Tennessee Town Still Looks Like a Moonscape After TVA Spill

It’s been nearly 7 months since the residents of Harriman, Tennessee woke up to find their properties – and the once-pristine lakes that could be seen from their windows – engulfed in a toxic mess of wet, gray coal sludge.  Sadly, the view from their homes still hasn’t changed much, and their children are beginning to show signs of troubling health problems.

The Tennessee Valley Authority, which is responsible for the December 22nd, 2008 spill at its coal power plant in neighboring Kingston, Tennessee, insists that the coal ash waste is safe, but residents – including the Hampton family, who live near the spill site – say that their health tells a different story.

CNN reports:

“Everything here is changed,” Hampton said, her eyes glistening. “[The landscape] reminds me of what you see on the moon. It breaks my heart.”

Residents are afraid of the chemicals that were released into the environment: arsenic, selenium, lead and radioactive materials including chromium and barium.

Whatever the official reports say, the Hamptons believe that the air outside their home could be toxic to their children. Pamela Hampton says she first noticed that her children were having health problems only days after the spill.

First, 11-year-old Monica started complaining about headaches. Then, all three children — Monica, 6-year-old Noah and 3-year-old Joshua — began to experience upper-respiratory problems, fevers, ear infections, runny noses and red eyes.

“You’re taking your child to the doctor yet again, or two children, and then in a week, the next child is sick,” Hampton said. “After about the third or fourth time, that’s when I started realizing that this is not a coincidence. It’s like being sucker-punched.”

Noah Hampton’s ear infections were so persistent, his ears so inflamed, Pamela Hampton says, the family’s doctor said it looked like he had growths in his ears resembling small grapes.

The doctors’ visits over the past six months have been frequent, expensive and inconclusive.

Here it is, July, and yet all the residents have received from TVA and the government is unfulfilled promises. The EPA, which doesn’t consider coal ash a hazardous material, still hasn’t revisited that stance despite reassurances from administrator Lisa Jackson that it would. TVA told residents that it would set up clinics to test community members’ blood for potential toxics – but they’ve been saying that for months.

In contrast to TVA’s finding that the water and air in the area was safe, a Duke University study concluded that toxic elements from the coal ash could be suspended in the air, which poses a health risk. It also found that coal ash caused contamination in surface waters, and that accumulation of toxic substances found in the river sediment could poison fish. Sure enough, researchers have noticed fish with gills coated completely in coal ash sediment, a sign of what it may be doing to humans’ lungs as well.

Sadly, these families don’t have the funds to leave the area and start a new life somewhere else – they’re participants in a lawsuit against the TVA, but that could be drawn out for years. They have little choice but to wait, and hope that things don’t get any worse.

Link [CNN]
Photo credit: Dirty Coal TVA

TVA Spill Update: Worried Residents and More Coal Spills

Over three weeks after the December 22nd TVA coal ash spill in Harriman, Tennessee, residents of the affected area wait for answers – is their drinking water safe? Where will they go? Underneath the wet, toxic mess in their backyards is once-fertile land, now contaminated and uninhabitable. As workers protected by HAZMAT suits pick through the sludge, the devastated, coughing residents whose homes and property have been destroyed wonder if they should be wearing protective gear, too.

Nashville Scene News reports:

What will happen when it dries and whips over the countryside, spirited by the wind coursing through these East Tennessee hills?

But there’s not much they can do. Their homes are all but worthless; no one’s shopping for fixer-uppers on a hazardous waste site. And without ample nest eggs, few have the money to leave.

“The most we could hope for is TVA buying our property,” Brenda Bailey says. “It’s ruined. We don’t even have the money to relocate.”

Residents of areas where TVA plants are located are torn between gratitude for the thousands of jobs that TVA has provided in their area and fears about pollution. Some locals are holding on to the hope that the Kingston spill was truly an accident and was not caused by TVA cutting corners to save money, while others angrily decry what they see as the sacrifice of their safety for higher profits.

One week ago today, as much as 10,000 gallons of coal waste spilled into Widows Creek in northeastern Alabama – at another plant owned by TVA. Claiming that it poses no threat to human health, TVA blamed a leaking pipe for the calcium sulfate spill and dismissed concerns about whether drinking water in the area was affected. Lab test results are expected on Monday.

The Huffington Post is reporting that yet another coal spill has occurred – this time, rather than coal ash sludge, it’s 110 tons of coal spilled next to New River in Scott County, Tennessee after a train overturned. This third spill is not connected to TVA, but does provide another sobering reminder of the danger that coal poses to the human health and the environment.

TennesseeGreen.com is reporting on the reaction of environmental groups and members of Congress:

U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works

“The Tennessee Valley Authority has a lot to answer for – the first step is to prevent further spills and damage to communities around its plants. I have asked the TVA for a complete assessment of the safety of its waste disposal sites and their plans for upgrading those sites. This second pollution spill must be a wakeup message to the TVA and to the U.S. EPA that the current situation is unacceptable.”

Bruce Nilles, Director of the Sierra Club’s National Coal Campaign

“Even as residents in Roane County Tennessee are still trying to grasp the full impact of the Kingston disaster, communities in northeastern Alabama are now threatened with a new toxic coal waste spill.

“While initial accounts indicate that this latest spill is smaller than the Tennessee disaster, we hope that TVA and EPA have learned from the Tennessee disaster and move quickly to protect residents….

“Clearly current regulations are not adequate. We need the Environmental Protection Agency to start regulating coal ash before more communities are put at risk.”

