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By

Tom Gordon — The Birmingham News

November 20, 2009, 1:10PM

This aerial view shows the scale of the Arrowhead landfill in Perry County where TVA coal ash is being disposed. (Arrowhead Landfill photo)An environmental attorney has asked the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to order a massive landfill in Alabama’s Perry County to stop receiving coal ash from Tennessee until it has a state permit to discharge liquid waste into the treatment plant in the county seat of Marion. 

David Ludder filed documents this week on behalf of a Marion resident, Jackie Fike, who lives near the town’s wastewater treatment plant. Ludder said Perry County Associates LLC, which owns the Arrowhead landfill, does not have a permit from the Alabama Department of Environmental Management to discharge “pollutants contained in leachate generated” at the site through the Marion wastewater plant and into a tributary of the Cahaba River, Rice Creek.

“Accordingly, such discharge is unlawful,” Ludder writes. 

Because the landfill does not have the necessary permit, EPA should order it to stop taking massive amounts of the coal ash it is now receiving from the Tennessee Valley Authority, Ludder said.

The ash was spilled last year when an earthen dam collapsed at TVA’s Kingston Fossil Fuel Plant in Roane County, Tenn., and the landfill started receiving it in July. Since then, the landfill receives between 8,000 to 11,000 tons of waste virtually every day, and most of the waste is coal ash.

Under a permit from ADEM, the landfill operates as a solid-waste disposal facility.