Staff and wire reports

GREENVILLE — A federal judge is approving two Duke Energy plans describing how the country’s largest electricity company says it will comply with environmental laws.

The statewide and nationwide environmental compliance plans were approved last week by U.S. District Judge Malcolm Howard. They were required under Duke Energy’s $102 million settlement of criminal charges last year following its 2014 spill of coal ash into the Dan River.

The state plan includes annual audits of Duke Energy’s North Carolina power plants with coal ash pits and record-keeping of how much ash those pits contain.

One of those sites is in Rowan County, at Duke’s Buck Steam Station power generating plant on the Yadkin River. At the end of 2015, the state Department of Environmental Quality rated the Buck coal ash ponds at an intermediate to low priority for remediation, after an earlier draft rated the site high priority. But state officials said Duke hadn’t provided enough information on some impoundments “to support a definitive conclusion as to whether the exceedances of groundwater standards near the coal ash impoundments are the result of natural background.”

Residents who live near the Buck coal ash impoundments have been told by the state not to drink their well water due to the presence of heavy metals.

The state Department of Environmental Quality plans to hold a public meeting March 22 to discuss the Buck coal ash ponds and how it rated them. The meeting is scheduled to begin at 6 p.m. in room 300 at the Center for the Environment on the Catawba College campus.

Duke Energy pleaded guilty in May to nine criminal violations of the federal Clean Water Act for its illegal pollution. The company was sentenced to five years’ probation and is being monitored for compliance with the federal law.