The good news is, the US House of Representatives is moving forward on fly ash regulation after the Kingston spill made the entire country aware of just how dangerous this coal waste product can be. U.S. Rep. Nick Rahall of West Virginia filed legislation on Wednesday requiring that federal standards be put in place for coal ash ponds and other members of Congress are questioning why the EPA has not regulated coal ash in the past. Obama’s EPA nominee, Lisa Jackson, pledges to assess the situation in depth and look at strict regulation.

TVA has also been ordered by a federal judge to clean up four coal-fired plants in Eastern Tennessee and Alabama, which have been fouling the air in nearby Western North Carolina. Emissions from the plant were found to unreasonably interfere with the rights of North Carolina citizens, affecting health, the local economy and natural resources. The plants will now be required to use year-round pollution controls.

The coal industry must be held responsible for the damage they’re doing. We can’t continue to let them get away with things like this.

If you want to help the cleanup effort in Tennessee, please contact United Mountain Defense. They are currently in need of donations for HAZMAT respirators and independent air monitors.

Link [Nashville Scene News] + [The Huffington Post] + [TennesseeGreen] + [Knox News] + [CNN]
Photo credit: United Mountain Defense

Tennessee Coal Ash Spill Spurs Worries Around the Country

If anything could open the eyes of the entire nation to the dangers of coal, the Tennessee TVA spill should be it. When more than a billion gallons burst a wall at a power plant in Harriman, Tennessee on December 22nd, just over two weeks ago, it swallowed up most of the town, destroying homes and leaving behind a mess of toxic sludge. Many wonder whether the area will ever really be able to recover, as residents worry about the safety of their water and air.

Those who saw the sludge come barreling at their homes described it as a ‘tsunami’, and people who saw the spill’s effects firsthand said the land resembled that of the fictional Mordor, from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. It’s been said that the Tennessee coal ash spill may be the worst environmental disaster in this nation’s history, and as details have emerged about how the coal combustion waste was stored by the Tennessee Valley Authority, people around the country worry that it could happen to their town, too.

100 miles away in Gallatin, Tennessee, coal ash is stored the same way as it was in Harriman, albeit on a smaller scale.

From the Tennessean:

Betty Johnson of Gallatin lives more than 100 miles from East Tennessee’s massive ash sludge spill. But to her and her neighbors, the disaster hit a little too close to home.

That’s because they’re in the shadow of another Tennessee Valley Authority power plant — which uses the same method to store coal ash as the one that failed at the Kingston plant last month, spilling tons of potentially toxic sludge into the surrounding community.
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“It happened there, it can happen here,” said Johnson, who has lived on Odom’s Bend Road near the Gallatin Fossil Plant for 10 years. “It’s always a concern when you live near any kind of plant.”

TVA and state inspection reports show that the Tennessee Valley Authority knew for the past decade of leaks at the ash retention pond. The Chattanooga Times Free Press reports that in both 2003 and 2006, leaks in the landfill where the wet fly ash was dumped were so bad that TVA repaired drainage and dikes around the retention ponds and, for nearly a year and a half, TVA suspended adding any more ash deposits to the landfill in an attempt to let the dredge cell dry out and stabilize.

Environmental groups are demanding that the Environmental Protection Agency set national standards for ash removal and regulate coal residue as a hazardous material. It’s currently treated as an industrial waste, and disposal is regulated by state agencies. A congressional hearing will be conducted on Thursday about the Kingston spill and the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will hear at least one call from an environmental leader who wants fly ash to be more strictly regulated by the EPA.

Activists have been disseminating information about the dangers of coal ash to ensure that citizens are properly informed, since many feel that the TVA has tried to downplay the toxicity of the sludge. Independent tests on the water quality at the spill site and downstream revealed arsenic levels 300 times what federal laws allow and all samples contained “elevated levels of arsenic, barium, cadmium, chromium, lead, mercury, nickel and thallium”.

On December 30th, 8 days after the spill occurred, the TVA finally released some information about the Kingston Fossil Plant waste generation.

“In just one year, the plant’s byproducts included 45,000 pounds of arsenic, 49,000 pounds of lead, 1.4 million pounds of barium, 91,000 pounds of chromium and 140,000 pounds of manganese. Those metals can cause cancer, liver damage and neurological complications, among other health problems. And the holding pond … contained many decades’ worth of these deposits.”

The coal industry is, of course, frantically trying to keep Americans under the impression that coal can be clean. Coal industry advocates continue to insist that Kingston is an isolated event despite the fact that the EPA has recorded smaller ash pond leaks at about two dozen other sites. Previous ash pond leaks have killed hundreds of fish, yet industry leaders claim there are no proven instances of significant dangers to human health.

Such attempts to placate the public may not go over as well as they have in the past, however. Appalachia residents are more concerned than anyone, given that they live so close to so many coal mines and plants, and they’re demanding action in their own towns.

From Alternet:

Long before this latest disaster, citizens in the Coal River valley in southern West Virginia have pointed to the threats of massive sludge ponds in their neighborhood: Brushy Fork, which contains 9 billion gallons of sludge and the 2.8 billion gallons that sit above Marsh Fork Elementary School, which according to reports written between 1998 and 2005 by the Mine Safety and Health Administration, is at risk for failure which could fatally impact 1,000 people downstream. From the Coal River Valley — and across the nation — the people cry for Marsh Fork Elementary to be moved away from the toxic waste dump which has accrued hundreds of repeated violations. But West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin, III has refused this community’s requests. Massey Energy, which runs the operation, assures West Virginians that their dam is safe and inspected regularly. But that is also what TVA assured the people of Kingston.

The Tennessee Valley Authority must be held accountable for this tragedy, and we must not let the coal industry lull us back into a false sense of safety. Let this be a warning once and for all of just how dangerous coal is, to our health and that of the environment. It’s time to move on.

Link [Tennessean] + [Chattanooga Times Free Press] + [Alternet]