The coal ash spill in Tennessee that experts are already calling the largest environmental disaster of its kind in the history of the USA is more than three times as large as initially estimated, according to an updated survey by the Tennessee Valley Authority.
On the 22 December an earthwork dyke containing dredge cells at TVA’s Kingston coal fired plant collapsed, releasing about 5 million m3 of watery fly ash and bottom ash. The spilled material now covers parts of the nearby Watts Bar reservoir, reservoir shorelands, several roads and parts of the railway line serving Kingston; and water, electrical, and gas services to the adjacent area were interrupted.
TVA has undertaken urgent action to control the effects of what it acknowledges is an emergency – repairing and restoring rail and roads, installing weirs and dykes, testing water samples for toxicity and so on. During the process it also cleaned up some environmental activists by using site police to detain them, surely illegally, thereby preventing the taking of photographs of the devastation that twenty minutes later appeared in the national press and on television anyway.
The clean up costs are now expected to run to hundreds of millions of dollars, and Tennessee voters’ representatives are attempting to get federal aid to reduce the burden on the state’s taxpayers. To date the message from the White House is – nothing doing.
TVA officials stated at first that about 1.7 million cubic yards of wet coal ash had spilled when the earth retaining wall of an ash pond at the plant, which is about 40 miles west of Knoxville, disintegrated But three days later they released the results of an aerial survey that showed the actual amount that flooded the countryside was three times larger, enough to cover more than two square miles to a depth of three feet.
It is also double the amount the authority initially said was in the pond, 2.6 million cubic yards. Does allowing a pollution site to contain more than double its estimated content constitute a crime of negligence? Apparently not, technically. But these ponds are not reinforced or lined and if they can be safely contained at all, which is now thrown into doubt, they can only be safely contained if their content is known. TVA’s ignorance was its moral crime, because it could not possibly know whether the pond was safe. But it did know that it was vulnerable – residents testify that there have been leaks at the site, repaired by TVA, every year since 2001. And its responsibility is shared by the state authority, which seems to have been lax in allowing TVA to certify the safety of its spill ponds without supervision. Organisations are lining up to sue TVA but no one is talking yet about prosecutions, for the simple reason that so far no crime has been discovered.
The whole business raises several uncomfortable questions, given that there could easily have been loss of life or poisoning of the water supply. We are not talking here about a slow overflow of some benign ash-containing stream. One resident was quoted as saying that huge boulders had rolled down the valley, and real damage was done including the total demolition of three houses and damage to 22 others.
What has TVA got to hide, if citizens can be ‘arrested’ for taking photographs of a public company going about its public business? Why are there no rigorous safety and environmental regulations to specify the safe structure and content of such huge ponds or a penalty for failing to meet them? How is it that neither the company nor its individual staff has a real motive (ie fear of prosecution) to act responsibly? All this is somewhat shocking. But the shock is not that TVA has done something illegal. The real shock, is that it hasn’t.
Leonard Sanford is deputy editor of Modern Power Systems
