Transcript of Press Conference Announcing Settlement in United States Et Al vs. American Elec...( WASHINGTON Oct. 9 -- The followin...),Health

WASHINGTON, Oct. 9/PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The following was released today by the U.S. Department of Justice:

9:05 A.M. EDT

MR. TENPAS: Good morning. I am Ronald Tenpas, acting Assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources Division here at the Department of Justice. Joining me today is Granta Nakayama, the EPA's assistant administrator for Enforcement and Compliance Assurance.

We are here today to announce the largest environmental enforcement settlement in the history of our agencies. The agreement reached with American Electric Power Company and lodged with the court today requires the company to install approximately $4.6 billion in pollution control technologies and to reduce its emissions by 800,000 tons per year in the coming years.

In addition, the company will pay a $15 million civil penalty and will spend a further $60 million on a group of projects designed to address the effects of its past emissions. These projects include the acquisition and protection of ecologically valuable land, buying buffer zones to help protect the people from harmful effects of nitrogen and taking steps with respects to its own fleet of transportation vehicles such as barges and trucks.

This case was originally brought in November of 1999. It has involved a coalition of eight states and more than a dozen citizens groups. In bringing this case, the government alleged that the company had made major modifications to many of its coal-fired power plants in the eastern United States, changes that led it to emit more air pollution.

We alleged that the company should have obtained a permit and installed pollution control devices, often called best available control technology, in order to prevent these emissions and should have made the installation of that technology at the time it made the plant modifications.

This historic settlement covers 16 coal fire plants. You can see their location in five states
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