became a subdivision. Patterson was born in 1967, a year before construction began on Mill Creek. After moving back, Patterson was leaving for work one morning in her brand new black Kia Sephia when she saw tiny white flakes floating in the air. She drove to Timmy’s Auto Wash on Dixie Highway to wash off the dots spotting her car, but the soap and water only made the white specks brighter. She called LG&E to complain, but she said the utility only offered a car wash. The paint job on the new car was ruined, Patterson said. Worse, Patterson, who grew up with symptoms of bad asthma, alleged that she ended up with pneumonia after the incident.

“Anything that sits outside is basically destroyed,” Patterson said. 

Her dad, who never drank alcohol or smoked cigarettes, died of liver cancer less than three months after his diagnosis, Patterson recalled. Her mother has dementia. Patterson works in health care, shuttling between three jobs at a local nursing home, a west end hospital, and a teaching gig at Sullivan University.

“I knew living by LG&E was a bad thing,” Patterson said. But she came back to help her family and take care of her grandmother, and she stayed.

Some neighbors who answered the door for The Margin relocated here because homes offer some of the cheapest property values in Louisville, the state’s most populous city. Alfredo Carballo opened the door to his sister’s house, where she lives with her mom and two young children. They get sick more often in this neighborhood, with cold symptoms including a cough, Carballo said. They spent months trying to sell the home but couldn’t find a buyer, so they took the house off the market.

Patricia Myers, 61, was diagnosed with small cell carcinoma, a highly aggressive form of cancer that typically originates in the lungs, last October. She’s lived in her house, bordering a chain link fence with LG&E/KU since 2008, after growing up in the neighborhood. Myers said she lost several childhood friends to cancer, but gesturing to stubbed-out cigarettes on her patio table, she said she couldn’t necessarily attribute her illness to the plant when she’s also been a longtime smoker. 

One woman, who asked not to share her name, spoke through her living room window after peeling back a lace curtain. She said the issue used to be bigger, but the state and the federal government didn’t seem to care very much anymore. Her next door neighbor, she said, died of throat cancer. 

LG&E/KU told The Margin it wasn’t familiar with these complaints.

“LG&E investigates all complaints, operates in strict compliance with operating permits including dust control plans, and strives to be a good neighbor,” Gardner wrote in an email. “We’re continually monitoring, measuring and reporting the plant’s performance to appropriate federal, state and local regulatory agencies, and we operate Mill Creek and all of our power plants under federally enforceable operating permits.”

The neighborhoods around Mill Creek suffer broader cumulative and synergistic effects of environmental injustice, according to Tony Arnold, a law professor at the University of Louisville who runs the Resilience Justice Project, an organization whose work includes a focus on the environmental and community needs around the Mill Creek watershed.

Along with the Mill Creek power plant, there’s the Kosmos Cement Plant across the street from the Mill Creek landfill, the car exhaust along Dixie Highway, and the chemical plants just north in Rubbertown. 

“A lot of communities, a lot of neighborhoods that are marginalized have fewer resources,” Arnold said. That includes a lack of information about the plant, its emissions, and the regulatory bodies that oversee it. Rollbacks on climate science at the federal level also limit research into how climate change, largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels, could impact Mill Creek’s coal ash.

“With extreme flooding, if there’s some sort of accident or unintentional release or if it’s not managed properly, there are all sorts of things that could go wrong, and the fact that we’ve already had discharges in the past tells you that things can go wrong,” Arnold said. 

In a “worst-case” flooding scenario modeled in a 2017 LG&E report, Rainbow Drive, where Hendricks’ daughter lives, could have been under five feet of contaminated water from the now-closed coal ash pond within an hour of a flood event.

IV. Cancer in coal country

Mill Creek has one active coal ash landfill, a roughly 14-story behemoth sandwiched between the Ohio River and Dixie Highway, an artery that helps connect metro Louisville to nearly 1.4 million people. The plant also houses five closed coal ash sites, including a large closed coal ash pond that borders the river and the Mill Creek watershed. Standing in the woods below the terraced rows of gravel, the chemical smell of the closed pond is inescapable. 

Both the landfill and the pond are leaking contaminants into the Ohio River and onto an industrial property south of the plant, according to a January report filed by LG&E. At least 17 out of 29 monitoring wells at Mill Creek had tests showing contaminants above federal groundwater protection standards. Arsenic, lithium and molybdenum exceeded those standards dozens of times across two testing events in April and September of 2025. Cobalt exceeded those standards twice and thallium once.The report said these contaminants weren’t likely to measurably increase concentrations in the Ohio River, where residents boat, fish, and recreate. LG&E reported and made publicly available its own monitoring data, as required under the 2015 rule, but so far no enforcement actions seem to have been taken by the federal or state government to bring the utility into compliance after its most recent report.

Arsenic, a known carcinogen found at least once at Mill Creek at levels 37 times the federal standard, exceeded the groundwater protection standard seven times last year. Lithium exceeded the threshold across at least 10 wells, sometimes measuring more than seven times the standard. Molybdenum at least tripled the groundwater protection standard seven times, exceeding the threshold across eight wells.

For many people, connecting their health concerns to coal ash is exceedingly difficult. Science shows that dozens of elements in coal ash — including arsenic, mercury, lithium, lead, selenium, and radium — can be dangerous and even deadly to humans. But tying coal ash to a specific person's ailments likely requires studies based on evidence of community or workplace exposure, according to Kristina Zierold, a public health professor at the University of Mississippi. 

And so far, little proof exists, which is largely a missed opportunity, Zierold said. While at the University of Louisville, her research focused on communities bordering Mill Creek and Cane Run Generating Station, another former coal plant owned by LG&E/KU that converted to natural gas in 2015 and then spent years closing its coal ash sites. 

Zierold began door knocking in the Cane Run and Mill Creek neighborhoods in 2012. She sent letters about her study through a mailing list of the 12-ZIP code area and slipped flyers under the windshield wipers of teachers’ cars in local schools. She took out Facebook ads and stood in store parking lots near the plants handing out information. Parents told her about learning difficulties, poor school performance, and the prevalence of ADHD among kids in their neighborhood, challenges Zierold knew were also seen in kids exposed to heavy metals. They also reported asthma and respiratory problems, along with trouble sleeping.

Shoeleather epidemiology eventually introduced Zierold and her fellow researchers to roughly 280 kids, aged 6-14 years old, and their families. They would become the participants in an almost $3 million study from the National Institutes of Health exploring how children’s neurobehavioral problems at home and school could be connected to coal ash exposure. Researchers set up devices to collect air samples in their homes, took dust samples in the children’s bedrooms and family rooms, and periodically collected nail clippings from children to test for heavy metals. 

Under a microscope, the air samples showed 43 percent of 261 kids’ homes contained cenospheres. These are glassy, spherical particles that form when minerals melt during combustion and reform in exhaust steam, according to Zierold. Those cenospheres meant coal ash was present in almost half the homes. Children with coal ash in their homes had increased levels of iron, aluminum, and silica in their nails, all contaminants found within coal ash. Zierold worked closely with a psychologist and found a relationship between coal ash exposure and elevated levels of depression and lower school performance among the kids. 

“There needs to be a ton more funding and a ton more research on this,” Zierold said. But she’s struggled to secure funding to move the research forward.  Zierold would have liked to study adults after hearing about high rates of cancer in the communities near Mill Creek and Cane Run from residents. Counties closer to coal-fired impoundments tend to have higher cancer rates, according to a 2026 spatial association analysis led by Charlie Zhang, an urban and health geographer at the University of Louisville also involved in Zierold’s research.

The map below shows the annual cancer incidence rate across the United States, measured as the number of new cancer cases per 100,000 people. Kentucky is highlighted with a red outline.

Much of Kentucky is dark red on one of the study’s maps in Zhang’s research. Kentucky is one of the top five states when it comes to the number of coal ash impoundments, and ranks highest for both cancer incidence and mortality. Those cancer rates are often attributed to social determinants like low education and high poverty rates, with high rates of tobacco-, obesity- and HPV-related cancers. Research connecting cancer to coal ash is often marginalized, according to Zhang, especially in coal country.

Coal ash, Zierold said, “affects so many people, and a lot of people don’t even know they’re being affected by it, and that’s the sad thing. It’s very sad.”

While Zierold was working on her health study, she was approached by lawyers representing a group of workers who alleged they were sickened from cleaning up the Kingston coal ash disaster across the stateline in Tennessee. The lawyers wanted Zierold for consulting, but because her research focused on kids, not adults, she declined. She called the limited research a shame.

Now, the utility in charge of the Kingston spill, the Tennessee Valley Authority, is issuing its own “scientific context” about coal ash. Angie Mummaw,  an organizer with the environmental nonprofit Appalachian Voices,attended a meeting in April about the extended retirement dates for the two coal units near the Cumberland Fossil Plant about 70 miles west of Nashville. Mummaw encountered a woman holding a booklet of TVA fact sheets who told her that the amount of molybdenum, a coal ash contaminant detected at Cumberland, was equivalent to what a person would eat in a serving of black-eyed peas; she also compared the amount of arsenic found at the plant to what a person might get from a glass of wine or a cup of hot chocolate. TVA’s fact sheets read, in part, “Coal Ash is Not Hazardous” and included the statement “the constituents of coal ash are nearly identical to common soil.”

TVA spokesperson Scott Brooks said in an email that the fact sheets referenced were developed to help advance public understanding using information and data from credible third-party sources.

“They are intended to provide scientific context about coal ash and to illustrate that many of its naturally occurring constituents are also found throughout the environment,” Brooks wrote. He said the common narrative around coal ash isn’t rooted in reality or informed by the extensive science, monitoring, and regulatory oversight that govern its management today.

V. ‘Can Kentucky do something?’

Well over one hundred people signed up to speak at the EPA’s virtual public listening session on the coal ash rollback in late May. So many that the agency had to extend the session, keeping people across the country glued to their computer screens from 9 am to 7 pm. The 141 speakers were from faith organizations, environmental groups and nursing associations. They were Tribal members, scientists, attorneys, parents and neighbors living near coal ash sites. 

Susan Wind, an activist who used to live in Lake Norman, North Carolina, spoke about the cancers children in her neighborhood were diagnosed with in a community she said was built on top of coal ash used as fill for the development. They included her daughter, who was diagnosed with thyroid cancer at 16 years old.

“The word of the day is betrayed,” said Wind. “Betrayed not just by a utility company that put profit over people, but by the very agencies sworn to protect us, you especially, the EPA.” 

She came from a state with some of the strongest regulations in the country. After the Dan River disaster in 2014, North Carolina passed the Coal Ash Management Act, going beyond federal regulations, forcing Duke Energy to excavate and close leaking coal ash sites. Michael Regan, former head of the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, helped negotiate Duke Energy’s cleanup, developed the state’s clean energy plan,and later helmed the Biden administration’s EPA. 

“We have a coal ash program that does work,” said SELC’s Torrey, who lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. “It’s the only one like it in the country.” 

A system with loosened regulations on coal ash, like what Trump’s EPA proposed, could allow utilities to pressure regulators into accepting inadequate monitoring or cleanup plans, critics say. Activists like Wind would continue devoting their lives to challenging such plans on a case-by-case basis instead of working with the federal government to protect them. States would become the new watchdog, and most states aren’t ready, let alone interested, in policing the coal industry.

Oklahoma, Georgia, Texas, North Dakota, and Wyoming have authorized state CCR permit programs, the EPA press office said in an emailed statement, and the agency has proposed approval of three other state CCR permit programs in Virginia, Louisiana, and Alabama.

The Kentucky EEC targeted September to formally file regulation changes to join these ranks, pending a comment period and public hearing.

“Can Kentucky do something? Yes, they can,” McGarvey said. “But the reality is the states, including Kentucky, do not have the resources to do this. They know it. That’s why they’re doing this. They’re trying to give coal companies and big corporations a pass so that there is going to be no accountability.” 

Back on Rainbow Drive, Hendricks stood in her front yard. 

“Are the federal rules changing on this? That’s crazy,” Hendricks said. Her neighbor, Roger Mills, a resident in his 70s, stood outside his front door, with his dog peering through the glass. 

