Glynn Wilson / Southwings

A close view of the growing coal ash mountain in Perry County, Alabama (click on image for more photos)

by Glynn Wilson

Attorney David Ludder has filed an administrative complaint against the Alabama Department of Environmental Management that could result in a federal takeover of the state’s enforcement of national environmental laws by the Environmental Protection Agency and result in a loss of federal funding for the state.

The formal complaint was filed with EPA’s Office of Civil Rights on behalf of the people of Perry County in Alabama’s Black Belt. According to Ludder, they have been the subject of an environmental injustice due to their racial and economic disadvantage by the permitting and placement of a landfill near them that is now full of toxic coal ash from the Tennessee Valley Authority’s major environmental disaster in the Cinch River in 2008.

Ludder’s complaint alleges that the landfill and its contents pollute the environment in a poor, minority area without the means to fight it politically. In addition to potential health problems from the air and water pollution, the landfill exposes local residents to a constant bad odor, lowers property values and causes dangerous traffic problems in the area.

“If EPA determines that ADEM did violate EPA’s regulations without ‘justification,’ EPA must initiate proceedings to deny, annul, suspend or terminate EPA funding to ADEM,” Ludder said in an e-mail interview. “This could cripple ADEM, and no doubt would require ADEM to surrender EPA-authorized programs.”

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Glynn Wilson/Southwings

The toxic TVA coal ash mountain grows higher every day at the Arrowhead Landfill in Alabama’s Black Belt as millions of tons of the deadly stew makes its way down in train after train from one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history at Kingston, Tennessee. Click here or on the image for a photo essay…

What Happened to the Millions from the TVA Coal Ash Contract?

John Wathen/Southwings

Toxic TVA coal ash by the train load is filling up the local landfill only designed for household garbage, not hazardous waste, in Alabama’s Black Belt…

by Glynn Wilson

The Arrowhead Landfill in Perry County, Alabama — where TVA is hauling millions of tons of coal ash in one of the biggest environmental cleanups ever – has filed for bankruptcy protection just days before a major lawsuit was to be filed, sources say.

It is not clear whether this decision will stop shipments of the toxic fly ash to Alabama’s Black Belt, or halt the ongoing cleanup in the Emory River in Kingston, Tennessee.

It is also not clear where the money went from the Tennessee Valley Authority, which contracted with the landfill for millions of dollars to take the waste, although sources say it ended up in New Jersey, not Uniontown, Alabama.

Environmental lawyer David Ludder, who confirmed the bankruptcy petition, said he and other attorneys representing local residents are investigating the options available to those in the community.

He said the filing of the bankruptcy petition automatically stays or prevents any new lawsuits from being filed against the company, Perry County Associates, at this time.

“I see it as an opportunity for any new operator to do a better job,” Ludder said, “and an opportunity for the residents to approach them and demand that they do a better job.”

No one from the company could be reached for comment at the numbers listed in Uniontown or Atlanta on their Website.

But Jeffery Hartley, an attorney for Perry Uniontown Ventures, which filed for bankruptcy in federal court in Mobile, told the Birmingham News it had “no choice given Phillips and Jordan’s refusal to turn over monies to ownership, to make payments they had agreed to make, or to provide a proper accounting of the funds.”

Perry Uniontown Ventures I owns Arrowhead Landfill. Phillips & Jordan Inc., and Phill-Con Services operate the landfill under an agency agreement with Perry Uniontown Ventures.

Hartley said the bankruptcy filing would not affect the operation of the landfill, “which will continue to operate safely and effectively, without interruption.”

Hurricane Creekkeeper John Wathen says the landfill has not been operating safely or effectively, since he has discovered the company dumping liquid waste into ditches along the road in front of people’s houses.

Check out more of this story and the best coverage of this controversy in the country here:

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John Wathen

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.

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