W.A. Parish Electric Generating Station has 64 groundwater monitoring wells, 61 of which have been polluted above federal advisory levels based on samples collected between May 24, 2010 and October 18, 2019. Groundwater at this site contains unsafe levels of sulfate, manganese, arsenic, strontium, fluoride, boron, lithium, molybdenum, antimony, chromium, cobalt, selenium, thallium, barium and mercury.
Site descriptionNRG Energy’s W.A. Parish Electric Generating Station is a 2,737-MW plant with four coal-fired units and four gas-fired units. The plant is located adjacent to Smithers Lake, near Thompsons, Texas in Fort Bend County. It is the largest power plant in Texas and the second largest fossil-fuel burning plant in the country and began operations in 1977.This facility is among the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's list of potential damage cases, indicating that it has potentially polluted groundwater or surface water at levels which threaten human health and the environment. W.A. Parish has a landfill and two ponds (Air Preheater Pond and FDG Emergency Pond) regulated under the federal coal ash rule. You can find the industry reported data here.
For more information on the W.A. Parish Generating Station, see EIP's reports, Risky Business, Groundwater Contamination from Texas Coal Ash Dumps and EIP's 2019 National Coal Ash Report Coal's Poisonous Legacy.
For more information about Texas Coal Ash, see Earthjustice's fact sheet, Texas and Coal Ash Disposal in Ponds and Landfills.