Coal Ash Spill Anniversary as Forgotten as Disaster Itself
December 26th, 2009
Ruby Holmes, 80, who has lived in a house right across the street from the Arrowhead Landfill in Perry County all her life, says when she tries to sleep with her window cracked, “This odor wakes me up at night.”
Originally published as the Christmas Day lead story at Truthout.org | Digg It…
by Glynn Wilson
On the third day before Christmas in 2008, the people living along the Emory River in East Tennessee were listening to the songs on the radio about a white Christmas like everybody else in the country, trying to look forward and not back. A new president had been elected and would soon occupy the White House, a president who promised “hope” after eight years of Bush and war and unprecedented corruption, as well as increasing economic hardship, squeezing the middle class like a juggernaut.
Instead of a white Christmas, though, people like Steve Scarborough of the Dagger Kayak and Canoe company woke up to a black-gray mess of epic proportions, a river full of toxic coal ash from the Tennessee Valley Authority’s coal-fired power plant at Kingston, Tennessee.
“There are no excuses for this,” Scarborough said. “One of the dumbest thing humans do is dig coal out of the ground and burn it.”
The largely affluent population of the area demanded action and an immediate cleanup of the largest environmental disaster in American history in the lower 48 states, second only to the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince Williams Sound, Alaska, in the spring of 1989. So within four months, by March 20, TVA began dredging the mountain of coal ash out of the river and shipping it by train to a landfill in the poor Black Belt of Alabama.
One year later, on the first anniversary of the second worst environmental disaster in American history, while the people in Tennessee are hiring lawyers and suing TVA and reading story after story in the local newspapers about their plight while the cleanup continues, the poor people of Perry County, Alabama, where TVA found a place to dump the toxic ash, are not singing Christmas carols. They are locked in their homes with their air conditioners running even in winter trying to stay out of the gaseous fumes from the landfill where the coal ash is piling up on top of household garbage by the freight train load.
