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

Tina Nicholson walks down her driveway in Cumberland County, Tenn., every afternoon to meet her kids as they get off the school bus. They often detour down the winding Smith Mountain Road to look at wild growing herbs and enjoy the fresh air. The road is so narrow that when cars pass by, the Nicholson family has to step into a ditch that runs parallel to the road to make room. “Two regular cars cannot pass each other on this road as it is,” she says.

But if Crossville Coal Company and Smith Mountain Solutions have their way and are allowed to reclaim a surface mine on top of Smith Mountain to store coal ash recovered from the east Tennessee site of a massive coal ash spill, the narrow roadway where the Nicholsons walk will become even more treacherous with heavy trucks carrying tons of coal ash.

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Cumberland County, Tennessee, officials saw dollar signs and improved highways when they approved the relocation of coal ash recovered from a neighboring spill site to a landfill atop Smith Mountain. “I call it the Good Neighbor Plan,” says Commissioner Lynn Tollett. “We’ve got a place to put (the recovered coal ash). We can help out and we’re going to gain some income at a time when the economy is not what it ought to be.”

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Not everyone is trying to keep the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) from dumping coal ash on its property. One company wants the TVA to pay them to haul and hold coal ash in its Cumberland County strip mine.

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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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