The Center for Public Integrity

Owners of one of the nation’s largest impoundments of the often-toxic byproducts of burning coal must do more to protect residents from groundwater contamination and stop accepting waste by 2016, under an agreement with Pennsylvania regulators.

The pact focuses on FirstEnergy Corp.’s impoundment, known as Little Blue Run, in southwestern Pennsylvania on the West Virginia border.

Pennsylvania’s complaint and settlement, finalized Friday, came 59 days after environmental groups filed a 60-day notice of intent to sue, alleging that dangerous substances were seeping from the impoundment into the water supply.

The groups filing the notice — the Environmental Integrity Project and Public Justice — praised the state Department of Environmental Protection’s action. But they say the settlement came after the agency for years denied the existence of contamination. Indeed, state officials made such claims when the Center for Public Integrity highlighted problems at the site in 2010.

The agency declined an interview request, but said in a written statement, “We believe this will not only make major strides in environmental projects for that area, but also bring peace of mind to many residents who have expressed concerns about the Little Blue Run impoundment.”

LOS ANGELES — Sheri Sangji is on fire.

The 23-year-old research associate, a Pomona College graduate raised in Pakistan, has accidentally pulled the plunger out of a syringe while conducting an experiment in the Molecular Sciences Building at UCLA. The syringe contains a solution that combusts upon contact with air.

The solution spills onto Sangji’s hands and torso, and she is instantly aflame. She isn’t wearing a lab coat; no one told her she has to. Her synthetic rubber gloves provide no protection as the fire burns through her hands to the tendons. She inhales toxic, superheated gases given off by her burning polyester sweater, a process that accelerates as she runs and screams.

It’s December 29, 2008, mid-afternoon. The UCLA campus is mostly quiet for the holidays, but chemistry professor Patrick Harran’s team is working. Harran is in his office, one floor up from Room 4221, where at his direction Sheharbano “Sheri” Sangji has been trying to produce a chemical that holds promise as an appetite suppressant. She is unsupervised.

Two postdoctoral fellows from China are nearby when Sangji catches fire. One runs upstairs to summon Harran, the other tries to smother the fire with his lab coat. He doesn’t think to put Sangji under an emergency shower a few feet away. By now, deep burns cover almost half her body.

Harran finds Sangji “sitting on the floor,” her clothes “either caked to her or burned off,” he later tells an investigator.

After 18 days, on January 16, 2009, Sangji succumbs to her wounds at the Grossman Burn Center in Sherman Oaks, Calif.

Four days after Christmas 2008, UCLA research associate Sheri Sangji caught fire. She was performing an experiment in a university laboratory and accidentally pulled the plunger out of a syringe filled with a chemical that combusts upon contact with air. The chemical spilled on her hands and torso, burning almost half her body. She died 18 days later. She was 23.

Sangji’s supervisor, chemistry professor Patrick Harran, faces felony charges for the accident, as does the University of California’s Board of Regents. It’s the first time a professor in the United States has been criminally prosecuted in connection with the workplace death of an employee. Harran and university lawyers are to appear in a Los Angeles courtroom on Friday. A long-delayed arraignment may take place — or, a plea agreement may be announced.

Harran and UCLA Chancellor Gene Block have called Sangji’s death a tragic accident, not a crime. Sangji’s sister, Naveen, feels differently. “If this were a regular person out on the street who got drunk and killed someone,” she says of Harran, an award-winning researcher, “he would be going to jail.”

On Friday the Center for Public Integrity will publish an in-depth story, produced jointly with the Center for Investigative Reporting, on the Sangji case. The story is part of the Center’s Hard Labor project.

In the latest settlement targeting toxic emissions from power plants, the Environmental Protection Agency and Justice Department have issued a $950,000 fine and ordered millions in pollution control technology at three coal-fired power plants in Wisconsin.

Plant operator Dairyland Power Cooperative will pay the civil penalty, invest $150 million in pollution control technology and spend $5 million on environmental mitigation projects, the EPA said in a Clean Air Act pact announced June 29.

“This settlement will improve air quality in Wisconsin and downwind areas by significantly reducing releases of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and other harmful pollutants,” Ignacia S. Moreno, assistant attorney general for the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the Department of Justice, said in a statement.

The upgrades, federal officials said, will reduce annual sulfur dioxide emissions by 23,000 tons and nitrogen oxide emissions by 6,000 tons from 2008 levels.

