AP Photo/Duncan Mansfield
DCL
As if the coal ash spill in Kingston, TN didn't do enough damage last year, not only to the community's human and environmental health, but also to their sense of trust in existing protections against such damage, once they learned that TVA had been warned about the danger of that very kind of spill as far back as 1985—now the sludge from that spill is being trucked elsewhere, so a different community down in Alabama can worry about it. 8,500 tons a day at a time.
In total, Perry County will be paid a little more than $3 million to take 3 million cubic yards of coal ash from the TVA power plant spill that left behind barely studied levels and types of toxins including arsenic and lead.
It's a poor community that architects of the deal say will benefit the community, and maintain will be perfectly safe. But while the ash will be sent to a relatively isolated and theoretically impermeable landfill, residents fear that equipment failure, flooding, or tornadoes could all compromise the safe containment of the waste. Not to mention lack of oversight at the landfill—not an unreasonable concern, considering TVA lawyers were instructed to cover up a $3 million study of the root causes of the accident in the first place.
And while some of the logic for taking the coal ash rested on the assumption that it can't be any worse than the coal so many people have been living near for so many years—it actually can be. Mercury and arsenic are just two of the toxins that end up in the ash because air pollution controls require that the plant filter them out from the emissions. So instead of being released into the air, they get stored for dealing with later, creating waste toxic enough that the EPA pledged to come up with new regulations specifically for coal ash.
Apparently, that doesn't rule out sending it by train to be buried across state line. Robert Bamberg, a Perry County catfish farmer, said, "The problem is being shifted down here for us to tend to, when we didn't want it to start with."
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