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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The People Who Don’t Want It Are Afraid of the Effects

by Glynn Wilson [Videos below]

UNIONTOWN, Ala. — The Rev. James R. Murdock sits on his porch with a view of the Arrowhead Landfill and wonders, watching the TVA coal ash train roll in.

Glynn Wilson

The Rev. James R. Murdock

Murdock is one of the original members of Concerned Citizens of Perry County, a group that lost a court fight to keep the landfill from opening — before they knew the coal ash would be shipped to their town dump. It was permitted to take garbage from 16 states, including New Jersey, and for that the chairman of the county commission of 18 years lost his seat.

Not in time for the people here who have to live with the landfill now, though, along with the effluent from the Southeastern Cheese factory, overflowing their lagoon sewer.

Murdock, a cancer survivor, is anxious about the toxic and radioactive coal ash rolling into town. It contains at least 14 different chemicals and heavy metals, including arsenic and lead. There are ways to recycle some coal ash, like putting it in concrete. But experts say this particular coal ash is some of the most toxic ever generated as a byproduct of burning some of the dirtiest coal to ever be mined for electric power. It has been piling up in East Tennessee since the 1960s. A member of Congress from Huntsville, a doctor, recently testified it was as deadly as nuclear waste.

Murdock and his group are concerned, but they don’t know what they can do since the people elected to represent them have written them off. He worries the toxic ash will get airborne and pollute the very air he breaths every day, as well as the local drinking water supply.

Yet he wonders, aloud, if “there’s even a point to fighting it anymore.”

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TVA Coal Ash Comes to Alabama’s Black Belt

Glynn Wilson

An off duty Uniontown Police officer, with his town cruiser and air conditioner running full blast on a hot July day, guards the entrance to the Arrowhead Landfill in poor Perry County in Alabama’s Black Belt where TVA is shipping its toxic coal ash from the massive spill in Kingston, Tennessee back in December. After a day trip there on Saturday with John Wathen, the Hurricane Creek Keeper and with TheDirtyLie.com, we are working up a full report on the latest environmental injustice to result from the biggest ecological disaster of its kind in American history.