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Tennessee Coal Toxin Spill Reporting Needs Anderson Cooper
By My Wild Irish Prose | January 7, 2009
Getting a straight story on the Harrington, TN fly ash spill isn’t easy. While some activists and bloggers are calling it the nation’s largest environmental disaster, the national corporate media is mostly MIA. After, all, there are other things going on.
This much we know: On December 22, 2008, something around a billion gallons of fly ash breached the retaining wall of a retention “pond” at the Kingston Fossil Station in eastern Tennessee. Fly ash is a solid waste by-product of coal combustion. This particular batch had been brewing for about 50 years and stood 55 feet high. Then it burst through the wall and flooded somewhere between 300 and 400 acres with a glossy grey sludge, destroyed 3 homes and damaged up to fifty more, and generally screwed up life for everyone in the area for the foreseeable future.
The TVA feels pretty bad about this, to the point that the director said they could not even hold their heads high. They are going to do whatever it takes to fix things. This is the same agency that repaired some leaks in the wall earlier in the decade, and in January 2008 found that the dike complied with EPA legal limits. A note about EPA legal limits: The Editorial Board would like to point out for the record that the EPA is neither magic not scientific, and the standards they arrive at are dictated by compromise and politics. Under the Bush administration, the have been reduced to a joke, like most other Federal regulatory agencies. Things get past them.
So the national media covered this story half heartedly for a few days, but now it has been relegated to the news bog of the blogs. As of this morning, based on analysis of the major news media online reporting pages, the Harriman spill is less important than: how to party off the pounds with Richard Simmons, in ongoing coverage on the spat between Josh and Russell and need to know info on Hef’s new girlfriend/playmate, who, by the way, looks a lot like the previous dozen or so. What’s in the pipe, Hef?
Analyzing accounts of the spill from local news sources, activist organization and blogs, has been challenging for the Editorial Board. This is partly because some aspects of the truth won’t be known for years, and partly because most of the reporting entities have a stake in the matter. The coal industry wants to keep the story contained better than they are able to contain their toxic sludge. They are willing to move mountains to keep a lid on this story, and they have the equipment to do it.
Conversely, the anti-coal acitivist sees this an opportunity to discredit the efforts of the clean coal lobby’s recent feel good campaign. This campaign included animated bits of coal singing Christmas carols – how do you fight that?
There are disparities in the claims made by the TVA and the results of independent testing. The TVA says levels of arsenic, thallium and mercury are just fine most places, except in wells, which pose no danger unless you drink the water. Independent labs, on the other hand, have found levels of poison that are 100 or 300 times higher than acceptable levels. They are testing in places the TVA isn’t.
As you are aware, most of the Catastrophe Map Editorial Board is committed to fair and balanced reporting. So can we just say this? If you dump a billion gallons of nasty ass goop that contains different types of poison into any eco system, bad things are going to happen. The coal boys don’t own giant wet vacs the size of the draglines that take the tops off of mountains. So, later, then this stuff dries, into the air.
In the year 2000, the EPA prepared regulations that would treat fly ash as a hazardous waste. But the coal companies complained, and the EPA was instructed to back off. Once again, if you believe the EPA is now anything but a puppet show designed to maintain a false sense of security on the part of the chronically and willfully un-informed.
What we need is Anderson Cooper to come back from reporting on the Israeli / Palestinian dust up. He needs to stand in that sludge the way he stands in Hurricane Winds and in front of rocket explosions and get the country worked up. Come home Anderson and get something going! The Israelis and Palestinians will still be killing each other when you get back.
Topics: Harriman Tennessee Spill, TVA, coal ash, fly ash spill, mountain top removal mining | No Comments »