July 9th was the deadline to provide comments on FERC's Environmental Assessment for the rebuilding of AmerenUE's Taum Sauk hydropower project, which failed in December 2005.
Citing concerns over whether the project should be built at all, or whether a fair review should be shifted to the relicensing (Taum Sauk's license expires in 2010), several groups protested the conclusions of the draft. Their comments are attached below.
As the Associated Press reported in its July 10th "Groups Criticize Ameren Taum Sauk Plans":
Environmental regulators and activists criticized parts of Ameren Corp.'s plan to rebuild the Taum Sauk reservoir in public comments submitted to federal regulators this week.
The comments were filed Monday and Tuesday with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which is deciding whether to let Ameren rebuild the mountaintop reservoir in rural southeast Missouri.
BACKGROUND
Early in the morning on December 14, 2005, the upper reservoir of the Taum Sauk Project failed, blowing out one wall of the earthen berm and flooding Johnson's Shut-Ins State Park with over one billion gallons of water. The catastrophic breach emptied the reservoir in 30 minutes. A park ranger and his family were seriously injured in the flood.
The Taum Sauk project operates as pumped storage. It has two reservoirs - one in the East Fork of the Black Rivers channel, the other carved out of a chopped-off mountain neighboring the river. When peak power is in demand, the top reservoir releases water into the lower reservoir; on off-peak hours, the water is pumped to the top reservoir. Often, pumped storage is a net-loss energy facility, generating power that is financially advantageous and using another source of power (commonly coal power) to return water to the upper reservoir.
In preparation for St. Louis's power needs on the morning of December 14th, project owner Ameren began filling the upper reservoir. However, the upper reservoir was known to have safety issues, and to compound the problem, Ameren overfilled the reservoir. In its weakened state, the reservoir collapsed. A review of the situation by dam safety officials suggests that the reservoir's permitted high-end levels were already too close to the lip of the reservoir; that the safety issues were not dealt with appropriately by regulators; and that the safety review conducted only three months before the collapse may have contained inaccurate data.
FERC conducted a review of the breach and fined the company for its error. The state of Missouri pursues its own claims, including criminal negligence, against the company.
Read FERC's website on Taum Sauk failure.
Read the Missouri DNR's coverage of the disaster, including photos.