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.”
Sixty-four residents of Perry County, in Alabama’s Black Belt, have filed a lawsuit against the operators of the Arrowhead Landfill for damages resulting from odor, dust and noise due to the contract to dispose of TVA’s toxic coal ash from the major spill in Tennessee’s Emory River over the Christmas holidays in 2008.
David Ludder of Tallahassee, Florida and G. Keith Clark of Birmingham, Alabama, both former attorneys with the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, filed the suit Monday against Phill-Con Services and Phillips and Jordan in Perry County Circuit Court.
According to Ludder, residents also ask court to prohibit operators from recirculating leachate in waste piles,
using coal ash or any other non-cohesive, permeable material for daily cover, and from operating the landfill in a manner that causes odor to leave the landfill site.
They are also asking the court to require operators to place a permanent cover on all side slopes of all waste cells, to prohibit operation of heavy machinery at the waste cells and rail yard and movement of large trucks along the haul roads prior to 7 a.m. or after 7 p.m.
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.”
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.
Coming up this Sunday, CBS’s “60 Minutes” will air a long anticipated show on coal ash, a byproduct of coal power plants. But according to the advance blurb, the story will focus on how coal ash is recycled in dozens of ways and used in consumer products like carpet for schools.
How safe are these products? Lesley Stahl talks to EPA administrator Lisa Jackson.
For mo-better coverage, check out our previous stories on one of the worst environmental disasters in American history.
An analysis by the Conservation Alabama Foundation finds that Alabama’s landfill permitting practices put the state at high risk for accepting more out-of-state coal ash and other hazardous materials.
“Alabama has 32 municipal landfills with a permitted daily flow capacity of 51,205 tons,” said Adam Snyder, executive director of the Conservation Alabama Foundation. “Considering Alabamians produce about 12,600 tons per day of waste, there is nearly four times the capacity at state landfills for Alabama’s needs.”
Eight of the 32 municipal landfills in the state are permitted to take out of state waste, with a total out-of-state capacity of 24,200 tons per day. New landfills, such as the proposed Conecuh Woods landfill in Conecuh County, could add 10,000 tons per day of out-of-state waste.
“Such a glut in landfill capacity makes Alabama a prime target for out-of-state waste, such as the coal ash that is planned to be transported from Kingston, Tenn. to Perry County’s Arrowhead Landfill,” Snyder said. “Alabama’s landfill permitting practices need to be reviewed before another landfill is allowed to open or a current landfill is allowed to expand.”
The Arrowhead Landfill is permitted to accept 7,500 tons of garbage per day, although its Web site shows a capacity of 15,000 tons per day. Should Arrowhead put all of their permitted flow towards accepting the estimated 3.9 million tons of waste from the Tennessee Valley Authority’s spill in Kingston, coal ash will be flowing into Perry County for more than 520 days.
An analysis done by the Legal Environmental Assistance Foundation in 2005 found that about two-thirds of the landfills in Alabama are sited in or around impoverished and/or minority communities. Census estimates show that 31 percent of the citizens of Perry County live in poverty and a significant number of the county’s citizens are minority.
We echo the concerns of this group and urge an investigation of this practice.
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Perry County Landfill Set to Double Intake, Expand to 33 States?
Studies of public documents on the Alabama Department of Environmental Management’s Web site reveal that Arrowhead Landfill in Perry County is seeking permission to allow double its current permitted waste intake.
Perry County Associates, LLC has applied for a major permit modification to the Solid Waste Disposal Permit No. 53-03 for the Perry County Associates Landfill. The modification involves expanding service area, increasing disposal volume and minor operational changes as explained in the draft permit…..The service area for the Perry County Associates Landfill (as contained in the permit application and approved by the Perry County Commission) after proposed major modification will be the States of Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia and Wisconsin. The maximum average daily volume of waste disposed at the Perry County Associates Landfill (as contained in the permit application and as approved by Perry County Commission) after the proposed major modification will be 15,000 tons/day.
“Alabama already has capacity to take more than 24,000 tons per day of out of state waste, and this permit modification would expand the potential out-of-state waste stream to more than 31,000 tons per day, more than 2.5 times the waste that Alabamians produce per day,” Snyder said. “Such a glut in landfill capacity makes Alabama a prime target for out-of-state waste, such as the toxic coal ash that is planned to be transported from Kingston, Tenn. to Perry County’s Arrowhead Landfill. Alabama’s landfill permitting practices need to be reviewed before this landfill is allowed to expand or a new landfill is allowed to open.”
