Tennessee cleanup sends coal ash, anxiety, to Alabama site

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http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/04/15/92282/tennessee-cleanup-sends-coal-ash.html



When the mound of wet coal ash began to rise in the landfill across the road from her pretty yellow house with the peonies and roses in the front yard, Ruby Holmes felt overpowered by a horrible smell.

A few doors down, Mary Williams, a retired Avon sales office manager, shut her windows and kept the air filters running and still couldn't sleep. She was nauseated. Her eyes, nose and throat burned, and her husband, a retired Greyhound driver, had trouble breathing.

"For a while, it was like we were just cast out and it didn't matter about people living (with) that crap," Williams said.

Uniontown's Arrowhead Landfill so far has taken in 1.8 million tons of coal ash from one of the nation's biggest environmental disasters, the December 2008 spill from a coal ash pond at a Tennessee Valley Authority power plant in Kingston, Tenn. Trains bring about 10,000 tons a day.

The transfer of the ash 327 miles from Tennessee to the mostly black community of Uniontown is partly a story about how people are faring at the receiving end. Federal environmental justice policy requires that low-income and minority communities aren't burdened with outsized environmental risks.

(of course they'd put it by a black community)

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The coal industry opposes regulating coal ash as a hazardous waste. It argues that there are no toxic hazards, that the labeling it as dangerous could rule out some uses of recycled coal ash and that disposal of ash that can't be reused would become more expensive. Some coal ash today is used to make cement and other products and for building up roads and embankments.

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People who live across the road from the landfill say the odor disappeared a few weeks ago, but they're still worried.

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Uniontown, about 100 miles southwest of Birmingham, Ala., is a mostly black community with a few dozen store fronts, most of them closed, and a catfish feed mill and a prison just outside the town proper. When the EPA announced last summer that the ash would be shipped to Alabama, it said the landfill was in an isolated location. The Alabama Environmental Council counted 317 people out of the area's population of 1,600 who live within half a mile of it.

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"My biggest concern is I've got 16 cows over there and four horses," he said. Animals in nearby pastures drink from creeks that flow near the landfill.

John Wathen, an investigator for Ludder, photographed the site from the air and sampled water nearby. He said he took two water samples with high arsenic levels in the ditch across from the Williamses' home, and another from a water-treatment plant where wastewater from the landfill was taken. He also took a photograph that showed workers hosing out ash-covered railcars for the return trip to Tennessee. Wathen said that water runs to a creek alongside the tracks.

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"I feel that we've been mistreated down here," she said.
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true, they have been mistreated and it is criminal!

[johnaries]

1. They should have shipped it to Cullman, AL.

That's where my ex in-laws live. They would have been right at home with it.