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The new chairman for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) says the disastrous coal ash spill that dumped more than a billion gallons of toxic material on to an east Tennessee community and into the Emory River must never happen again, according to WHNT-TV.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will send its first teams of inspectors to coal ash storage areas across the country within weeks, according to Knoxville Business News. The inspections are the first step in developing new coal ash regulations for an industry not currently overseen by federal regulations.
Lawmakers sit on both sides of the argument about whether lining the coal ash impoundment at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston, Tennessee, plant would have prevented the massive spill of toxic material onto neighboring homes and property, but legislation is moving through the Tennessee House and Senate that would require such ponds created or expanded in the future to be lined, according to the Times Free Press.
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.
Power plants in the U.S. produce more than 125 million tons of coal combustion waste each year, most of which ends up in dry landfills or in above-ground coal slurry pounds. In 2000, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) listed that material as non-hazardous and thus it didn’t fall under any strict government regulations.
