From hazardous eyesore to wetlands: Grainger power plant’s transformation nearly complete
What was once a coal power plant in Conway is in the final stages of being reclaimed by nature and becoming a benefit for the area.
Santee Cooper breached the dike on Wednesday between its former Grainger Generation Station’s fully excavated Ash Pond 2 and the Waccamaw River near the bridge into Conway on U.S. 501 to create an area of wetlands.
The power company is planting a mixture of species over the next year or so in the flooded area including a variety of oaks, bald cypress, swamp tupelo and red maple.
“This is one of the final steps in the promise Santee Cooper made to return Grainger’s reservoirs to their natural habitat,” said Mark Bonsall, Santee Cooper president and CEO, in a release.
The wetlands restoration efforts will protect and improve water quality, recharge underground aquifers, and act as a sponge to mitigate large flood events for residents in areas around the U.S. 501 bridge into Conway, according to the power company.
“This is another area kind of like Lake Busbee where flood waters can be held now,” Waccamaw Riverkeeper Cara Schildtknecht said. “The same as Lake Busbee took on a lot of water during (Hurricane) Florence, these ponds will be able to do that.”
The coal plant began operating in 1966 and was decommissioned in 2012. It had two ash ponds that contained 1.7 million tons of coal ash, Santee Cooper said.
Former Ash Pond 1 was fully excavated and breached last fall and is adjacent to Ash Pond 2 on the north side of 501. The Grainger site also includes the former cooling pond known as Lake Busbee on the south side of 501, where wetlands restoration is well underway.
Lake Busbee has a 2.3-mile bike and walking trail around it, and Ash Pond 2 also has a walking trail that was originally the dike around the pond that the city of Conway may opt to utilize for residents, according to Santee Cooper public relations specialist Tracy Vreeland.
Wetlands are diverse biological ecosystems that provide habitat for many species of microbes, plants, insects, amphibians, reptiles, birds, fish and mammals, including many that are threatened or endangered.
“We still have to plant in Ash Pond 2. We’ve already seeded it so we have to plant some trees,” Vreeland said. (The trees) are native to marshes and swampland so they should just thrive in those areas, and we’ll monitor it and make sure it flourishes over the next few years because it will take about 10 years for those trees to grow.”
Santee Cooper began removing the ash from unlined waste pits in 2014 after settling a lawsuit in 2013 with Southern Environmental Law Center, which sued over pollution concerns.
The environmental group said arsenic levels in area groundwater was reduced significantly from dangerous levels once much of the ash was removed.
Santee Cooper said it removed the last remaining load of coal ash in May 2019 from Grainger ponds. The company initially planned to have all ash removed by 2023 but accelerated its excavation efforts after flooding from Hurricane Florence in September 2018 nearly breached the ponds.
“Santee Cooper has done a lot to get to this point and we’re really grateful they’ve done that and it’s ahead of schedule,” Schildtknecht said. “We can guarantee the ponds are clean before hurricane season hits so we don’t have to worry about the ponds flooding and contamination.”
The majority of the ash has been reused by the cement industry and the rest was transported to Santee Cooper landfills.
The utility said it also removed 469,263 tons of soil, with 83 percent beneficially used as daily cover at neighboring Class 3 waste landfills.
