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

“How do you spell relief? COAL ASH,” says Perry County, Alabama Commissioner Albert Turner, Jr., in remarks prepared for a hearing of the House Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment. Turner testified this week about how the historically poor and black county is benefiting from shipments of coal ash recovered from the east Tennessee community where it spilled from a neighboring coal-firing plant. The problem is residents of Perry County are more apt to call the arrangement a nightmare rather than a boon to the community.

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Six generations of Jere McCraw’s family are buried on his 300-acre farm near Bridgeport, Ala. The land has been in his family since 1830, and he doesn’t want to sell it. But a Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) coal ash pond in nearby Widows Creek is threatening his land.

Last January, just one month after a coal ash pond at the TVA’s Kingston, Tenn., plant broke, sending a wave of toxic sludge on to 300 acres of neighboring property and waterways, contaminated water accidentally leaked from the Widows Creek plant. The TVA recalculated that pond’s rating as “high hazard” and spent $2 million to upgrade the ponds. The nation’s largest utility vowed to convert the ponds from wet to dry storage, considered a safer storage alternative. And, as a precaution, TVA also is buying property adjacent to the coal ash ponds where the leak occurred, land that is also adjacent to McCraw’s farm, property that is also historically significant as the site of the Civil War’s Battle of Bridgeport.

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