“It’s the dirtiest place I’ve ever lived in my life,” Mills said.“It’s got to be unhealthy breathing it.” But he had little information and few resources. Mills spends his days taking care of his wife with dementia, who grew up in the house where they now live. 

While they breathed, the plant burned on.

***

Plumes form from burning coal for electricity at the Mill Creek Generating Station, the last utility-scale coal-fired power plant in Jefferson County, Kentucky. The plant operates between the banks of the Ohio River and a low-income neighborhood called Valley Station less than 15 miles southwest of downtown Louisville. The city has repeatedly failed to meet the EPA’s air quality standards for ozone, becoming one of the 25 smoggiest cities in the U.S., according to the American Lung Association’s 2026 State of the Air report.

Air pollution is a known problem for Hendricks’ community. What’s more obscure are the health risks from the waste left behind by combusted coal, known as coal ash. Proposed federal regulations coming from the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency could make finding and cleaning up that waste even more difficult.

Walking barefoot along the horseshoe of her driveway in May, Hendricks said she’s long worried over the health impacts from the plant.

People are dying of cancer left and right in this subdivision.

That waste, known as coal ash, has been dumped within at least six sites across Mill Creek’s 544-acre footprint, enough to fill more than 6,200 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Contaminants within the ash can cause cancer and other serious health effects. But for decades, coal ash was poorly regulated by the federal government. The grey sludge, often kept in place by mixing the featherlight dust with water, leached from unlined pits into groundwater, surface water, and soils. Meanwhile, dried ash took to the air and traveled for miles into the surrounding communities, landing on windowsills and migrating into children’s bedrooms. 

Coal ash contains higher concentrations of contaminants compared to the original rock. According to a January 2026 report filed by the plant’s owners, Mill Creek’s coal ash sites are leaking heavy metals like arsenic, molybdenum, and lithium. Arsenic is a known carcinogen; molybdenum can cause achy joints and lead to liver and kidney damage; and lithium is a metal associated with multiple health risks, including neurological damage. 

For decades, electric utilities avoided monitoring and cleaning up their waste. Then came a pair of disasters in 2008 and 2014 where coal ash broke from a dam at the Kingston Fossil Plant in Tennessee and a pipe at the Dan River Steam Station in North Carolina, clogging waterways and leveling homes.In 2015, President Barack Obama’s administration finally took action to protect communities from coal ash, requiring groundwater monitoring and cleanup plans. 

The industry’s own data, compiled by Earthjustice, an environmental nonprofit that has litigated numerous coal ash cases, showed that coal ash at nine out of every ten power plants polluted groundwater. In 2023, the EPA announced that cancer risks from arsenic and radiation in soils containing coal ash were high enough to require further regulation. Under President Joe Biden, the EPA doubled down, adding the protection of communities from coal ash contamination to a national priority list as one of its most critical charges. 

But the heyday of federal coal ash oversight has atrophied, and long-fought-for improvements are under threat again. Most states, including Kentucky, rarely regulate coal ash beyond permitting facilities and largely rely on federal oversight for enforcement. 

“Team Kentucky’s focus is to make sure our communities and our natural resources are protected from any adverse effects of coal ash storage. We do this by working with our utility companies and property owners, but also within the constraints of federal and state laws,” Robin Hartman, spokesperson for the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, the state agency responsible for environmental and natural resource regulatory enforcement, said in an email. 

Five days before President Donald Trump was sworn in for the second time, 10 utility executives, including the owner-operator of Mill Creek, asked Lee Zeldin, a fossil fuel evangelist and then-nominee for administrator of the EPA, in a letter to overhaul environmental laws, including nascent regulations on coal combustion residuals, a wonky name for coal ash. The last signator, John R. Crockett III, is president of Kentucky’s two companies that form the state’s largest utility, Louisville Gas and Electric Company and Kentucky Utilities Energy, LLC, or LG&E/KU.

The EPA acquiesced in April, first proposing a new rule that would allow states and utilities to bypass standing regulations for coal ash cleanup, and then reopening a case for a new permitting system that could further weaken requirements. In an emailed statement to The Margin, an EPA spokesperson described the proposed changes as “a major improvement over the Biden-era rule.” They continued, “Under the proposed new compliance pathway, permit authorities could tailor requirements to site-specific risks and incorporate advances in monitoring and corrective technologies.” 

In late June, LG&E/KU filed comments supporting those amendments, highlighting the need to delegate the federal coal ash program to state authorities, enhance flexibility for compliance options, and remove provisions for specific sites called Coal Combustion Residuals Management Units. Earlier that month, the Trump administration doubled down, announcing $700 million in taxpayer funding to keep coal alive. The budget included $124 million on upgrading three coal plants in Kentucky, which is home to eight operating coal plants, the majority of which line the Ohio River. 

“The two things are part and parcel of one another,” said Gavin Kearney, deputy managing attorney for Earthjustice’s clean energy program. “Eliminating coal ash protections is a way of helping coal plants prosper.

Now, the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, the state agency responsible for environmental and natural resource regulatory enforcement, is seeking approval to self-implement permits and efforts to clean up coal combustion residuals (CCR), another name for coal waste.   

“The EEC has been developing new regulations for (CCR) that, if approved, would protect Kentuckians’ public health, ratepayers, and the environment by enabling additional oversight from the state and allowing the cabinet to evaluate each facility individually,” Hartman said in an email. “The proposed regulation would require CCR owners to get a permit similar to those acquired by landfills and require the facility to conduct a comprehensive investigation of the structural stability, groundwater quality, and all remedies for coal ash impoundments."

Advocates warn that under new coal ash proposals, utilities could potentially close coal ash ponds that are in contact with and contaminate groundwater, which the current rule forbids, without first cleaning them up. The rollbacks also relax some monitoring requirements for cleaning up contaminated groundwater. In addition, the proposals could exempt hundreds of large piles of ash from any oversight by rolling back a 2024 rule that expanded the definition of coal ash sites. This proposal could allow state regulators to shortcut or eliminate coal ash protections, leaving citizens to challenge a utility's plans for its coal ash cleanup on a site-by-site basis. This would be a Sisyphean task. In Kentucky, there are at least 87 coal ash sites; across the country there are more than 1,000, according to Earthjustice. Experts said they estimate the weakened rules to be finalized by the end of this year. Mill Creek likely has at least three Coal Combustion Residuals Management Units (CCRMU’s), according to data collected by Earthjustice. 

Folks like Hendricks, who often had multiple jobs at a time while raising two kids and caring for ill relatives, don’t usually have time or resources to play watchdog to powerful utilities. She inherited her house from her mother, who died three years ago from lung cancer, and lives in it with her sister. Her daughter lives in a house Hendricks owns on Rainbow Drive, the last line of homes before the green lawn of the plant property begins. Most families like hers living near coal ash sites depend on federal regulators to ensure their safety from toxic and sometimes unstable ash impoundments.

LG&E told The Margin the utility would publish a report defining its CCRMU sites, in compliance with regulations, which LG&E has asked the EPA to rescind. During the licensing process for two new gas units at Mill Creek, one proposed and one under construction, LG&E disclosed the plants would be built on an old storage site for Posotech, a low-grade concrete material manufactured with coal ash, LG&E/KU spokesperson Andrew Gardner said in an email. He added, “It is likely the Mill Creek site has other CCRMU given the existing rule’s definition of CCRMU.”

Fewer than half of Kentucky’s coal ash sites are reliably monitored by the federal government. Self-reported industry data show that all but one have contamination levels above safe drinking water standards. That includes Mill Creek, where heavy metals can be found at levels triple groundwater protection standards, finding pathways to the Ohio River and off the plant’s southern edge. Regardless, LG&E plans to keep Mill Creek burning coal. 

Gardner said in an email that the utility “is properly managing the site to protect public health and the environment,” and complies with the 2015 Obama-era rule pertaining to closing impoundments, operating its landfill, monitoring groundwater, and notifying regulators about constituents of concerns and remedies.

In June, Congressman Morgan McGarvey, whose district covers Mill Creek, signed a separate letter to Zeldin asking the EPA not to weaken coal ash regulations that could expose working-class communities facing disproportionate environmental burdens to dangerous contaminants. 

“They’re not located in rich neighborhoods,” McGarvey told The Margin of coal ash sites in his state. “They are already in places where it will hurt even worse for people who have suffered from pollution and being dumped on for years and years.

II. Kentucky’s ‘deregulatory mania’

When Thomas Edison began burning coal at Pearl Street Station to illuminate households in lower Manhattan in 1882, the commercial power he created made commercial-scale waste. 

In the century and a half since, billions of tons of coal ash have been stored in landfills (when dry), ponds (when wet), and haphazard holes. Those dumps, largely unlined, often border rivers and streams, since coal plants need water to create steam and cool the generation systems. Pollutants from those sites could continue contaminating groundwater for hundreds of years, according to Nick Torrey, coal ash attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit focused on legal advocacy and environmental protection in six southern states.

It’s basically a forever problem in terms of any normal human scale.

Since the 1980s, the coal industry has found loopholes to avoid the overwhelming scope of its waste problem. After the 1976 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act was enacted, governing the disposal of waste, the 1980 Bevill Amendment granted polluters regulatory relief by classifying coal ash as a non-hazardous waste, which allowed the industry to continue to dispose of it in landfills and ponds. The EPA reaffirmed that decision in 1993 and 2000, but environmentalists have long protested this exception, arguing coal ash contains dozens of heavy metals and radiation that would qualify other materials as hazardous. 

Kentucky has long been a leader in coal power, a trend on the decline. About 67% of the state’s power grid came from coal in 2024, down from more than 90% a decade earlier. Coal power declined as natural gas became cheaper, the coal supply diminished, and the global energy market pulled away from one of the world’s dirtiest fuels. 

While there has been a reduction in coal, a rapid increase in electricity demand and a failure to quickly transition to renewable alternatives means coal continues to stick around. Last year, LG&E/KU projected its energy demand could double in the coming years, largely from data centers. Activists against data centers in Jefferson County are pushing back against LG&E/KU’s request to build more gas and extend coal, which they say will fuel projects like the 400-megawatt data center approved by Louisville regulators about 12 miles north of the plant.

The map below displays coal ash sites and data centers across Kentucky and near its border, with each site's status available by hovering over its location. The Ohio River is highlighted in red to illustrate the concentration of these sites near major waterways. The map also includes county-level census data showing the percentage of residents who identify as people of color.

Meanwhile, state lawmakers have made it exceedingly difficult to transition to cleaner sources of energy. A pair of laws passed in 2023 and 2024 made it more difficult to retire fossil-fired units and to replace fossil fuels with most renewables. Republican legislators during this year’s session proposed rolling back state environmental regulations under a bill that would make it impossible to pass state environmental laws in Kentucky that are stricter than federal laws. 

“There’s a deregulatory mania in Kentucky right now,” said Michael Washburn, executive director of the Kentucky Waterways Alliance, a nonprofit focused on protecting state waterways.

That pro-coal stance could influence older facilities like Mill Creek, which once had four coal-burning units. One retired in 2024, replaced by a gas turbine still under construction. LG&E/KU also asked the state to build a second gas turbine at Mill Creek and extend the life of the third coal unit until at least 2031. Previously, that stack was slated to retire next year. Two more could be retired in 2035, according to LG&E/KU 2024 integrated resource plan, but that decision will be reassessed in the utility’s 2027 plan. 

“We fully believe these investments are in the best interests of our customers and the communities we’re proud to serve, and they build upon our history of continuous environmental improvement initiatives and major equipment investments at Mill Creek,” Gardner wrote in an email.

Keeping coal burning will cost ratepayers, critics say. Coal generation is expensive, and so is building new gas-fired units, according to a 2025 report by the Kentucky Resources Council. The state could save electricity customers $2.6 billion by mid-century if utilities transitioned away from coal and gas to renewable energy and battery storage, according to the report, potentially reaching a 95% clean energy portfolio by 2050 without increasing costs to consumers.

