A Washington lobbyist who was the wife of a White House adviser was found dead inside a burning car Monday in southeast Washington.
Washington D.C. Fire Department responded about 5:00 a.m. Monday to the 800 block of A Street, Washington, D.C. about eight blocks east of the Capitol of the United States building. Inside a burning black BMW, firefighters discovered the body of Ashley Turton, 37, an energy lobbyist and the spouse of deputy director of legislative affairs for the House of Representatives, Daniel Turton. She was discovered inside the burning BMW in one-car brick garage behind her home in the Washington D.C.
Ashley Turton was a mother of three children, and worked as a lobbyist for Progress Energy, which provides power to homes in North and South Carolina, as well as Florida.
Progress Energy (NYSE: PGN), headquartered in Raleigh, N.C., is a Fortune 500 energy company with more than 21,000 megawatts of generation capacity and $9 billion in annual revenues. Progress Energy includes two major electric utilities that serve approximately 3.1 million customers in the Carolinas and Florida. Progress Energy celebrated a century of service in 2008. The company’s chairman and CEO is William D. Johnson; his predecessor was Mr. Bob McGehee, who died on October 9, 2007 at the age of 64 of a stroke while on a business trip to London.
Progress Energy is the majority owner and operator of the Brunswick, Crystal River 3, Robinson, and Shearon Harris nuclear power plants.
The company is investing $300,000 in a UNC Chapel Hill study to map the offshore wind power potential of North Carolina. Progress Energy launched its SunSense-branded solar incentive programs in 2009.
Progress Energy has installed flue-gas desulfurization technology, or scrubbers, to remove sulfur dioxide emissions from its nine largest coal-fired power plant units.
Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst identified Progress Energy as the 29th-largest corporate producer of air pollution in the United States in 2002, when it released roughly 39 million pounds of toxic chemicals into the air. Major pollutants included nickel compounds, chromium compounds, sulfuric acid, and hydrochloric acid. Progress Energy has also been named a potentially responsible party at the Carolina Transformer Co. Superfund toxic waste site, according to the Center for Public Integrity.