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

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) may be delayed in proposing new regulations for storage of toxic coal ash, but one item expected to be on the agency’s proposal is gaining applause from conservation groups. The EPA says its plan includes a requirement for coal-firing plants to set aside money that would be used in the event of future toxic waste problems, such as spills or leaks like the one from the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) plant in December 2008 that devastated a neighboring east Tennessee community.

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Three million tons of toxic coal ash recovered from east Tennessee from a breached impoundment at a coal-firing plant which sent a wave of the dangerous material on to a neighboring community, will be moved to Perry County, Alabama, and stored in a privately owned landfill near Uniontown. The deal could generate $4.1 million in fees and more than 50 jobs to the community, which has the highest unemployment rate in the state. But residents are hardly optimistic.

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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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The huge cleanup effort by the nation’s largest public utility could cost as much as $150 million more than previously estimated, according to the Associated Press. The effort to restore 300 acres of east Tennessee property damaged by the December 2008 coal ash spill from a Kingston, Tennessee, coal-firing plant is also expected to take years to complete.

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The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) has asked a federal judge to dismiss all lawsuits filed against it as a result of the December 22, 2008, coal ash spill at the utility’s Kingston, Tennessee, coal-firing plant, according to the Ledger-Enquirer/Associated Press. The spill occurred when a coal ash impoundment pond failed and dumped more than a billion gallons of toxic material on to 300 acres of a neighboring community and into the Emory River.

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Residents of east Tennessee probably thought little of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) coal-firing plant in Kingston, or the toxic brew of coal ash that had been brimming in an impoundment pond for years. But as residents built homes on property just miles away and fished and boated in the Emory River that snaked nearby, the pond walls were beginning to seep and were showing erosion scarring in some areas.

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