TOWN OF PINES, Ind. — In the herb garden beside her home on Colorado Avenue, Cathi Murray digs through the soil and pulls out two glittering black rocks.
They’re not ordinary stones, she said. They’re pieces of coal ash — waste from coal burned at the nearby Michigan City Generating Station, less than 3 miles away on the southern shores of Lake Michigan.
The rocks and dust she finds in her backyard and along the overgrown right of way behind her home — places where her two daughters played growing up — are a constant reminder of the contamination that has shaped life for the three decades Murray and her family have lived in Town of Pines, simply called Pines by residents…