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]

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