Ann Gunter, a 72-year-old who moved into her home near Mill Creek in 2003, said she was told the plant would be converted to gas by 2006. More than 20 years later, she said she’s still waiting, frustrated by the soot that accumulates on her house and car. LG&E/KU told The Margin it was not familiar with these claims and was actively transitioning portions of generation on the Mill Creek site from coal to natural gas. Gardner said Mill Creek Unit 5, the first combined cycle gas plant at the site, should be operating by spring 2027.

“They keep telling us, ‘next year we’re converting to gas,’” Gunter said from her front porch, wiping dust off the railing. “And next year never comes."

III. Between Rainbow Drive and the ‘Cloud Maker’

Beneath the towering Mill Creek station, along Rainbow Drive and on surrounding streets, dogs bark. Day lilies bloom orange. Tomato and cucumber starts wait in plastic trays on the patio. Robins’ feet click on the gutters, and cardinals perch on the edge of a bird bath shaped like a sunflower. Canadian geese fly against grey clouds. 

Then a flood warning pings cell phones around the time Lauren Hollobaugh opens the front door of her home bordering a grassy beam that functions as a floodwall. The 33-year-old human resources specialist lives on nearby Tennis Boulevard, with her mother and two kids. Her family is beset by several health conditions. Her mom and son have kidney disease. Her daughter and her mother have eczema. She has sensitive skin, so exposure to chlorine or too much sun causes her to develop rashes.

The Margin knocked on more than 60 doors in May. Some residents, especially those with children, expressed concern about their proximity to Mill Creek but struggle to connect their ailments to their high-polluting neighbor beyond anecdote. However, not everyone feels the same about this neighbor. Some support coal keeping the lights on. Others are indifferent. One neighbor insisted the plant did not burn coal anymore. 

Wilbur, a Spanish-speaker from Venezuela who works night shifts as a Walmart custodian, moved here two years ago with his son and a friend. He said he worried at first, but he hadn’t noticed any health issues. Vina Duncan, a woman in her nineties who moved to the neighborhood 30 years ago from Harlan County, said nothing about the plant bothered her.

But many are worried about the risks to their health and property that living so close to the plant poses while having little insight into the federal changes afoot that could remove guardrails for the plant’s pollution. 

Burning coal produces particulate matter, tiny bits of soot that can trigger asthma and cardiovascular issues. Hendricks has suffered from allergies, and Hendricks’ neighbor, Sherry Fitz, developed allergies after moving into the neighborhood. Every morning, she said she smells chemicals. She has to dust every day. 

Fitz moved onto Betsy Ross Drive when her daughter was three years old, making her a “smokestack baby,” a nickname for the little ones who grow up in the neighborhood, Fitz said. The now 12-year-old has allergies and depression, and her 17-year-old sister lives with social anxiety. Fitz said she doesn’t interact very much with LG&E but recalled a book giveaway by the utility at Watson Lane Elementary, then her kids’ school.

“You're hurting my kids’ insides, but you’re going to give them a stupid book?” Fitz recalled thinking. That school has since closed. A second school in the area, Frost Middle School, also closed, and was later purchased by LG&E. In an email, Gardner said the purchase was to support current and future operations at Mill Creek as the utility plans to build a warehouse there to support the operational needs of Mill Creek’s gas units. 

Soot has fallen in the neighborhood, for about half a century. Marla Patterson, who grew up here, moved back in 2000, said fine black residue coated her outdoor toys as a child. She and her family have long lived in the area and, by her account, she has been significantly impacted by the plant. 

Patterson recalled that her grandparents bought one of Valley Station’s first homes back in the 1940s when the neighborhood was sparsely occupied. Years later, it became a subdivision. Patterson was born in 1967, a year before construction began on Mill Creek. After moving back, Patterson was leaving for work one morning in her brand new black Kia Sephia when she saw tiny white flakes floating in the air. She drove to Timmy’s Auto Wash on Dixie Highway to wash off the dots spotting her car, but the soap and water only made the white specks brighter. She called LG&E to complain, but she said the utility only offered a car wash. The paint job on the new car was ruined, Patterson said. Worse, Patterson, who grew up with symptoms of bad asthma, alleged that she ended up with pneumonia after the incident.

“Anything that sits outside is basically destroyed,” Patterson said. 

Her dad, who never drank alcohol or smoked cigarettes, died of liver cancer less than three months after his diagnosis, Patterson recalled. Her mother has dementia. Patterson works in health care, shuttling between three jobs at a local nursing home, a west end hospital, and a teaching gig at Sullivan University.

“I knew living by LG&E was a bad thing,” Patterson said. But she came back to help her family and take care of her grandmother, and she stayed.

Some neighbors who answered the door for The Margin relocated here because homes offer some of the cheapest property values in Louisville, the state’s most populous city. Alfredo Carballo opened the door to his sister’s house, where she lives with her mom and two young children. They get sick more often in this neighborhood, with cold symptoms including a cough, Carballo said. They spent months trying to sell the home but couldn’t find a buyer, so they took the house off the market.

Patricia Myers, 61, was diagnosed with small cell carcinoma, a highly aggressive form of cancer that typically originates in the lungs, last October. She’s lived in her house, bordering a chain link fence with LG&E/KU since 2008, after growing up in the neighborhood. Myers said she lost several childhood friends to cancer, but gesturing to stubbed-out cigarettes on her patio table, she said she couldn’t necessarily attribute her illness to the plant when she’s also been a longtime smoker. 

One woman, who asked not to share her name, spoke through her living room window after peeling back a lace curtain. She said the issue used to be bigger, but the state and the federal government didn’t seem to care very much anymore. Her next door neighbor, she said, died of throat cancer. 

LG&E/KU told The Margin it wasn’t familiar with these complaints.

“LG&E investigates all complaints, operates in strict compliance with operating permits including dust control plans, and strives to be a good neighbor,” Gardner wrote in an email. “We’re continually monitoring, measuring and reporting the plant’s performance to appropriate federal, state and local regulatory agencies, and we operate Mill Creek and all of our power plants under federally enforceable operating permits.”

The neighborhoods around Mill Creek suffer broader cumulative and synergistic effects of environmental injustice, according to Tony Arnold, a law professor at the University of Louisville who runs the Resilience Justice Project, an organization whose work includes a focus on the environmental and community needs around the Mill Creek watershed.

Along with the Mill Creek power plant, there’s the Kosmos Cement Plant across the street from the Mill Creek landfill, the car exhaust along Dixie Highway, and the chemical plants just north in Rubbertown. 

“A lot of communities, a lot of neighborhoods that are marginalized have fewer resources,” Arnold said. That includes a lack of information about the plant, its emissions, and the regulatory bodies that oversee it. Rollbacks on climate science at the federal level also limit research into how climate change, largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels, could impact Mill Creek’s coal ash.

“With extreme flooding, if there’s some sort of accident or unintentional release or if it’s not managed properly, there are all sorts of things that could go wrong, and the fact that we’ve already had discharges in the past tells you that things can go wrong,” Arnold said. 

In a “worst-case” flooding scenario modeled in a 2017 LG&E report, Rainbow Drive, where Hendricks’ daughter lives, could have been under five feet of contaminated water from the now-closed coal ash pond within an hour of a flood event.

IV. Cancer in coal country

Mill Creek has one active coal ash landfill, a roughly 14-story behemoth sandwiched between the Ohio River and Dixie Highway, an artery that helps connect metro Louisville to nearly 1.4 million people. The plant also houses five closed coal ash sites, including a large closed coal ash pond that borders the river and the Mill Creek watershed. Standing in the woods below the terraced rows of gravel, the chemical smell of the closed pond is inescapable. 

Both the landfill and the pond are leaking contaminants into the Ohio River and onto an industrial property south of the plant, according to a January report filed by LG&E. At least 17 out of 29 monitoring wells at Mill Creek had tests showing contaminants above federal groundwater protection standards. Arsenic, lithium and molybdenum exceeded those standards dozens of times across two testing events in April and September of 2025. Cobalt exceeded those standards twice and thallium once.The report said these contaminants weren’t likely to measurably increase concentrations in the Ohio River, where residents boat, fish, and recreate. LG&E reported and made publicly available its own monitoring data, as required under the 2015 rule, but so far no enforcement actions seem to have been taken by the federal or state government to bring the utility into compliance after its most recent report.

Arsenic, a known carcinogen found at least once at Mill Creek at levels 37 times the federal standard, exceeded the groundwater protection standard seven times last year. Lithium exceeded the threshold across at least 10 wells, sometimes measuring more than seven times the standard. Molybdenum at least tripled the groundwater protection standard seven times, exceeding the threshold across eight wells.

For many people, connecting their health concerns to coal ash is exceedingly difficult. Science shows that dozens of elements in coal ash — including arsenic, mercury, lithium, lead, selenium, and radium — can be dangerous and even deadly to humans. But tying coal ash to a specific person's ailments likely requires studies based on evidence of community or workplace exposure, according to Kristina Zierold, a public health professor at the University of Mississippi. 

And so far, little proof exists, which is largely a missed opportunity, Zierold said. While at the University of Louisville, her research focused on communities bordering Mill Creek and Cane Run Generating Station, another former coal plant owned by LG&E/KU that converted to natural gas in 2015 and then spent years closing its coal ash sites. 

Zierold began door knocking in the Cane Run and Mill Creek neighborhoods in 2012. She sent letters about her study through a mailing list of the 12-ZIP code area and slipped flyers under the windshield wipers of teachers’ cars in local schools. She took out Facebook ads and stood in store parking lots near the plants handing out information. Parents told her about learning difficulties, poor school performance, and the prevalence of ADHD among kids in their neighborhood, challenges Zierold knew were also seen in kids exposed to heavy metals. They also reported asthma and respiratory problems, along with trouble sleeping.

Shoeleather epidemiology eventually introduced Zierold and her fellow researchers to roughly 280 kids, aged 6-14 years old, and their families. They would become the participants in an almost $3 million study from the National Institutes of Health exploring how children’s neurobehavioral problems at home and school could be connected to coal ash exposure. Researchers set up devices to collect air samples in their homes, took dust samples in the children’s bedrooms and family rooms, and periodically collected nail clippings from children to test for heavy metals. 

Under a microscope, the air samples showed 43 percent of 261 kids’ homes contained cenospheres. These are glassy, spherical particles that form when minerals melt during combustion and reform in exhaust steam, according to Zierold. Those cenospheres meant coal ash was present in almost half the homes. Children with coal ash in their homes had increased levels of iron, aluminum, and silica in their nails, all contaminants found within coal ash. Zierold worked closely with a psychologist and found a relationship between coal ash exposure and elevated levels of depression and lower school performance among the kids. 

“There needs to be a ton more funding and a ton more research on this,” Zierold said. But she’s struggled to secure funding to move the research forward.  Zierold would have liked to study adults after hearing about high rates of cancer in the communities near Mill Creek and Cane Run from residents. Counties closer to coal-fired impoundments tend to have higher cancer rates, according to a 2026 spatial association analysis led by Charlie Zhang, an urban and health geographer at the University of Louisville also involved in Zierold’s research.

The map below shows the annual cancer incidence rate across the United States, measured as the number of new cancer cases per 100,000 people. Kentucky is highlighted with a red outline.

Much of Kentucky is dark red on one of the study’s maps in Zhang’s research. Kentucky is one of the top five states when it comes to the number of coal ash impoundments, and ranks highest for both cancer incidence and mortality. Those cancer rates are often attributed to social determinants like low education and high poverty rates, with high rates of tobacco-, obesity- and HPV-related cancers. Research connecting cancer to coal ash is often marginalized, according to Zhang, especially in coal country.

Coal ash, Zierold said, “affects so many people, and a lot of people don’t even know they’re being affected by it, and that’s the sad thing. It’s very sad.”

While Zierold was working on her health study, she was approached by lawyers representing a group of workers who alleged they were sickened from cleaning up the Kingston coal ash disaster across the stateline in Tennessee. The lawyers wanted Zierold for consulting, but because her research focused on kids, not adults, she declined. She called the limited research a shame.

