COUNTY — Local groups continued to speak out against a potential coal ash dump in Pickens County last week before the Pickens County Planning Commission voted to suspend all activities at the landfill in questoin.

The Pickens County Legislative Delegation and local manufacturers had voiced their condemnation of the proposal, but the latest opposition came from an unexpected source — the Pickens County Historical Society.

“A historical society may not be a traditional activist organization when it comes to environmental issues, but we strongly believe that here in Pickens County our history and our heritage is intimately linked to the land and our natural resources,” the group said in a release last Thursday. “We will not stand idly by and watch the land of our ancestors become a toxic waste dump for other states.”

North Carolina-based MRR Pickens LLC entered into an agreement with Pickens County Council to create a construction and debris landfill at the site in Liberty in 2007, but the company recently applied for a variance with the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control to allow the disposal of coal ash in the landfill.

Coal ash — which is the waste material left behind after the burning of coal — can contain arsenic, mercury, lead, and more than a dozen other heavy metals, many of them toxic, according to environmental activist organization Physicians for Social Responsibility.

“Toxic constituents of coal ash are blowing, spilling and leaching (dissolving and percolating) from storage units into air, land and human drinking water, posing an acute risk of cancer and neurological effects as well as many other negative health impacts: heart damage, lung disease, kidney disease, reproductive problems, gastrointestinal illness, birth defects, and impaired bone growth in children,” according to the PSR website.

PSR says coal ash, which is generated at coal-fired power plants across the country, is the second-largest industrial waste stream in the U.S.

In a letter sent to MRR Pickens on Monday, the Pickens County Planning Commission suspended its land-use permit for the landfill.

The Pickens County Historical Society joined a rapidly growing number of Pickens County residents and local officials voicing opposition to the local dump site.

“We are appalled and disappointed that our own South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control would permit a facility, lined or otherwise, that would allow the owner to bring toxic coal ash waste into our state and specifically into our county,” the group’s release said. “We are also at a loss to explain how our own state agency, the very agency charged with protecting our environment and our health and safety, would put the health and safety of our children and other citizens at risk from the transport and disposal of a widely recognized toxic waste product.”