RRI Energy's Seward electric power facility along the Conemaugh River in southern Indiana County is in hot water, according to environmental groups that say the facility's discharges have violated toxic pollution and river temperature limits thousands of times in the last five years.

Those groups -- PennEnvironment, the Sierra Club, PennFuture and Defenders of Wildlife -- announced today that they will file a formal 60-day notice of their intent to sue the company in federal court for its repeated violations of the Clean Water Act. Such notice to RRI, the DEP and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is required under the citizen suit provisions of the federal law.

Laurie Fickman, a spokeswoman for Houston, Texas-based RRI, said the company needs to review the formal notice before it responds to the allegations of permit violations.

According to the environmental groups, RRI's own reports to the state Department of Environmental Protection show water discharges into the river from a coal refuse site at the plant exceeded permitted limits of iron, aluminum, manganese and acidic water on 400 separate days and for every month since 2005.

The company's monitoring reports also show pollutants, including toxic heavy metals, are leaching from the refuse pile and contaminating the river and groundwater in the area, violating the federal Clean Water Act and state Clean Streams Law, the environmental groups say.

In addition, the hot, polluted wastewater discharged by the 521-megawatt waste-coal burning power plant 60 miles east of Pittsburgh has often caused river water temperatures to spike by 12, 14, and even 20 degrees in less than an hour. The power plant's permit limits river temperature changes to 2 degrees, but it has exceeded that limit more than 600 times.

The large and quick river temperature fluctuations threaten aquatic life, said Lisa Widawsky, an attorney with the Environmental Integrity Project, a Washington D.C.-based group representing four other environmental groups.

"The 60-day notice gives everyone an opportunity to fix the problem or take enforcement actions," said Josh Kratka, senior attorney at the National Environmental Law Center, who also worked on the notice.

The $800 million Seward plant was built by Reliant Energy, now RRI, in 2004 to use low-grade "waste" coal. The plant uses about 3.5 million tons of waste coal annually. An estimated 100 million tons of waste coal is in "gob piles" within 50 miles of the facility.

The plant, which boasts cleaner air emissions, replaced an old power facility of the same name built in 1921 on the riverside site. The old plant had enough pollution violations to warrant three enforcement actions by the DEP in 2000 and 2001.

David Masur, state director for PennEnvironment, said a review of RRI's discharge monitoring reports uncovered more than 12,000 permit violations over the last five years and the violations are ongoing.

"If 12,000 violations of cornerstone environmental laws over the past five years is considered 'clean coal,' I'd hate to know what the industry considers 'dirty coal,' " Mr. Masur said.

About half the alleged violations -- more than 5,000 -- are for self-reported violations of the Seward plant's Clean Water Act discharge permit, Mr. Masur said, and more than 6,000 are for illegal, unpermitted discharges of metals and otehr pollutants from the coal refuse piles into the river and groundwater.

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