During the summer of 2010, my heart was breaking. There were an unusual number of untimely deaths back home, in Stokes County, N.C. In the midst of praying for my junior-high friend before her second craniotomy for her Stage III brain tumor, I paused. She was only 34. I was struggling with how I could faithfully pray for my friend. At the same time, my childhood neighbor was on his deathbed from a malignant brain tumor.

As a liturgical artist, I turned to my work to sort through my concerns. I sculpted a piece out of an old book from my church closet – “Your God is Too Small,” by J.B. Phillips. I asked “Whose God is too small?” My friend’s faith was not wavering, but mine was. Ultimately, I called it Gray Matter. It evolved into a paper sculpture shaped like a small brain with grave rubbings of loved ones I had lost over the years tucked into the cut pages.

During the process, I also began to ask, “What’s in the water?” and “What’s at Belews Lake?” The answers I found were disturbing.

Belews Lake was built with the advent of Belews Creek Steam Station, which opened in 1974, the year of my birth. It is Duke Energy’s largest coal-burning power plant in the Carolinas. It provides twenty percent of the power for North Carolina and burns over 200 railcars of coal on a peak day.

The by-product of this process is coal ash, which contains a toxic mix of heavy metals, including arsenic, beryllium, boron, cadmium, chromium, hexavalent, chromium, cobalt, lead, manganese, mercury, molybdenum, selenium, strontium, thallium, and vanadium. Historically coal ash has been contained in retaining ponds covered with water close to rivers throughout our country. This allows for energy providers to discharge water into the rivers and maintain appropriate levels in the ponds. As one can imagine, this puts our drinking water in grave risk.

Belews Creek is home to over 20 million tons of coal ash, 13 million of which is located in one massive pond reaching 342 acres wide and twelve to fourteen stories deep. It includes twenty-seven drains that flow into the Dan River twenty-four hours a day since 2006. I imagine this is like burying radioactive toxic waste the size of over two hundred city blocks of skyscrapers – a monstrosity hidden in plain sight, quietly polluting our scenic, rural landscape.

Local lifelong residents talk about how the coal ash rained down over the area for a decade. As a child, I vaguely remember drawing smiley faces and writing WASH ME on the backs of car windows while spending the summer at my cousin’s house. Back then, I had serious allergies and asthma that prevented me from participating in any sport. I was not a great athlete anyway, but the lack of energy and inability to breathe stopped me in my tracks. When I moved to Chapel Hill for college, all of my allergies were miraculously gone. I thought that I had simply outgrown my allergies. I had always heard your body regenerates itself every seven years. But this summer, I began to wonder if the ash was the source of my sickness, five years after I started speaking to my friends about how coal ash impacts other people’s health.

In late 2012, the residents around Belews Creek developed a group called Residents for Coal Ash Clean Up. Until two years ago, many people were unfamiliar with coal ash despite the massive TVA coal ash spill in Kingston, Tennessee in December 2008, which knocked homes off foundations and is still undergoing a billion dollar remediation process seven years later. Once the Dan River spill put coal ash in the spotlight as the third largest coal spill in our nation’s history, our organizing efforts grew exponentially.

Groundhog Day marked the two-year anniversary of when the Duke Energy plant in Eden started leaking coal ash into the Dan River. Even though executives knew that the plant was at grave risk for this happening, Duke took no preventative measures and a week to stop the spill. 80,000 tons of coal still coat 70 miles of the Dan River after a meager 4% clean-up deemed complete by the EPA. Headlines today tell us the State of Virginia is suing Duke Energy regarding this spill.

It is hard for me to forget that the same week the coal ash flowed down the Dan River, my friends and I were praying for a ten-year-old boy on Facebook. He lived within two miles of the Belews Creek plant just thirty miles upstream from Eden. I first heard about him when he was in remission from his brain tumor. By the summer, doctors discovered tumors filled his lungs. He passed away in February 2014.

This summer our communities from around the state came together to form Alliance of Carolinians Together against Coal Ash. This statewide organization includes groups from the fourteen Duke Energy facilities around the state, plus groups from Lee and Chatham Counties, which are slated to receive the ash. Non-profit agencies who assist us include Appalachian Voices,Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, Clean Water for NC,NC WARN, NC Environmental Justice Network, NC NAACP Local Chapters, and EnvironmentaLEE.

On Epiphany 2016, ACT released its unifying principles on the same day that WRAL, the Raleigh television station, broke the story of Governor McCroy, a 28-year employee of Duke Energy, hosting a secret dinner at the Governor’s Mansion with Duke Energy executives and DEQ officials on June 1st in the midst of the state’s coal ash regulation. No one will say what they talked about over dinner, but afterwards DEQ reduced Duke’s coal ash settlement from $25 million for one pond, to just $7 million for all 14 ponds.

Instead of fixing this situation or holding the polluters responsible, DEQ is downplaying the risk from chemicals that Duke Energy has dumped into our drinking water. These chemicals like vanadium or hexavalent chromium are just one of a cocktail of toxins being fed into our water, streams and bodies daily. The three most startling numbers found on the Do Not Drink letters surrounding Belews Creek include: arsenic: 108 ug/L, lead: 1890 ug/L, and Iron=8500 ug/L. Imagine what that does to your body to live, eat, breath and sleep surrounded by a mix of arsenic, lead, mercury, selenium, radon and many more heavy metals for forty years.

One of our members living closest to the Belews Creek coal ash pond is able to shave a layer of ash off of her bedspread every four to five days during Duke’s recent reconstruction process. She is one of the 400 families living on bottled water in the state of North Carolina for the last year. These families must use bottles of Dasani water to eat, bathe, brush their teeth, wash their vegetables, and cook. Stacks of bottles fill every corner of their homes. It is an incredible burden to deal with the cardboard and plastic recycling.

Yet Governor McCroy has yet to identify this statewide water crisis inflicted by Duke Energy as a problem for our citizens. After the news of the Governor’s secret dinner, ACT against Coal Ash went to Raleigh to invite Governor McCroy to come to any of the impacted citizens’ homes for dinner. Citizens of Walnut Cove invited him again the following week. He still has not responded.