5 Years After Disastrous TVA Spill, Still No EPA Rules For Handling Coal Ash
W itnesses still recall with horror the sights, sounds and smells of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s power plant disaster here five years ago, when a mountain of toxic coal ash broke loose in the middle of a frozen night to bury hundreds of acres and devastate a community.
“It was not a spill,” said Roane County resident Steve Scarborough. “It was a geologic event. People that lived right there looked out their windows and saw a forest moving by.”
Miraculously, nobody was injured when 5.4 million cubic yards of piled, sodden ash broke loose on Dec. 22, 2008. But the slide, which destroyed three homes, damaged dozens of others, and poured into two tributaries of the Tennessee River, has required a $1 billion cleanup, with $200 million more to go.
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Before the TVA disaster, EPA didn’t even know for sure how many ash landfills and ash ponds existed. It counted 618 landfills and ponds in 2000, but after the spill, a detailed survey found more than 1,000 ponds and 437 landfills containing coal ash. “Kingston was a watershed event that should have brought quick federal controls on the disposal of this waste,” said Lisa Evans, a Boston attorney with Earthjustice. “Instead, it brought on widespread paralysis at the EPA and within the (Obama) administration. It’s as if Hurricane Katrina happened, and they didn’t fix the levees.”
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http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20131221/GREEN/312210041/EPA-fails-deliver-coal-ash-rules-5-years-after-catastrophic-spill