Now, the utility in charge of the Kingston spill, the Tennessee Valley Authority, is issuing its own “scientific context” about coal ash. Angie Mummaw,  an organizer with the environmental nonprofit Appalachian Voices,attended a meeting in April about the extended retirement dates for the two coal units near the Cumberland Fossil Plant about 70 miles west of Nashville. Mummaw encountered a woman holding a booklet of TVA fact sheets who told her that the amount of molybdenum, a coal ash contaminant detected at Cumberland, was equivalent to what a person would eat in a serving of black-eyed peas; she also compared the amount of arsenic found at the plant to what a person might get from a glass of wine or a cup of hot chocolate. TVA’s fact sheets read, in part, “Coal Ash is Not Hazardous” and included the statement “the constituents of coal ash are nearly identical to common soil.”

TVA spokesperson Scott Brooks said in an email that the fact sheets referenced were developed to help advance public understanding using information and data from credible third-party sources.

“They are intended to provide scientific context about coal ash and to illustrate that many of its naturally occurring constituents are also found throughout the environment,” Brooks wrote. He said the common narrative around coal ash isn’t rooted in reality or informed by the extensive science, monitoring, and regulatory oversight that govern its management today.

V. ‘Can Kentucky do something?’

Well over one hundred people signed up to speak at the EPA’s virtual public listening session on the coal ash rollback in late May. So many that the agency had to extend the session, keeping people across the country glued to their computer screens from 9 am to 7 pm. The 141 speakers were from faith organizations, environmental groups and nursing associations. They were Tribal members, scientists, attorneys, parents and neighbors living near coal ash sites. 

Susan Wind, an activist who used to live in Lake Norman, North Carolina, spoke about the cancers children in her neighborhood were diagnosed with in a community she said was built on top of coal ash used as fill for the development. They included her daughter, who was diagnosed with thyroid cancer at 16 years old.

“The word of the day is betrayed,” said Wind. “Betrayed not just by a utility company that put profit over people, but by the very agencies sworn to protect us, you especially, the EPA.” 

She came from a state with some of the strongest regulations in the country. After the Dan River disaster in 2014, North Carolina passed the Coal Ash Management Act, going beyond federal regulations, forcing Duke Energy to excavate and close leaking coal ash sites. Michael Regan, former head of the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, helped negotiate Duke Energy’s cleanup, developed the state’s clean energy plan,and later helmed the Biden administration’s EPA. 

“We have a coal ash program that does work,” said SELC’s Torrey, who lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. “It’s the only one like it in the country.” 

A system with loosened regulations on coal ash, like what Trump’s EPA proposed, could allow utilities to pressure regulators into accepting inadequate monitoring or cleanup plans, critics say. Activists like Wind would continue devoting their lives to challenging such plans on a case-by-case basis instead of working with the federal government to protect them. States would become the new watchdog, and most states aren’t ready, let alone interested, in policing the coal industry.

Oklahoma, Georgia, Texas, North Dakota, and Wyoming have authorized state CCR permit programs, the EPA press office said in an emailed statement, and the agency has proposed approval of three other state CCR permit programs in Virginia, Louisiana, and Alabama.

The Kentucky EEC targeted September to formally file regulation changes to join these ranks, pending a comment period and public hearing.

“Can Kentucky do something? Yes, they can,” McGarvey said. “But the reality is the states, including Kentucky, do not have the resources to do this. They know it. That’s why they’re doing this. They’re trying to give coal companies and big corporations a pass so that there is going to be no accountability.” 

Back on Rainbow Drive, Hendricks stood in her front yard. 

“Are the federal rules changing on this? That’s crazy,” Hendricks said. Her neighbor, Roger Mills, a resident in his 70s, stood outside his front door, with his dog peering through the glass. 

“It’s the dirtiest place I’ve ever lived in my life,” Mills said.“It’s got to be unhealthy breathing it.” But he had little information and few resources. Mills spends his days taking care of his wife with dementia, who grew up in the house where they now live. 

While they breathed, the plant burned on.

***

Please note this article contains mention of suicide. If you are in crisis, please call, text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.

In the early evening of October 11th, 12-year-old Seth Friend went out to fish for tomcod on the Kwigillingok River. It was windy, and the rain tasted like seawater. Dark clouds cast a shadow over Seth’s boat as he navigated strong river currents that nearly towed him away. Spooked, he returned home. 

Seth and his older sister, 20-year-old Ariel, settled into their two-story house—where they lived with their parents, two younger cousins, four dogs, and a guinea pig named Hazel—to wait out what they thought would be just another fall storm. On western Alaska’s Bering Sea coast, late autumn often brings storms that have increased in severity with climate change.

But they weren’t prepared for how devastating this one would be. Remnants of Typhoon Halong slammed into Alaska’s western coast a few hours later, bringing up to 100-mile-per-hour winds and a storm surge that unleashed major floods across the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. The region, nearly the size of Oregon, is one of the world’s largest river deltas. Kwigillingok and its neighbor, Kipnuk, a Yup’ik community, were the two hardest-hit villages. The storm surge reached up to twelve feet in both villages. Halong came with only 36 hours of warning, presenting a limited opportunity for mass evacuation.  

The National Weather Service’s categorization of Halong as the “remnants” of a typhoon undercuts its sheer force. Bryan Fisher, the director of Alaska’s Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, described Halong as the most catastrophic storm he has witnessed in over three decades. Disaster recovery experts have compared the destruction to that of Hurricane Katrina. 

On the night of October 11, as the storm intensified, the Kwigillingok Tribal Council urged all families to seek shelter in the local school, which sat on high ground. But the Friend family was already trapped. Within thirty minutes, floodwaters had rushed in through a hole in the laundry room, inundating the entire first floor. The waters knocked their home of nearly ten years off its foundation. “Our house lifted up,” Ariel recalled. “It went really fast.” 

They ran upstairs. From the windows, Ariel watched as neighboring houses smashed into theirs, shattering their windows and letting in even more water. Barrels of stove oil split, filling the air with the stench of gasoline. A wire snapped, and the power went out. Ariel felt like she was in a boat out at sea in pitch darkness. As she remembers it, the house twirled in circles, and she began to feel seasick. “I was terrified and dizzy because the house was spinning,” she said. 

Ariel didn’t sleep all night. In the morning, after the floodwaters started receding, Ariel went to the bathroom and threw up. “I couldn’t hold it in,” she said, “I just lost my home.

Six months later, as of this reporting, the majority of evacuees have yet to return to their homes. Many have spent the time since Halong in limbo: transitioning from shelters to couch surfing with relatives and friends.  

These transitions have been especially difficult for young people between the ages of 12 and 24, like Ariel and Seth. Tribal leaders and school officials have confirmed at least two youth evacuated from Kwigillingok and Kipnuk have died by suicide in the last six months, and at least one other young person attempted suicide. One 16-year-old boy from Kwigillingok who died by suicide was involved in mental health advocacy and was preparing to go to Juneau to meet with legislative officials at the time of his death. 

This has raised concerns for service providers, Tribal officials, and state officials around gaps in mental health support for evacuated youth. Many are beginning to exhibit a wide range of trauma responses to the climate disaster, including feelings of isolation, depression, and anxiety, according to three school officials, five mental health providers, and 10 youth between the ages of 12 and 24 interviewed by The Margin. 

“Can you imagine being in your home not being anchored, and it floating away with you inside?” asked Jennifer Sahaba, a site administrator for the Lower Kuskokwim School District who has been working to support evacuated youth in the village of Toksook Bay. “That kind of trauma doesn't go away in days and weeks, and maybe even years.

Six months later, Ariel and Seth Friend still have nightmares about the night of Halong. And they’re not the only ones. Children as young as 6 years old are reporting flashbacks and trouble sleeping. These acute stress responses are compounded by their displacement. The storm hit a month into the school year, and many young people are now living hundreds of miles away from their homes, from their villages’ tight-knit social networks, their Yup’ik language, and familiar subsistence lifeways. 

These symptoms are alarming mental health professionals in Alaska, where the suicide rate is more than double the nationwide average, a crisis that disproportionately affects youth.  

From 2011 to 2023, the percentage of Alaska high school students who attempted suicide more than doubled from nine percent to 19 percent. In 2023, the most recent year of data available through the Alaska Statewide Suicide Prevention Council, Alaskans aged 15 to 24 had the highest rate of deaths by suicide of any age group. From 2020 to 2024, youth between 11 and 19 years old exhibited the highest rates of emergency room visits due to suicide attempts. 

The picture is grimmer in rural areas, like the Y-K Delta, which was home to the highest rate of suicide per capita in 2024. And among Alaska Native Youth, there’s a distinct risk. In 2023, an Alaska Department of Health survey found that one in four Alaska Native high schoolers had attempted suicide, compared to one in seven white high schoolers statewide. 

The aftermath of losing one’s home and loved ones, plus the alienating impacts of displacement, is contributing to an already dire youth mental health crisis among Alaska Natives. However, the existing, mounting data on youth suicide risk has not resulted in more resources for mental health; practitioners worry that young people’s emotional well-being will worsen as climate-fueled storms like Halong become ever more frequent. And the complicated, outdated funding models for disaster recovery are escalating stress and uncertainty for young Halong survivors.

In a March 2026 address to the Alaska State Legislature, Representative Nellie Unangiq Jimmie, whose district includes Kwigillingok and Kipnuk, identified mental health support as one of the greatest needs for her constituents impacted by the disaster. She cited these youth suicides as an area of major concern. “From populations [this] small, this is catastrophic,” she said.

‘The houses seem to rise out of the sea’

Ariel lived in Kwigillingok’s downtown area, which bore the brunt of the storm. Powerful floodwaters forced homes like hers off their foundations and sent them barrelling into raised boardwalks. Some houses drifted for several miles, crossing a river that runs from north to south down the village’s center. Panicked livestreams flooded social media that night. 

Residents in Kwigillingok’s uptown area watched helplessly as their neighbors pleaded for rescue. One neighbor opened his window and clutched a light pole to avoid being carried away by strong tides. Another recorded himself as he waded through knee-deep water in his living room, the walls of his home swaying while he frantically tried to retrieve floating items like a guitar case, house slippers, and a trash can.

While the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta often experiences fall storms, Halong was a product of our warming climate. Originating as a category four typhoon off the coast of Japan, the tropical storm trailed east before defying weather forecasts and veering northward. Fueled by abnormally warm ocean temperatures, the storm gathered strength and took an “extremely rare” track to hit villages like Kwigillingok with the intensity it did, according to experts in atmospheric science. The region has only experienced one other fall storm this strong in the last seven decades, and only four other ex-typhoons since 1970. In 2022, Typhoon Merbok—a similar meteorological phenomenon—destroyed homes, critical infrastructure, and fish camps along Alaska’s western coast. The costs of recovery from Merbok have totaled $170 million so far.

Starting on October 11, Halong made an abrupt northward turn, defying forecasts and following an extremely rare path toward Alaska's Bering coast.

Even before Halong, young people in Kwigillingok faced frequent climate-related stressors. For years, the Y-K Delta has been sinking due to a combination of rising ocean temperatures, melting sea ice, and thawing permafrost. Dotted across this flat, low-lying landscape are 56 villages. The population of these communities—ranging from less than ten to over 900 inhabitants—is almost entirely Alaska Native. 

For communities on the Bering Sea coast, like Kwigillingok, some areas are only 10 feet above sea level. As a result, high tides and storms can send seawater over dozens of square miles of low-lying tundra. Strong winds from the south even blow sheets of ice over the village’s shores. These extreme weather events, coupled with sea level rise, are also accelerating erosion of the coastline. 

According to Henry George, a 67-year-old man who grew up in Kwigillingok, the land that the village sits on wasn’t suitable for long-term inhabitation to begin with. “The tundra [in Kwigillingok], it's not hills, it's not bluffs. It's just lowland,” he said. With each passing year, George has observed the tundra growing softer and more sod-like

As with many other villages in the Y-K Delta, missionaries played a major role in the formation of a permanent village at Kwigillingok. In the late 19th century, missionaries dispatched from the headquarters of the Moravian Church in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, arrived in southwest Alaska. After establishing their missionary center in Bethel, the Church stationed members in Indigenous settlements across the Y-K Delta. At the time, Alaska Native communities were dispersed amongst camps and small settlements along the sloughs and rivers that drained out into the Kuskokwim Bay, and then farther west towards the Bering Sea. They lived a semi-nomadic lifestyle, establishing seasonal villages depending on subsistence needs.

