A Conversation on the BP Gulf Oil Disaster With John Wathen and Glynn Wilson

John L. Wathen’s summarized comments on the dumping of coal ash on poor, mostly black Uniontown residents in Alabama’s Black Belt.

It’s “clearly an environmental justice community where TVA transferred to the Kingston coal ash disaster. It was not cleaned up, simply moved to Uniontown, Alabama,” Wathen said.

Complaints filed with Lisa Jackson, the director of EPA, “took months to answer and then very weakly,” he said. “It seems that EPA is trying to protect TVA and it’s need to dispose of the disaster instead on the fine people of Perry County, Alabama. Coal ash is a toxic product and should be treated as one.”

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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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Friends of Hurricane Creek, one of the most effective environmental organizations in the state and the country, will hold the group’s annual dinner and fundraiser on Nov. 19 at Capstone Village in Tuscaloosa beginning at 6 p.m. at the Capstone Village dinning room.

John Wathen

From about 6:30 to 7 p.m. Hurricane Creekkeeper John Wathen will give the year-in-review report to the membership, “with many photographs of both pretty stuff and the ugly side of the job,” he said in a press release.

The keynote speaker this year is Andy Willner, Executive Director, New York/New Jersey Baykeeper, and a former researcher for the American Littoral Society. Willner has been a city planner, furniture designer, sculptor, boat builder, environmentalist, story teller and photographer.

He was the NY/NJ Baykeeper for 19 years and retired in April 2008. He has started a consulting firm, Andrew J. Willner, Inc. is exhibiting and published a book of his photographs, was a visiting public scholar at Monmouth University’s Urban Coast Institute from 2008-2009. He is a founding member and continues to serve on the international Waterkeeper Alliance Board of Directors, and has traveled nationally and internationally to speak on behalf of the Waterkeeper model of water and habitat protection.

Mr. Willner is a sought after speaker on a wide variety of subjects including environmental advocacy, habitat restoration and sustainability.

There will be a silent auction as well for many of Creekkeeper’s photo prints as well as art works from around the area. A $25 per plate donation is required. Please send RSVP to hccreekkeeper@hughes.net before Nov. 14.