It’s Tuesday, July 9.
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Good morning, readers.
Imagine a giant prehistoric plant buried under layers of rock, dirt, and water. Over hundreds of millions of years, the remnants of the plant are crushed into a dark, energy-rich rock known as coal and remain undisturbed for millennia—until a human digs it up and tosses it into a furnace at UNC-Chapel Hill’s power plant to do something important like turn on a light in a classroom or power a mediocre collegiate DJ set.
But the ash from that combustion lingers. And in the 1960s, tons of that ash—full of a whole lot of stuff you really don’t want to breathe—were dumped into a pit at 828 Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.
In the 1980s, the town acquired that property and built a police headquarters on top of those 46,000 tons of toxic waste. And no one cared much until 2013, when the slope leading down to the Bolin Creek greenway eroded enough to release coal ash into the soil and groundwater.
At the time, the town did some basic removal and fencing, but the question of what to do with that nightmare pit remained largely unanswered.
Just this month, Chapel Hill and the NC Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) have released a draft agreement to officially designate the area as a brownfields site, taking a first step towards possible future redevelopment of the property.
The 66-page document does not set out an exact plan for the site. It does, however, call for the town to “design a remedy” in the form of a structural cap before redeveloping the site (some residents have previously argued that removing the coal ash is the only way to ensure it does not escape in the future). The agreement would also limit the area to non-residential uses only.
The draft agreement is available for public comment until the end of the month. Check out the full rundown here.
And have a good Tuesday.
—Chase
Durham
ICYMI: Holloway Street, Durham’s busiest transit corridor, will receive $12 million worth of pedestrian upgrades from a federal grant.
Wake
Some Wake County residents will pay thousands of dollars more in property taxes following revaluation.
Changes are in store for the Carolina Hurricanes.
Orange
Chapel Hill and Carrboro have a long history of towing.
North Carolina
Gov. Cooper signed bills providing stop-gap funding for child care centers in the state and giving teachers promised raises.
Duke Energy says that silent testing caused alarms to sound unexpectedly at Shearon Harris Nuclear Plant on Monday.
Today’s weather
Sunny with a high of 98 degrees.
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