The settlement resolves litigation concerning Dairyland’s plants in Alma and Genoa, Wis. The Sierra Club filed a civil lawsuit alleging Clean Air Act violations in 2010. Those same allegations were repeated in an EPA notice of violation two years later.

Both the Sierra Club and the EPA contended that Dairyland Power had failed New Source Review and New Source Performance Standards provisions of the Clean Air Act.

Shahla Werner, Wisconsin chapter director of the Sierra Club, told the Center for Public Integrity that the plants had “violated emissions limits for one or all of the following: carbon monoxide, opacity, and particulate matter numerous times over the past several years.”

The U.S. Geological Survey has found high levels of toxic compounds in soil and water around mountaintop-removal mining sites in central Appalachia, a potentially groundbreaking finding with human health consequences.

After a year of testing air, water and soil, researchers concluded that people in mountaintop mining communities in southern West Virginia live in an environment with significant chemical discrepancies from the rest of the state. This could suggest that documented health problems in the region are linked, at least in part, to the mining operations.

Bill Orem, USGS research geochemist and project chief, said mining areas display “unusually high” pH and conductivity levels in the water, abnormal air particulate loading, and irregular levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in soil and streams. Several PAH compounds are probable or possible human carcinogens.

“The water chemistry is definitely affected by something,” said Orem, who emphasized that the findings are preliminary and studies are ongoing. The coal-derived compounds in soil samples were also “certainly different from soils we’re seeing in non-mining areas.” The air content of silica particles, which cause lung disease, was “definitely higher.”

“You can see that just from looking at the filters,” Orem said.

Orem cautioned that the USGS would be “prudent” about connecting preliminary results with health problems. “You have to be conservative in your statements. It can’t be driven by people’s feelings,” he said. “It has to be a scientific, data-driven process.”

House Republicans inserted language in a budget bill unveiled Tuesday that would kill a proposed rule to protect coal miners from dust that causes black lung.

Democrats on the House Committee on Appropriations objected, saying in a statement, “Recent reporting by NPR and the Center for Public Integrity has highlighted the need for more effective ‘black lung’ disease prevention efforts as there has been a resurgence of the disease among coal miners.”

The Center-NPR investigation found that, after decades of decline, black lung is making a comeback, increasingly afflicting younger miners with a more severe, faster-progressing form of the disease. The system for monitoring miners’ exposure to dust is riddled with loopholes, and regulators have sometimes failed to enforce even these rules. Mining companies have taken advantage of a self-policing system to manipulate dust sampling results for decades.

In 2010, the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration proposed a rule that would close some loopholes, though it would still leave much of the sampling in the hands of mining companies. Last December, House Republicans inserted language in a previous budget bill that would have barred any money from being spent to implement the rule until the Government Accountability Office evaluated whether the proposal was necessary. That study is on track to be released in August.

The insertion of a paragraph into the new Labor Department’s budget bill goes further, barring the agency from using any money to continue developing the rule, issuing it or enforcing it.

Federal regulators are assembling a team of lawyers and other experts to consider how to bolster coal mine dust enforcement given systemic weaknesses revealed by an investigation into the resurgence of black lung by the Center for Public Integrity and NPR, according to an internal Labor Department communication.

The effort, involving officials from the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) and other offices within the Labor Department, includes discussion of how regulators might be more aggressive in filing civil and criminal cases against mining companies that violate dust standards, the communication says.

The investigation by the Center and NPR documented a recent increase in cases of deadly coal workers’ pneumoconiosis, commonly known as black lung. It highlighted rampant cheating on dust sampling by coal companies, rules riddled with loopholes and weak enforcement.

Black lung was supposed to have been eradicated after a 1969 law forced coal companies to control the amount of dust miners breathe. After declining from the 1970s through the mid-1990s, the disease has reappeared, in part because of flaws in MSHA regulations. The agency proposed a rule in 2010 that would close some loopholes but leave much of the dust sampling in the hands of coal companies, preserving a self-policing system critics and government panels have recommended eliminating for years.

MSHA spokeswoman Amy Louviere wouldn’t discuss specific plans by the agency but said: “[I]t is obvious more needs to be done. We’re carefully reviewing the issues that were raised by NPR and CPI, and are committed to taking whatever actions are necessary to end black lung disease.”