In the early 20th century, the Moravians identified Kwigillingok as an ideal location for a “permanent mission station” because it was accessible by waterways and was populated in the fall and winter. When approaching Kwigillingok from the Kuskokwim Bay, the Moravians noticed how close the village was to sea level. “Houses seem to rise out of the sea,” they observed, “there is really no high ground.” Despite this unstable land, the Church encouraged the Kwigillingok community to establish permanent infrastructure—supplying lumber from a saw mill they ran in Bethel for the construction of log cabins and boardwalks. 

Within decades, Kwigillingok’s traditional sod houses—semi-permanent, insulated dwellings that sheltered residents in colder months—were replaced by year-round western-style homes. The opening of a Moravian day school in 1915 and a Bureau of Indian Affairs school in 1924 solidified Kwigillingok as a stationary village. Kwigillingok’s population increased as Alaska Native people across the Bering Sea moved there to comply with a 1929 compulsory schooling mandate. 

Communities like Kwigillingok, whose locations are the result of colonization and imperialism, are now on the frontlines of climate change in subarctic Alaska. As climate-fueled storms have increased in intensity, the low-lying land of the Y-K Delta has proven especially vulnerable to these disasters.

‘The trauma is coming back up’ 

The morning after Halong, the subarctic sunrise illuminated the village, bringing the full picture of the storm’s destruction into view. The stormwaters lifted large swathes of the village several feet above ground before depositing them in twisted configurations. Pieces of boardwalk lay on top of four-wheelers and snowmachines. In the village cemetery, residents had begun above-ground burials in recent years to avoid disturbing the tundra earth, which was softening with rapid permafrost thaw. Overnight, the storm had ripped caskets from their wooden encasements, leaving black unmarked coffins all over the village. 

When floodwaters finally began receding at 8 am, Ariel’s younger cousin, who lived nearby, came to rescue the Friend family. Their two-story house had tipped forward, blocking access to the front door and windows. Ariel’s cousin stood on top of their porch and ripped open a crack in the siding of their roof so the family could escape from the second story. 

The Friends considered themselves lucky. An intact boardwalk had prevented their house from becoming completely unmoored. But nearly all their belongings were ruined—covered in a thick layer of tundra sludge, brine, and stove oil. Ariel’s parents were devastated by what they had lost, especially her mom, who cried over the precious traditional beadwork she had spent hours on. Their house was beyond saving. The wall joints had split open, and the foundation was ruined. They demolished it in January of this year. “Most of the memories were in the house,” Ariel said. “We moved there when I was in grade school.”  

Ariel and her family went to the local school, where they joined the rest of the village. Many Elders had taken shelter there before the storm started. Some residents had left halfway through the night when staying home became life-threatening, driving four-wheelers atop floating boardwalks with young kids cradled in their arms. Helicopters rescued those whose houses floated miles away. 

Three people were missing—including Ariel’s aunt’s best friend, who was later found dead. “I thought she was gonna be at the school, but then I found out her body was decomposed by the water,” Ariel recounted between tears. Nearly nine months after the storm, one missing resident remains to be found. 

                                              ***

Seth and Ariel Friend still have dreams about the night of the storm. And they’re not the only ones reporting what psychiatrists call “intrusive re-experiencing,” a stress response that involves reliving a traumatic event. Families have reported children as young as 6 years old waking up in tears from recurring nightmares of Halong. Eighteen-year-old Elijah Paul, who lived in an eight-person intergenerational household in Kipnuk, spent the night of Halong sheltering in the local school. He remembers a dream he had following evacuation from his home, which had floated during Halong. “I was alone in the house. There was nobody to help me,” he said. “I woke up crying for some reason.” 

Extreme weather also triggers flashbacks of the storm. Elijah began planning for the future after he finished his senior year of high school in the village of Toksook Bay. He wants to attend technical school to become a welder. But when he hears strong winds, he’s right back in the throes of Halong. “I’m traumatized 'cause [of] how the school was shaking in the wind,” he said. When a low-lying area of Bethel flooded with the spring river breakup, children and teens across town expressed anxiety around another displacement. 

Research has demonstrated the short- and long-term consequences of environmental disasters on emotional well-being. In the months after Hurricane Katrina, rates of anxiety and mood disorders like PTSD among people directly impacted rose to nearly 50 percent; survivors’ trauma responses persisted over a decade later. 

Frieda Evon, whose family evacuated from their Kwigillingok home in the middle of the night when Halong was at its worst, remembers her sons, 5 and 7 years old, trembling in her arms as she drove their four-wheeler atop floating boardwalks to get to the school. She described how the mental health impacts on her children have persisted since the family moved to Bethel. “When it's really windy, they start to ask, ‘Is it gonna flood? Is it gonna flood high?’” she said. “I think it was from being traumatized.” 

For 18-year-old Janel Lincoln-John, whose Kwigillingok home floated during Halong, the sound of whistling windstorms incites visceral dread and terror. “I was worried I wouldn’t make it past that night,” recalled Janel, who lived with her mom and stepdad in the village’s heavily impacted downtown. Memories of the storm permeate her subconscious. Janel hasn’t slept well since her evacuation: she wakes up every day at 5 am, around the time when Halong was at its worst. “I think my mind tries to remind me of that night,” she said

Jim Biela, a school social worker for the Lower-Kuskokwim School District (LKSD), has seen firsthand how young people’s trauma is manifesting: as nightmares, flashbacks, and feelings of isolation and anxiety. Biela said he counsels an expanded caseload, including 18 youth who evacuated from Kwigillingok and Kipnuk to other schools in the LKSD. The kids in his care describe nightmares, flashbacks, and feelings of isolation and anxiety that make him worry these mental health challenges will escalate risk factors for suicide.

The emotional pain tied to traumatic events, including climate events like Halong, is seen as a major contributor to high suicide rates in villages, according to a 2020 survey conducted by researchers at Montana State University and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. 

In the first few months after a disaster, service providers like Biela focus on immediate crisis response, ensuring students’ physical needs are met. This initial stage of disaster recovery is adrenaline-filled. Those affected take action and attend to their immediate needs, such as food, water, and shelter. Humanitarian aid pours in. It’s only over the long term that the real emotional toll surfaces. “The trauma does not just happen overnight,” Biela said. “It will develop after a while, especially if you don't talk about it.” Trauma responses look different for everyone. Some ramp up hypervigilance and anxiety, while others sink into numbness and despair. Without early intervention, these acute stress responses can develop into chronic mental health disorders. 

A 2026 Harvard Review of Psychiatry study evaluating global disasters from 1990 through 2024 found that one in five people will develop mental health problems such as anxiety, sleep problems, PTSD, and depression in the initial months after surviving a disaster, and during a second peak about a decade later. Roughly 20 percent of survivors developed suicidal thoughts. The link between climate change and suicidality was reinforced through a 2020 study by researchers at Nantong University in China, which found that extreme weather events were significantly associated with an increase in suicide attempts and deaths. 

Biela believes mental health providers are approaching a critical time for intervention for evacuated youth. “We’re just seeing it now, some of the trauma is coming back up,” he said.

Displaced youth are coming to terms with the long-term consequences of Halong. The schools in Kwigillingok and Kipnuk currently have no plans to reopen, and many school-aged youth are scattered. The LKSD operates schools in Bethel and 26 of the 56 villages in the Y-K Delta region. When Halong hit last October, roughly 130 displaced students transferred to LKSD’s Bethel schools to finish out the year. 

Biela is assigned to a handful of remote villages and acts as a first responder for mental health emergencies. In his two decades with the school district, Biela has lost 18 students to suicide, he said. When Biela encounters a student in crisis, he refers them to just four clinicians in Bethel at the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation, a Tribal provider that operates the only hospital in the region. Those four professionals cover mental health needs for approximately 26,000 people of all ages across the 56 villages in the Y-K Delta. 

Staffing shortages mean a waitlist: it can take up to six months for a young person in need to see a mental health clinician for an initial evaluation. Even when students are referred to intensive programs, they need to fly to the rural hub of Bethel to access them—a journey that can take up to an hour each way. 

According to Biela, who is one of nine social workers in the school district, staffing shortages and geographic isolation present challenges to mental health care for village youth. Although LKSD’s social workers provide frontline care to dozens of schools in their district, more than half of the villages in the region do not have social workers in their schools. “The sheer volume of kids [...] it's impossible to catch everybody,” Sahaba said.

In many parts of rural Alaska, access to community-based mental health services is already limited. For example, while Anchorage and Juneau have Mobile Outreach and Crisis Response centers, which have been proven to reduce inpatient hospitalization and residential confinement for youth, the entire Y-K Delta region, including Bethel, does not. This means that calling a crisis hotline often leads to law enforcement intervention instead. Young people with a serious risk of suicide are held in the village jail until they are flown to Bethel, then Anchorage, where inpatient care is available. 

“ I've had young girls wait two to three days [...] in the public safety office,” Biela said. 

The lack of community-based mental health infrastructure led the United States Department of Justice to conclude, in 2022, that the state was failing to provide adequate services for youth, with the largest gaps occurring in rural regions.

Biela sees funding as the main explanation for staffing shortages in rural Alaska. State funding for mental health and school-based services has been declining in recent years, and federal grant cancellations under the Trump administration have led to more scarcity, according to lawmakers and advocates. “Funding is the biggest issue,” said Biela. “ The public service, the mental health, and all that's always the first to get cut.” Even when the state sets aside money for behavioral health and crisis programs, Biela said, “the rural areas get less than the cities.” Working with what they have, this summer, the LKSD will begin training on trauma and PTSD in order to prepare staff like Biela to address these crises as the first anniversary of Halong approaches. 

In response to the recent suicides amongst displaced youth, Indigenous youth advocates from rural Alaska are fighting for a series of statewide suicide prevention bills: to establish a mental health curriculum in schools, to expand state funding for the 988 suicide hotline, and to fund the Statewide Suicide Prevention Council. The bill to fund mental health education, which has been under consideration for eight years, passed the state Legislature before Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed it in June 2026.

“In my district, there are no therapists down the road, no crisis counselors in every school. When something breaks in a child in rural Alaska, it usually breaks quietly, and we always see how that ends up. We always find out too late,” Rep. Jimmie told news media while advocating for state support for rural suicide prevention during the 2026 Alaska state Legislative session. 

“We are losing kids."

Some Indigenous mental health advocates argue that merely expanding resources for existing mental health interventions is not enough. In 2012, Rose Domnick, a 67-year-old Yup’ik trauma intervention expert, founded Calricaraq, a preventative services program that centers Indigenous ancestral wisdom to address suicidality and other behavioral health issues. The program acknowledges intergenerational trauma is a key factor behind high suicide rates. 

“It’s so culturally grounded in an Indigenous worldview, it's really difficult for Western minds to see and understand that [this] truly is suicide prevention,” Domnick said.

The appeal of culturally-aligned behavioral health programs was highlighted through a 2020 survey of youth from Alaska Native villages, which was administered by researchers at Montana State University, The University of Washington, and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Survey participants indicated a desire for community-based suicide prevention programs rooted in Indigenous culture. Evaluations of similar interventions—like the Yup’ik Qungasvik project and the White Mountain Apache Tribe’s New Hope program—have demonstrated their efficacy.

Domnick takes issue with individualistic views of suicide prevention. She sees youth suicides as the result of colonization’s trauma and violence, which hindered the development of emotional coping skills for Indigenous communities. “That is what colonization severed: transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next,” she said. 

Therefore, Domnick added, addressing mental health issues amongst Alaska Native youth requires collective healing to restore the social and emotional supports that historically existed at the community level. She described this process of slow repair. “We will never be as impactful as the parents, grandparents, aunties, and uncles in preventing suicide,” she said. “And so we have to teach the communities, families how to take care of their children in the same way that our ancestors did.” 

Domnick emphasizes that the Calricaraq program is not merely a translation of Western models of behavioral health because: “We can’t utilize what harmed us to heal us.” 

