Beasley, Allen, Crow, Methvin, Portis & Miles, P.C.

The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is facing a new round of headaches since its coal ash impoundment failed last December and dumped a billion gallons of toxic coal ash on to an east Tennessee neighborhood. Now it is facing the wrath of the magistrate judge in the case, according to the Knoxville News Sentinel. U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Guyton upheld an order made by the court Jan. 30, which required the TVA to preserve all voice mails, as they could be potential evidence in the case against the utility. The TVA is being criticized because it didn’t immediately turn off its “do not delete” function on its voice mail system until February 27. Recently, it began limiting recording time on voice mail messages to 20 seconds each. Many calls are to the utility’s help line for resident affected by or who have questions about the spill.

And now the TVA is arguing that the process of saving the voice mails could possibly “bring down” the utility’s voice mail system. Magistrate Judge Guyton was unmoved by the TVA’s argument that keeping the past voice mails is straining its system.

TVA says it believes it has preserved most of the voice mails related to the spill and says it doubt future voice mails will have any bearing on the pending lawsuits against the utility.

Magistrate Judge Guyton says he will issue a written ruling soon. An April 8 hearing has been set to determine how soon the lawsuits could be resolved or tried, according to the Knoxville News Sentinel.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 7:00 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.