Big Bend Station

Big Bend Station has 47 groundwater monitoring wells, 45 of which have been polluted above federal advisory levels based on samples collected between February 03, 2010 and June 01, 2017. Groundwater at this site contains unsafe levels of sulfate, boron, arsenic, radium, manganese, molybdenum, fluoride, nitrate, beryllium, thallium and antimony.

Big Bend Station is a 1,823 MW facility in Apollo Beach, Florida. Big Bend Unit 2 is set to retire in 2021 and Big Bend Unit 1 is planned to be repowered as a natural gas-fired combined-cycle unit by 2023. Tampa Electric Company operates a network of 11 coal ash impoundments and one landfill to accommodate ash and flue gas desulfurization (FGD) waste produced at Big Bend Station. Most of these impoundments are un-lined. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection issued a consent order in 2001 citing contamination of ground and surface waters, including arsenic levels 11 times greater than the drinking water standard. Data collected almost ten years later (in October 2010) show that many monitoring wells still exceed health-based standards for arsenic. On June 29,2017, molten slag from a coal boiler killed five and injured one.

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. For more information about Big Bend, see EIP's reports, Out of Control and America's Top Power Plant Toxic Air Polluters, and visit SoutheastCoalAsh.org.