Our healing must utilize our identity, our culture, and our wisdom to move us away from the impacts of historical trauma and colonization.

‘I don't know where home is anymore’ 

Faith Paul spent the summer before her senior year of high school in Kipnuk—a Yup’ik community of 700 residents thirty miles west of Kwigillingok—with her dad’s side of the family. She arrived in Kipnuk at the beginning of the subarctic spring, right as migratory shorebirds were descending on the Bering Sea coast, depositing their eggs in beds of feathers, grass, and driftwood. Her dad took her egg hunting, and they harvested five gallons. 

Then, it was herring season, closely followed by halibut season, and Faith spent long hours helping her friend process the catch. At times, she passed sun-filled days driving boats through gleaming river bends as tall tundra grasses waved in the wind. She reveled in the freedom of village life. Although she spent the school year in Kwigillingok with her mom’s side of the family, summering in Kipnuk was an annual tradition. 

Now, the changing seasons bring Faith painful reminders of routines no longer possible. “It doesn’t truly feel like it’s gonna be summer ‘cause we're not home,” she said.

Having grown up between the two villages hardest hit by Halong, 17-year-old Faith is experiencing a double loss from the storm. After her evacuation, Faith finished her senior year of high school in Bethel, and in the spring of this year, graduated from LKSD’s Kuskokwim Learning Academy. But what should’ve been a celebratory time only dredged up feelings of isolation. Faith has struggled to adjust to the move to Bethel. She wishes she were graduating with her classmates in Kwigillingok—whom she grew up with—instead of with people she barely knows. 

Faith has struggled to move on from the night of the typhoon. She thinks about it every single day. In Bethel, she has found it difficult to access hobbies she enjoys. Her days blur together. “Every day is just the same routine. I just stay home,” she said. “I still feel stuck in October.” 

As she talks about the typhoon, her sentences trail off into whispers, like she forgets to draw in air. And the final words emerge like a gasp, “I think about it every day ‘cause every day I wake up, and I'm not at home.

Meghan Crow, who has worked as a social worker for over two decades for LKSD, has been providing counseling for Kwigillingok youth since their evacuations. Before Halong, Crow served as Kwigillingok’s school social worker and traveled to the village monthly to meet with students. According to her, post-Halong mental health interventions need to address youth’s loss of their physical rooting in the world. 

“The biggest factor is loss of place,” she said. “It’s like an existential spiritual loss that they're grieving.” 

According to Crow, this uprooting affects all areas of mental health. Her students are struggling to adjust to new schools and transition from Yup’ik to predominantly-English speaking environments. 

For Native youth, separation from their familiar landscape also bars them from lifeways central to their identity and self-worth. Ariel spent her summers cleaning and processing fish—up to 40 per day—that her parents would net from the Kwigillingok River. Ariel loves hunting, partly for the thrill, but mostly for the fulfillment of providing for her loved ones. 

“It’s this way to feed your family or friends if they really need it,” she said. “That's what the hunting part is about.” 

Now Ariel lives apart from her parents, who have returned to Kwigillingok with their pets that survived the storm to help with rebuilding efforts. She’s living with an older cousin in Bethel, and sometimes she thinks about going back to Kwigillingok because she misses her dogs, her guinea pig Hazel, and her family.

Recovery efforts in Kwigillingok and Kipnuk are balancing two competing goals—reuniting the community as quickly as possible at an interim village site and preparing for a large-scale relocation in the long term. Roughly 30 percent of Kwigillingok buildings were destroyed, and around 90 percent of buildings in Kipnuk were destroyed. Both villages have voted overwhelmingly to relocate to higher ground, rather than to rebuild in place.

These two efforts will require separate funding mechanisms. 

Repairing damage from Halong is funded under the Stafford Act, the statute that governs federal disaster declarations. The law requires infrastructure to be rebuilt in the same place. “Our law hasn't caught up with the current climate reality of Alaska,” said Rachael Gunn, the chief of staff for Rep. Jimmie. The Alaska state Individual Assistance program provides renters with only three months of rental assistance, and Tribal leaders report that residents are already facing evictions and housing insecurity. 

Both Kipnuk and Kwigillingok want to be reunited at one interim village site while they wait for relocation, according to Tribal leaders. But, state agencies set construction priorities, sometimes without consulting local leaders, according to Tribal officials.

“This violates our Tribal sovereignty,” said Rayna Paul, the tribal administrator and environmental director for Kipnuk. “We want to relocate and do not want to build back in place and have repeatedly stated that to the state and to the FEMA officials." "This is about our survival and the survival of future generations."

According to Gunn, the real limitation is the lack of resources. FEMA has estimated that repairing the damage from Typhoon Halong will cost close to $125 million. But lawmakers are preparing for these estimates to increase significantly. The Trump administration has denied several of the state’s appeals for FEMA to increase its share of recovery costs

Converging crises—many of which stem from federal administration decisions—will likely drive up repair costs over time. The U.S. war with Iran has aggravated a rural energy crisis by driving up gas and home heating prices. Tariffs have skyrocketed construction costs for a winding and delicate supply chain in rural Alaska. 

This funding dilemma exposes structural inequalities across the state’s vast geography, Gunn added. “It's always been a competition between rural and urban Alaska for resources, and rural’s been left behind for a long time.

For Janel Lincoln-John, an 18-year-old who grew up in Kwigillingok, relocation debates ignite feelings of anger and frustration. Janel sees the village’s current predicament as an outcome of governmental neglect. For years, residents of Kwigillingok have raised fears about worsening floods and sought assistance for relocation. 

“It took how many years?” Janel said. “People would try to ask for relocation, and it took Typhoon Halong to [get] people to notice.” 

Faith has experienced firsthand how difficult it is to coordinate a community-wide relocation in her region. Roughly 90 miles northwest of Kwigillingok sits Mertarvik—the new site for the village of Newtok. Newtok’s residents made the decision to relocate their village to higher ground in the face of climate change in 1993, 15 years before Faith was born. The more than three-decades-long relocation process frequently stalled due to anemic funding and a lack of central government planning. It took until 2019, when Faith was 11 years old, for Newtok’s residents to finally begin moving to Mertarvik. 

“I feel like it'll take forever, and by the time it's done, I feel like I'd be old,” Faith said of Kwigillingok’s planned relocation. “It wouldn’t be the same anymore.” 

“Wherever we move in the future, I feel like [nothing] would make it feel better,” she said. “I don't know where home is anymore.” 

Jennifer Sahaba, the LKSD site administrator, has witnessed how environmental stressors impact Alaska Native village youths’ hopes for their future. Even before Halong, villages across the Y-K Delta faced escalating threats of permafrost thaw, erosion, and flooding. “At one point, this was a sustainable future [...] being able to maintain what they grew up with,” Sahaba said. “But as these environmental factors become much more prevalent, it gives a sense of hopelessness.” 

Research across the globe has documented how repeated climate stressors harm young people’s long-term outlook. A study published in The Lancet Planetary Health last year found that adolescents living in flood-prone areas of Bangladesh showed significantly higher levels of anxiety and depression than those in low-flood regions. This research also found that cognitive overload and feelings of hopelessness limit these young people’s ability to plan for the future. 

Still, Faith, like many other young people displaced by the typhoon, longs to return home to Kwigillingok, where locals say a construction crew of 30—more than half of whom are residents—works 12-hour days, seven days a week, to repair Halong’s damage. They are laying fresh boardwalks, patching and repainting damaged walls, and using inflatable airbags to move homes back onto their foundations. During the winter, they salvaged over a dozen houses that the stormwaters had uprooted. As a short subarctic construction season kicks off the summer, cleanup crews plan to flock to the villages to remove hazardous waste, restore safe drinking water, and repair sewage infrastructure.

The goal is to give residents the option to return to the village by late fall 2027. Faith’s home is still intact, but her parents are hesitant to return, in fear of another disaster.

“For the future, I was hoping to still live in [Kwigillingok],” she said. “I'd even want my kids, if I had any, to grow up there.”

***

Please note this article contains mention of suicide. If you are in crisis, please call, text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.

In the early evening of October 11th, 12-year-old Seth Friend went out to fish for tomcod on the Kwigillingok River. It was windy, and the rain tasted like seawater. Dark clouds cast a shadow over Seth’s boat as he navigated strong river currents that nearly towed him away. Spooked, he returned home. 

Seth and his older sister, 20-year-old Ariel, settled into their two-story house—where they lived with their parents, two younger cousins, four dogs, and a guinea pig named Hazel—to wait out what they thought would be just another fall storm. On western Alaska’s Bering Sea coast, late autumn often brings storms that have increased in severity with climate change.

But they weren’t prepared for how devastating this one would be. Remnants of Typhoon Halong slammed into Alaska’s western coast a few hours later, bringing up to 100-mile-per-hour winds and a storm surge that unleashed major floods across the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. The region, nearly the size of Oregon, is one of the world’s largest river deltas. Kwigillingok and its neighbor, Kipnuk, a Yup’ik community, were the two hardest-hit villages. The storm surge reached up to twelve feet in both villages. Halong came with only 36 hours of warning, presenting a limited opportunity for mass evacuation.  

The National Weather Service’s categorization of Halong as the “remnants” of a typhoon undercuts its sheer force. Bryan Fisher, the director of Alaska’s Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, described Halong as the most catastrophic storm he has witnessed in over three decades. Disaster recovery experts have compared the destruction to that of Hurricane Katrina. 

On the night of October 11, as the storm intensified, the Kwigillingok Tribal Council urged all families to seek shelter in the local school, which sat on high ground. But the Friend family was already trapped. Within thirty minutes, floodwaters had rushed in through a hole in the laundry room, inundating the entire first floor. The waters knocked their home of nearly ten years off its foundation. “Our house lifted up,” Ariel recalled. “It went really fast.” 

They ran upstairs. From the windows, Ariel watched as neighboring houses smashed into theirs, shattering their windows and letting in even more water. Barrels of stove oil split, filling the air with the stench of gasoline. A wire snapped, and the power went out. Ariel felt like she was in a boat out at sea in pitch darkness. As she remembers it, the house twirled in circles, and she began to feel seasick. “I was terrified and dizzy because the house was spinning,” she said. 

Ariel didn’t sleep all night. In the morning, after the floodwaters started receding, Ariel went to the bathroom and threw up. “I couldn’t hold it in,” she said, “I just lost my home.

Six months later, as of this reporting, the majority of evacuees have yet to return to their homes. Many have spent the time since Halong in limbo: transitioning from shelters to couch surfing with relatives and friends.  

These transitions have been especially difficult for young people between the ages of 12 and 24, like Ariel and Seth. Tribal leaders and school officials have confirmed at least two youth evacuated from Kwigillingok and Kipnuk have died by suicide in the last six months, and at least one other young person attempted suicide. One 16-year-old boy from Kwigillingok who died by suicide was involved in mental health advocacy and was preparing to go to Juneau to meet with legislative officials at the time of his death. 

This has raised concerns for service providers, Tribal officials, and state officials around gaps in mental health support for evacuated youth. Many are beginning to exhibit a wide range of trauma responses to the climate disaster, including feelings of isolation, depression, and anxiety, according to three school officials, five mental health providers, and 10 youth between the ages of 12 and 24 interviewed by The Margin. 

“Can you imagine being in your home not being anchored, and it floating away with you inside?” asked Jennifer Sahaba, a site administrator for the Lower Kuskokwim School District who has been working to support evacuated youth in the village of Toksook Bay. “That kind of trauma doesn't go away in days and weeks, and maybe even years.

Six months later, Ariel and Seth Friend still have nightmares about the night of Halong. And they’re not the only ones. Children as young as 6 years old are reporting flashbacks and trouble sleeping. These acute stress responses are compounded by their displacement. The storm hit a month into the school year, and many young people are now living hundreds of miles away from their homes, from their villages’ tight-knit social networks, their Yup’ik language, and familiar subsistence lifeways. 

These symptoms are alarming mental health professionals in Alaska, where the suicide rate is more than double the nationwide average, a crisis that disproportionately affects youth.  

