And this will be fouling the Neuse River for a long time to come:

Matthew Starr had paddled only a half mile of a stretch of Neuse River near Duke Energy’s H.F. Lee power plant in Goldsboro when he saw initial signs that something had gone very wrong. “There was exposed coal ash on trees, floating in the river, on the road,” said Starr, the Upper Neuse Riverkeeper. “There was coal ash lying on the ground. We scooped it up out of the water.”

Flooding from Hurricane Florence had drowned two inactive coal ash basins in five feet of water. The active basins, according to state regulators, were structurally sound, but the Half Mile Branch Creek, according to images published by the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), was flowing through the inactive basin complex, which is covered in trees and other vegetation. Cenospheres, hollow balls of silica and aluminum that are coal ash byproducts, were floating on the water. But cenospheres are not entirely innocuous; they often contain arsenic and lead, just like the coal they came from.

This is one of the coal ash sites Duke Energy was ordered to relocate, but in late 2016 they sought for and received approval to recycle that ash instead. In other words, it shouldn't have been there to leak out. At least not in the volume it did. But of course that "volume" is hard to quantify, since we can't trust Duke Energy to be honest about its reporting:

Nothin' to see here, folks. Move along:

Duke Energy says on-site inspections at the H.F. Lee plant confirm that only a minimal amount of coal ash came out of an inactive ash pond inundated by the post-Hurricane Matthew flooding near Goldsboro. A five-person crew from the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality spent more than five hours at the site Saturday. DEQ said in a prepared statement that the coal ash released from the flooded basin was “less than would fit in a pickup truck.”

I see their standards of measurement have deteriorated about as much as their quality standards. And in an effort to demonstrate they're not just in the bag for Duke Energy, DEQ brings out the white paint for industrial hog lagoons, too:

The term "negligence" never seems to come up in these discussions:

But Lesley Stahl of CBS, who anchored the hard-hitting segment, noted that Duke had been warned after repeated independent inspections in the past to keep a close watch on the stormwater pipe that ended up collapsing and rupturing under a pond, dumping an unimaginable 39,000 tons of the black filth into the Dan River.

Lynn Good, the current chief executive of Duke Energy, who was on the job only seven months at the time of the spill, put the best face she could on the situation. “It was an accident,” Good said. “It didn’t work the way it should have worked. It didn’t meet our standards or expectations.”

No, after several warnings spread over an equal number of years, it no longer meets the criteria of an "accident." It was an incident, and an avoidable one at that. And your continued efforts to shy away from taking complete responsibility seriously calls into question Duke Energy's ability to be a trustworthy partner in the effort to make the remaining coal ash impoundments safe and secure. If the General Assembly and the Coal Ash Commission don't understand that, the "negligence" will leak over to them, too.