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

Janice James was upstairs in her home and getting ready for bed, having just enjoyed a day celebrating Christmas with family, when a cracking and popping noise caught her attention. She threw on an old sweatshirt and her husband’s boots, and grabbed a flashlight to see what the ruckus was. Could be a hail storm or a tornado, she thought. But when the light of her flashlight shined on the first floor of her home, she was stunned. “It was just covered in this ashy mud,” she told a WATE-TV reporter.

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Even though the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is monitoring the air and water near Kingston, Tennessee, for dangerous levels of toxins, Sandy Gupton takes water samples from the flooding on her farm just to be sure.

“Our farm is the largest acreage affected,” said Sandy’s husband Terry in an interview to the Chattanooga Times Free Press. “TVA does not want to admit that the spill has devastated our lives, tainted our land and reduced our livelihood to a fraction of what it was before the spill.”

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The public relations firm that will likely handle the three-year, $1.9 million image campaign for Kingston, Tennessee, will use social media to improve the area’s tarnished reputation, according to WATE-TV.

McNeely Pigott & Fox Public Relations LLC, which submitted a proposal and budget for the campaign, would use social media techniques such as blogs, blurbs and Twitter Tweets to highlight the positive side of Kingston.

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The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is being asked to cover the cost of a three-year, $1.9 million public relations campaign aimed at improving the image of Kingston, Tennessee. The nation’s largest public utility is being blamed for tarnishing the region’s reputation. Once thought of as a destination for water sports and recreation, the east Tennessee community, which includes parts of the Emory River, is now covered in a mass of toxic debris that locals feel may cause them serious illness.

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Coal ash that poured from the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Kingston, Tennessee, Fossil Plant onto an east Tennessee community last December and recovered by cleanup crews is far too toxic to be stored in Pennsylvania’s coal mines, according to officials in that state. Authorities issued a statement saying it has strict regulations for the material to be stored there.

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Hotter and drier summer conditions increase the likelihood of coal ash going airborne, increasing the potential for the toxic material to be inhaled by those living near the site that was heavily damaged when a Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) fossil fuel plant’s impoundment pond was breached, causing more than a billion gallons of coal ash to tumble down on to a neighboring community.

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Criticism continues to fly as the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) labors on with its extensive and expensive coal ash cleanup effort following the December 22, 2008, spill from its Kingston, Tennessee, fossil fuel plant. A breach in an impoundment pond dumped more than a billion gallons of coal ash on to a neighboring community, destroying homes and damaging property in its wake. The Institute for Southern Studies now finds that the counties where the utility will be dumping much of the coal ash retrieved from the community in which it was spilled are largely populated by African Americans and have high poverty rates.

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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) signed an enforceable agreement with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to oversee the removal of coal ash from its east Tennessee fossil fuel plant where a coal ash impoundment breached and dumped more than a billion gallons of toxic coal ash on to a neighboring community and into the Emory River. The TVA was also ordered to reimburse the EPA for any costs associated with its oversight of the cleanup.

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Cancer rates among people living near coal ash ponds are “disturbingly high,” according to Environmental Integrity Project and Earthjustice, nonprofit organizations that studied Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data from 210 coal ash ponds across the United States. The data is compiled in a report titled, “Coming Clean: What EPA Knows About the Dangers of Coal Ash.”

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The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is eying a dormant landfill near its Kingston, Tennessee, plant and an abandoned strip mine in Cumberland County, Tennessee, as possible locations to bury the ash it is cleaning up after one of its impoundment ponds leaked and dumped more than a billion gallons of coal ash on to an east Tennessee community, according to WAAY-TV.

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