From 2011 to 2023, the percentage of Alaska high school students who attempted suicide more than doubled from nine percent to 19 percent. In 2023, the most recent year of data available through the Alaska Statewide Suicide Prevention Council, Alaskans aged 15 to 24 had the highest rate of deaths by suicide of any age group. From 2020 to 2024, youth between 11 and 19 years old exhibited the highest rates of emergency room visits due to suicide attempts. 

The picture is grimmer in rural areas, like the Y-K Delta, which was home to the highest rate of suicide per capita in 2024. And among Alaska Native Youth, there’s a distinct risk. In 2023, an Alaska Department of Health survey found that one in four Alaska Native high schoolers had attempted suicide, compared to one in seven white high schoolers statewide. 

The aftermath of losing one’s home and loved ones, plus the alienating impacts of displacement, is contributing to an already dire youth mental health crisis among Alaska Natives. However, the existing, mounting data on youth suicide risk has not resulted in more resources for mental health; practitioners worry that young people’s emotional well-being will worsen as climate-fueled storms like Halong become ever more frequent. And the complicated, outdated funding models for disaster recovery are escalating stress and uncertainty for young Halong survivors.

In a March 2026 address to the Alaska State Legislature, Representative Nellie Unangiq Jimmie, whose district includes Kwigillingok and Kipnuk, identified mental health support as one of the greatest needs for her constituents impacted by the disaster. She cited these youth suicides as an area of major concern. “From populations [this] small, this is catastrophic,” she said.

‘The houses seem to rise out of the sea’

Ariel lived in Kwigillingok’s downtown area, which bore the brunt of the storm. Powerful floodwaters forced homes like hers off their foundations and sent them barrelling into raised boardwalks. Some houses drifted for several miles, crossing a river that runs from north to south down the village’s center. Panicked livestreams flooded social media that night. 

Residents in Kwigillingok’s uptown area watched helplessly as their neighbors pleaded for rescue. One neighbor opened his window and clutched a light pole to avoid being carried away by strong tides. Another recorded himself as he waded through knee-deep water in his living room, the walls of his home swaying while he frantically tried to retrieve floating items like a guitar case, house slippers, and a trash can.

While the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta often experiences fall storms, Halong was a product of our warming climate. Originating as a category four typhoon off the coast of Japan, the tropical storm trailed east before defying weather forecasts and veering northward. Fueled by abnormally warm ocean temperatures, the storm gathered strength and took an “extremely rare” track to hit villages like Kwigillingok with the intensity it did, according to experts in atmospheric science. The region has only experienced one other fall storm this strong in the last seven decades, and only four other ex-typhoons since 1970. In 2022, Typhoon Merbok—a similar meteorological phenomenon—destroyed homes, critical infrastructure, and fish camps along Alaska’s western coast. The costs of recovery from Merbok have totaled $170 million so far.

Starting on October 11, Halong made an abrupt northward turn, defying forecasts and following an extremely rare path toward Alaska's Bering coast.

Even before Halong, young people in Kwigillingok faced frequent climate-related stressors. For years, the Y-K Delta has been sinking due to a combination of rising ocean temperatures, melting sea ice, and thawing permafrost. Dotted across this flat, low-lying landscape are 56 villages. The population of these communities—ranging from less than ten to over 900 inhabitants—is almost entirely Alaska Native. 

For communities on the Bering Sea coast, like Kwigillingok, some areas are only 10 feet above sea level. As a result, high tides and storms can send seawater over dozens of square miles of low-lying tundra. Strong winds from the south even blow sheets of ice over the village’s shores. These extreme weather events, coupled with sea level rise, are also accelerating erosion of the coastline. 

According to Henry George, a 67-year-old man who grew up in Kwigillingok, the land that the village sits on wasn’t suitable for long-term inhabitation to begin with. “The tundra [in Kwigillingok], it's not hills, it's not bluffs. It's just lowland,” he said. With each passing year, George has observed the tundra growing softer and more sod-like

As with many other villages in the Y-K Delta, missionaries played a major role in the formation of a permanent village at Kwigillingok. In the late 19th century, missionaries dispatched from the headquarters of the Moravian Church in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, arrived in southwest Alaska. After establishing their missionary center in Bethel, the Church stationed members in Indigenous settlements across the Y-K Delta. At the time, Alaska Native communities were dispersed amongst camps and small settlements along the sloughs and rivers that drained out into the Kuskokwim Bay, and then farther west towards the Bering Sea. They lived a semi-nomadic lifestyle, establishing seasonal villages depending on subsistence needs.

In the early 20th century, the Moravians identified Kwigillingok as an ideal location for a “permanent mission station” because it was accessible by waterways and was populated in the fall and winter. When approaching Kwigillingok from the Kuskokwim Bay, the Moravians noticed how close the village was to sea level. “Houses seem to rise out of the sea,” they observed, “there is really no high ground.” Despite this unstable land, the Church encouraged the Kwigillingok community to establish permanent infrastructure—supplying lumber from a saw mill they ran in Bethel for the construction of log cabins and boardwalks. 

Within decades, Kwigillingok’s traditional sod houses—semi-permanent, insulated dwellings that sheltered residents in colder months—were replaced by year-round western-style homes. The opening of a Moravian day school in 1915 and a Bureau of Indian Affairs school in 1924 solidified Kwigillingok as a stationary village. Kwigillingok’s population increased as Alaska Native people across the Bering Sea moved there to comply with a 1929 compulsory schooling mandate. 

Communities like Kwigillingok, whose locations are the result of colonization and imperialism, are now on the frontlines of climate change in subarctic Alaska. As climate-fueled storms have increased in intensity, the low-lying land of the Y-K Delta has proven especially vulnerable to these disasters.

‘The trauma is coming back up’ 

The morning after Halong, the subarctic sunrise illuminated the village, bringing the full picture of the storm’s destruction into view. The stormwaters lifted large swathes of the village several feet above ground before depositing them in twisted configurations. Pieces of boardwalk lay on top of four-wheelers and snowmachines. In the village cemetery, residents had begun above-ground burials in recent years to avoid disturbing the tundra earth, which was softening with rapid permafrost thaw. Overnight, the storm had ripped caskets from their wooden encasements, leaving black unmarked coffins all over the village. 

When floodwaters finally began receding at 8 am, Ariel’s younger cousin, who lived nearby, came to rescue the Friend family. Their two-story house had tipped forward, blocking access to the front door and windows. Ariel’s cousin stood on top of their porch and ripped open a crack in the siding of their roof so the family could escape from the second story. 

The Friends considered themselves lucky. An intact boardwalk had prevented their house from becoming completely unmoored. But nearly all their belongings were ruined—covered in a thick layer of tundra sludge, brine, and stove oil. Ariel’s parents were devastated by what they had lost, especially her mom, who cried over the precious traditional beadwork she had spent hours on. Their house was beyond saving. The wall joints had split open, and the foundation was ruined. They demolished it in January of this year. “Most of the memories were in the house,” Ariel said. “We moved there when I was in grade school.”  

Ariel and her family went to the local school, where they joined the rest of the village. Many Elders had taken shelter there before the storm started. Some residents had left halfway through the night when staying home became life-threatening, driving four-wheelers atop floating boardwalks with young kids cradled in their arms. Helicopters rescued those whose houses floated miles away. 

Three people were missing—including Ariel’s aunt’s best friend, who was later found dead. “I thought she was gonna be at the school, but then I found out her body was decomposed by the water,” Ariel recounted between tears. Nearly nine months after the storm, one missing resident remains to be found. 

                                              ***

Seth and Ariel Friend still have dreams about the night of the storm. And they’re not the only ones reporting what psychiatrists call “intrusive re-experiencing,” a stress response that involves reliving a traumatic event. Families have reported children as young as 6 years old waking up in tears from recurring nightmares of Halong. Eighteen-year-old Elijah Paul, who lived in an eight-person intergenerational household in Kipnuk, spent the night of Halong sheltering in the local school. He remembers a dream he had following evacuation from his home, which had floated during Halong. “I was alone in the house. There was nobody to help me,” he said. “I woke up crying for some reason.” 

Extreme weather also triggers flashbacks of the storm. Elijah began planning for the future after he finished his senior year of high school in the village of Toksook Bay. He wants to attend technical school to become a welder. But when he hears strong winds, he’s right back in the throes of Halong. “I’m traumatized 'cause [of] how the school was shaking in the wind,” he said. When a low-lying area of Bethel flooded with the spring river breakup, children and teens across town expressed anxiety around another displacement. 

Research has demonstrated the short- and long-term consequences of environmental disasters on emotional well-being. In the months after Hurricane Katrina, rates of anxiety and mood disorders like PTSD among people directly impacted rose to nearly 50 percent; survivors’ trauma responses persisted over a decade later. 

Frieda Evon, whose family evacuated from their Kwigillingok home in the middle of the night when Halong was at its worst, remembers her sons, 5 and 7 years old, trembling in her arms as she drove their four-wheeler atop floating boardwalks to get to the school. She described how the mental health impacts on her children have persisted since the family moved to Bethel. “When it's really windy, they start to ask, ‘Is it gonna flood? Is it gonna flood high?’” she said. “I think it was from being traumatized.” 

For 18-year-old Janel Lincoln-John, whose Kwigillingok home floated during Halong, the sound of whistling windstorms incites visceral dread and terror. “I was worried I wouldn’t make it past that night,” recalled Janel, who lived with her mom and stepdad in the village’s heavily impacted downtown. Memories of the storm permeate her subconscious. Janel hasn’t slept well since her evacuation: she wakes up every day at 5 am, around the time when Halong was at its worst. “I think my mind tries to remind me of that night,” she said

Jim Biela, a school social worker for the Lower-Kuskokwim School District (LKSD), has seen firsthand how young people’s trauma is manifesting: as nightmares, flashbacks, and feelings of isolation and anxiety. Biela said he counsels an expanded caseload, including 18 youth who evacuated from Kwigillingok and Kipnuk to other schools in the LKSD. The kids in his care describe nightmares, flashbacks, and feelings of isolation and anxiety that make him worry these mental health challenges will escalate risk factors for suicide.

The emotional pain tied to traumatic events, including climate events like Halong, is seen as a major contributor to high suicide rates in villages, according to a 2020 survey conducted by researchers at Montana State University and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. 

In the first few months after a disaster, service providers like Biela focus on immediate crisis response, ensuring students’ physical needs are met. This initial stage of disaster recovery is adrenaline-filled. Those affected take action and attend to their immediate needs, such as food, water, and shelter. Humanitarian aid pours in. It’s only over the long term that the real emotional toll surfaces. “The trauma does not just happen overnight,” Biela said. “It will develop after a while, especially if you don't talk about it.” Trauma responses look different for everyone. Some ramp up hypervigilance and anxiety, while others sink into numbness and despair. Without early intervention, these acute stress responses can develop into chronic mental health disorders. 

A 2026 Harvard Review of Psychiatry study evaluating global disasters from 1990 through 2024 found that one in five people will develop mental health problems such as anxiety, sleep problems, PTSD, and depression in the initial months after surviving a disaster, and during a second peak about a decade later. Roughly 20 percent of survivors developed suicidal thoughts. The link between climate change and suicidality was reinforced through a 2020 study by researchers at Nantong University in China, which found that extreme weather events were significantly associated with an increase in suicide attempts and deaths. 

Biela believes mental health providers are approaching a critical time for intervention for evacuated youth. “We’re just seeing it now, some of the trauma is coming back up,” he said.

Displaced youth are coming to terms with the long-term consequences of Halong. The schools in Kwigillingok and Kipnuk currently have no plans to reopen, and many school-aged youth are scattered. The LKSD operates schools in Bethel and 26 of the 56 villages in the Y-K Delta region. When Halong hit last October, roughly 130 displaced students transferred to LKSD’s Bethel schools to finish out the year. 

Biela is assigned to a handful of remote villages and acts as a first responder for mental health emergencies. In his two decades with the school district, Biela has lost 18 students to suicide, he said. When Biela encounters a student in crisis, he refers them to just four clinicians in Bethel at the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation, a Tribal provider that operates the only hospital in the region. Those four professionals cover mental health needs for approximately 26,000 people of all ages across the 56 villages in the Y-K Delta. 

