"When rancher Clint McRae first saw the swirling green and white ponds of arsenic, boron, mercury and lead-containing sludge 10 miles from his property, it was in a photography show at the Montana statehouse. He first thought they were abstract art, but quickly realized some were aerial photos of the ash slurry left over from burning coal at southeastern Montana’s Colstrip Steam Electric Station.
Colstrip is the second largest coal-fired power plant in the West, and significant water contamination has been happening there since 1979. Currently, its waste ponds are spewing (some say leaking) coal ash into the groundwater faster than the company can control. Even sucking 423 gallons of polluted water back into the ponds each minute hasn’t stopped underground contamination from spreading. In 2008, after people got sick from drinking water at the neighboring Moose Lodge, and people lost use of their wells, 57 residents in the nearby town of Colstrip settled with the plant’s owners for $25 million. The toxic plume is still spreading.
McRae is worried about his ranch’s water, but he’s caught between Montana’s toothless coal ash regulations and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s complete lack of oversight. 'No matter where we turn, we get the finger pointing the other direction,' he says in Things of Intrinsic Worth, a short film showing the McRae family’s struggle to defend their watershed against coal ash (video below, film starts 49 seconds in)."