A view of the TVA coal fired power plant at Kingston Tennessee across the Emory River. That is not a natural island in the river. It is an island of toxic coal ash.
by Glynn Wilson
KINGSTON, Tenn. — Steve Scarborough came to East Tennessee from Georgia for the scenic boating and stayed to raise a family and start his own canoe building company, Dagger Kayaks and Canoes. But on Dec. 22, the longest night of 2008, his world was turned upside down when an embankment wall caved at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s coal fired power plant here, causing the largest environmental disaster of its kind in U.S. history.
Heavy rains, freezing temperatures, and potentially a minor earthquake a few days before, caused the holding pond for TVA’s coal ash waste to fail, dumping 2.6 million cubic yards of the mildly toxic material into the middle of the scenic Emory River.
Tests of the river water around the spill showed elevated levels of lead and thallium, which can cause birth defects and nervous and reproductive system disorders. But levels of toxicity are not that dangerous and not the main issue, Scarborough said. The event was not just a spill of a hazardous substance, like many environmental disasters in the past, like the Exxon Valdez oil spill off the coast of Alaska in 1989.
Steve Scarborough of Kingston, Tennessee, talks about the devastation from the TVA coal ash spill in the land he loves.
This was not just a spill, but a major man-made disaster and a significant geological event. The mountain of ash completely filled up the main channel of the river for six miles, creating a biological dessert for perhaps 30 miles and disrupting the life of the river indefinitely.
It flooded pastures and destroyed homes, and it will take millions of dollars and many years for the river to be restored to anything like its native beauty and biological diversity.
“There are no excuses for this,” Scarborough said.
Coal ash from the nation’s coal-fired power plants is not a regulated substance, and TVA had no contingency plan in case of a spill.
While Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen has issued an emergency order for TVA to begin cleaning up the area, some critics, including state Representative Frank Nicely, R-Strawberry Plains, have said the state Department of Environment and Conservation is holding up a permit to begin work.
Not true, said Scarborough, who is a member of the conservation board for the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation. A phone call confirmed that work is scheduled to begin on March 20. The problem is finding and preparing a new site to dump the ash and letting contracts for workers and heavy equipment to be brought in to begin a massive clean up that could take five years or more.
TVA has already spent millions of dollars to hire heavy equipment operators to dig a channel through the new land mass and allow some of the river to flow down stream, where the floating cenospheres are being caught by boom skimmers. An underwater dam called a weir is being constructed to keep settled ash from moving downstream, although the ash has already created a blanket covering the bottom of the river for miles.
Since the ash was stored wet, when it hit the river it spread out like cream spreads out when you pour it into coffee, Scarborough said.
While only few houses were totally devastated by the ash, the property values in the area have plummeted in an already depressed housing market caused by the mortgage meltdown. Scarborough owns about 150 acres in the area. Now it is not worth anything near what he paid for it, although he’s one of the lucky ones. While some families already had their waterfront homes for sale to pay for their kids’ college educations, he is well off enough not to be totally devastated by the drop in property values.
Yet the aesthetic and psychological damage is still evident in his face as he talks about the disaster.
When people see the devastation caused by the massive geological event, on top of all the other problems caused by burning coal for electricity, he said, it should burn into people’s minds that there is “no such thing as ‘clean coal’.”
“One of the dumbest thing humans do,” he said, “is dig coal out of the ground and burn it.”
Locust Fork News-Journal Joins Call for Investigation
A waste pond at a coal-burning power plant in northeast Alabama ruptured early Friday about 30 miles southwest of Chattanooga, Tennessee, according to the Associated Press and other news organizations, the second ash spill in less than a month at a TVA plant.
“For the second time in less than one month, the citizens served by the Tennessee Valley Authority have been unnecessarily exposed to a multitude of health risks due to a failure of a coal-ash pond,” said Adam Snyder, executive director of Conservation Alabama. “This unfortunate incident highlights TVA’s over-reliance on coal for energy production and a lack of adequate health safety standards and enforcement. Conservation Alabama calls on Congress, TVA, and EPA to not only conduct an exhaustive evaluation of its current standards, but also to put into action whatever means necessary to ensure that the citizens of Alabama are not put in harm’s way again.”
On December 22, a spill in Kingston, Tenn., dumped 5.4 million cubic yards of sludge across 400 acres, burying homes, buildings, and heavy equipment, as reported in the story below.
The Locust Fork News-Journal joins the call for a full investigation by the incoming Obama administration and new regulations for the waste from these dirty coal-fired power plants. Perhaps power generators such as TVA and Southern Company should be forced to pay in some way for the newer, greener energy sources we are going to need for an environmentally sustainable and economically viable future.
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