Staffing shortages mean a waitlist: it can take up to six months for a young person in need to see a mental health clinician for an initial evaluation. Even when students are referred to intensive programs, they need to fly to the rural hub of Bethel to access them—a journey that can take up to an hour each way. 

According to Biela, who is one of nine social workers in the school district, staffing shortages and geographic isolation present challenges to mental health care for village youth. Although LKSD’s social workers provide frontline care to dozens of schools in their district, more than half of the villages in the region do not have social workers in their schools. “The sheer volume of kids [...] it's impossible to catch everybody,” Sahaba said.

In many parts of rural Alaska, access to community-based mental health services is already limited. For example, while Anchorage and Juneau have Mobile Outreach and Crisis Response centers, which have been proven to reduce inpatient hospitalization and residential confinement for youth, the entire Y-K Delta region, including Bethel, does not. This means that calling a crisis hotline often leads to law enforcement intervention instead. Young people with a serious risk of suicide are held in the village jail until they are flown to Bethel, then Anchorage, where inpatient care is available. 

“ I've had young girls wait two to three days [...] in the public safety office,” Biela said. 

The lack of community-based mental health infrastructure led the United States Department of Justice to conclude, in 2022, that the state was failing to provide adequate services for youth, with the largest gaps occurring in rural regions.

Biela sees funding as the main explanation for staffing shortages in rural Alaska. State funding for mental health and school-based services has been declining in recent years, and federal grant cancellations under the Trump administration have led to more scarcity, according to lawmakers and advocates. “Funding is the biggest issue,” said Biela. “ The public service, the mental health, and all that's always the first to get cut.” Even when the state sets aside money for behavioral health and crisis programs, Biela said, “the rural areas get less than the cities.” Working with what they have, this summer, the LKSD will begin training on trauma and PTSD in order to prepare staff like Biela to address these crises as the first anniversary of Halong approaches. 

In response to the recent suicides amongst displaced youth, Indigenous youth advocates from rural Alaska are fighting for a series of statewide suicide prevention bills: to establish a mental health curriculum in schools, to expand state funding for the 988 suicide hotline, and to fund the Statewide Suicide Prevention Council. The bill to fund mental health education, which has been under consideration for eight years, passed the state Legislature before Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed it in June 2026.

“In my district, there are no therapists down the road, no crisis counselors in every school. When something breaks in a child in rural Alaska, it usually breaks quietly, and we always see how that ends up. We always find out too late,” Rep. Jimmie told news media while advocating for state support for rural suicide prevention during the 2026 Alaska state Legislative session. 

“We are losing kids."

Some Indigenous mental health advocates argue that merely expanding resources for existing mental health interventions is not enough. In 2012, Rose Domnick, a 67-year-old Yup’ik trauma intervention expert, founded Calricaraq, a preventative services program that centers Indigenous ancestral wisdom to address suicidality and other behavioral health issues. The program acknowledges intergenerational trauma is a key factor behind high suicide rates. 

“It’s so culturally grounded in an Indigenous worldview, it's really difficult for Western minds to see and understand that [this] truly is suicide prevention,” Domnick said.

The appeal of culturally-aligned behavioral health programs was highlighted through a 2020 survey of youth from Alaska Native villages, which was administered by researchers at Montana State University, The University of Washington, and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Survey participants indicated a desire for community-based suicide prevention programs rooted in Indigenous culture. Evaluations of similar interventions—like the Yup’ik Qungasvik project and the White Mountain Apache Tribe’s New Hope program—have demonstrated their efficacy.

Domnick takes issue with individualistic views of suicide prevention. She sees youth suicides as the result of colonization’s trauma and violence, which hindered the development of emotional coping skills for Indigenous communities. “That is what colonization severed: transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next,” she said. 

Therefore, Domnick added, addressing mental health issues amongst Alaska Native youth requires collective healing to restore the social and emotional supports that historically existed at the community level. She described this process of slow repair. “We will never be as impactful as the parents, grandparents, aunties, and uncles in preventing suicide,” she said. “And so we have to teach the communities, families how to take care of their children in the same way that our ancestors did.” 

Domnick emphasizes that the Calricaraq program is not merely a translation of Western models of behavioral health because: “We can’t utilize what harmed us to heal us.” 

Our healing must utilize our identity, our culture, and our wisdom to move us away from the impacts of historical trauma and colonization.

‘I don't know where home is anymore’ 

Faith Paul spent the summer before her senior year of high school in Kipnuk—a Yup’ik community of 700 residents thirty miles west of Kwigillingok—with her dad’s side of the family. She arrived in Kipnuk at the beginning of the subarctic spring, right as migratory shorebirds were descending on the Bering Sea coast, depositing their eggs in beds of feathers, grass, and driftwood. Her dad took her egg hunting, and they harvested five gallons. 

Then, it was herring season, closely followed by halibut season, and Faith spent long hours helping her friend process the catch. At times, she passed sun-filled days driving boats through gleaming river bends as tall tundra grasses waved in the wind. She reveled in the freedom of village life. Although she spent the school year in Kwigillingok with her mom’s side of the family, summering in Kipnuk was an annual tradition. 

Now, the changing seasons bring Faith painful reminders of routines no longer possible. “It doesn’t truly feel like it’s gonna be summer ‘cause we're not home,” she said.

Having grown up between the two villages hardest hit by Halong, 17-year-old Faith is experiencing a double loss from the storm. After her evacuation, Faith finished her senior year of high school in Bethel, and in the spring of this year, graduated from LKSD’s Kuskokwim Learning Academy. But what should’ve been a celebratory time only dredged up feelings of isolation. Faith has struggled to adjust to the move to Bethel. She wishes she were graduating with her classmates in Kwigillingok—whom she grew up with—instead of with people she barely knows. 

Faith has struggled to move on from the night of the typhoon. She thinks about it every single day. In Bethel, she has found it difficult to access hobbies she enjoys. Her days blur together. “Every day is just the same routine. I just stay home,” she said. “I still feel stuck in October.” 

As she talks about the typhoon, her sentences trail off into whispers, like she forgets to draw in air. And the final words emerge like a gasp, “I think about it every day ‘cause every day I wake up, and I'm not at home.

Meghan Crow, who has worked as a social worker for over two decades for LKSD, has been providing counseling for Kwigillingok youth since their evacuations. Before Halong, Crow served as Kwigillingok’s school social worker and traveled to the village monthly to meet with students. According to her, post-Halong mental health interventions need to address youth’s loss of their physical rooting in the world. 

“The biggest factor is loss of place,” she said. “It’s like an existential spiritual loss that they're grieving.” 

According to Crow, this uprooting affects all areas of mental health. Her students are struggling to adjust to new schools and transition from Yup’ik to predominantly-English speaking environments. 

For Native youth, separation from their familiar landscape also bars them from lifeways central to their identity and self-worth. Ariel spent her summers cleaning and processing fish—up to 40 per day—that her parents would net from the Kwigillingok River. Ariel loves hunting, partly for the thrill, but mostly for the fulfillment of providing for her loved ones. 

“It’s this way to feed your family or friends if they really need it,” she said. “That's what the hunting part is about.” 

Now Ariel lives apart from her parents, who have returned to Kwigillingok with their pets that survived the storm to help with rebuilding efforts. She’s living with an older cousin in Bethel, and sometimes she thinks about going back to Kwigillingok because she misses her dogs, her guinea pig Hazel, and her family.

Recovery efforts in Kwigillingok and Kipnuk are balancing two competing goals—reuniting the community as quickly as possible at an interim village site and preparing for a large-scale relocation in the long term. Roughly 30 percent of Kwigillingok buildings were destroyed, and around 90 percent of buildings in Kipnuk were destroyed. Both villages have voted overwhelmingly to relocate to higher ground, rather than to rebuild in place.

These two efforts will require separate funding mechanisms. 

Repairing damage from Halong is funded under the Stafford Act, the statute that governs federal disaster declarations. The law requires infrastructure to be rebuilt in the same place. “Our law hasn't caught up with the current climate reality of Alaska,” said Rachael Gunn, the chief of staff for Rep. Jimmie. The Alaska state Individual Assistance program provides renters with only three months of rental assistance, and Tribal leaders report that residents are already facing evictions and housing insecurity. 

Both Kipnuk and Kwigillingok want to be reunited at one interim village site while they wait for relocation, according to Tribal leaders. But, state agencies set construction priorities, sometimes without consulting local leaders, according to Tribal officials.

“This violates our Tribal sovereignty,” said Rayna Paul, the tribal administrator and environmental director for Kipnuk. “We want to relocate and do not want to build back in place and have repeatedly stated that to the state and to the FEMA officials." "This is about our survival and the survival of future generations."

According to Gunn, the real limitation is the lack of resources. FEMA has estimated that repairing the damage from Typhoon Halong will cost close to $125 million. But lawmakers are preparing for these estimates to increase significantly. The Trump administration has denied several of the state’s appeals for FEMA to increase its share of recovery costs

Converging crises—many of which stem from federal administration decisions—will likely drive up repair costs over time. The U.S. war with Iran has aggravated a rural energy crisis by driving up gas and home heating prices. Tariffs have skyrocketed construction costs for a winding and delicate supply chain in rural Alaska. 

This funding dilemma exposes structural inequalities across the state’s vast geography, Gunn added. “It's always been a competition between rural and urban Alaska for resources, and rural’s been left behind for a long time.

For Janel Lincoln-John, an 18-year-old who grew up in Kwigillingok, relocation debates ignite feelings of anger and frustration. Janel sees the village’s current predicament as an outcome of governmental neglect. For years, residents of Kwigillingok have raised fears about worsening floods and sought assistance for relocation. 

“It took how many years?” Janel said. “People would try to ask for relocation, and it took Typhoon Halong to [get] people to notice.” 

Faith has experienced firsthand how difficult it is to coordinate a community-wide relocation in her region. Roughly 90 miles northwest of Kwigillingok sits Mertarvik—the new site for the village of Newtok. Newtok’s residents made the decision to relocate their village to higher ground in the face of climate change in 1993, 15 years before Faith was born. The more than three-decades-long relocation process frequently stalled due to anemic funding and a lack of central government planning. It took until 2019, when Faith was 11 years old, for Newtok’s residents to finally begin moving to Mertarvik. 

“I feel like it'll take forever, and by the time it's done, I feel like I'd be old,” Faith said of Kwigillingok’s planned relocation. “It wouldn’t be the same anymore.” 

“Wherever we move in the future, I feel like [nothing] would make it feel better,” she said. “I don't know where home is anymore.” 

Jennifer Sahaba, the LKSD site administrator, has witnessed how environmental stressors impact Alaska Native village youths’ hopes for their future. Even before Halong, villages across the Y-K Delta faced escalating threats of permafrost thaw, erosion, and flooding. “At one point, this was a sustainable future [...] being able to maintain what they grew up with,” Sahaba said. “But as these environmental factors become much more prevalent, it gives a sense of hopelessness.” 

Research across the globe has documented how repeated climate stressors harm young people’s long-term outlook. A study published in The Lancet Planetary Health last year found that adolescents living in flood-prone areas of Bangladesh showed significantly higher levels of anxiety and depression than those in low-flood regions. This research also found that cognitive overload and feelings of hopelessness limit these young people’s ability to plan for the future. 

Still, Faith, like many other young people displaced by the typhoon, longs to return home to Kwigillingok, where locals say a construction crew of 30—more than half of whom are residents—works 12-hour days, seven days a week, to repair Halong’s damage. They are laying fresh boardwalks, patching and repainting damaged walls, and using inflatable airbags to move homes back onto their foundations. During the winter, they salvaged over a dozen houses that the stormwaters had uprooted. As a short subarctic construction season kicks off the summer, cleanup crews plan to flock to the villages to remove hazardous waste, restore safe drinking water, and repair sewage infrastructure.

The goal is to give residents the option to return to the village by late fall 2027. Faith’s home is still intact, but her parents are hesitant to return, in fear of another disaster.

“For the future, I was hoping to still live in [Kwigillingok],” she said. “I'd even want my kids, if I had any, to grow up there.”

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