The volume and scope and threat posed by the TVA dike collapse is a great environmental catastrophe whose threat was known and predictable.
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Earthjustice Attorney Lisa Evans testified in a June 10 hearing of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Natural Resources titled "How Should the Federal Government Address the Health and Environmental Risks of Coal Combustion Waste?,
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State laws have prevented these states from enacting legislation that would protect them from this type of catastrophe and jeopardizes their safety --
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The federal failure to regulate the waste has put 23 states -- including Tennessee -- in a special bind, since their statutes have "no more stringent" provisions prohibiting them from enacting standards stricter than those found in federal law. Without federal action, those states can't regulate coal combustion waste disposal beyond the few obviously inadequate safeguards that now exist.
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Maybe it's time for those states to change their laws to protect their citizens.
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TVA, a federally-owned independent corporation, initially estimated the amount of coal sludge released at 1.7 million cubic yards. But after completing an aerial survey of the inundated area, it revised its estimate upward to 5.4 million cubic yards. That's
more than 1 billion gallons of waste
containing potentially dangerous levels of heavy metals including arsenic, cadmium, mercury and lead, as well as radioactive elements such as uranium and thorium -- impurities typically found in coal.
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With regulators' blessing, TVA was simply putting ash from its massive Kingston plant -- where nine burners consume
***14,000 tons of coal a day***
-- into a nearby lagoon where it was mixed with water, allowed to settle and then pumped into what's known as a dredge cell. The company reports that the ash level in the dredge cell at the time of the collapse was unusually high: 55 feet above the water level in the nearby ash pond, with a spokesperson describing the level as "a lot higher than any other internal dredge cell that we have in TVA."
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***14,000 TONS = 28,000,000 POUNDS EACH DAY***
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These are among the hazards already documented --
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* contaminated public and private drinking water supplies in at least eight states, including Georgia;
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* fish consumption advisories issued in Texas and North Carolina; and
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* documented infertility and other abnormalities in nearly 25 species of amphibians and reptiles inhabiting coal combustion waste-contaminated wetlands in South Carolina.
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Evans also noted more recent news reports of coal combustion waste contamination discovered in Maryland, Indiana and Montana. And when developers used 1.5 million tons of coal ash to build a golf course over a shallow aquifer in Chesapeake, Va., nearby wells almost immediately began showing elevated boron levels -- a marker for coal combustion waste contamination.
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Given the clear danger that poorly regulated coal combustion waste presents to the public, it's time for the federal government to take action to prevent another disaster like the one now facing Eastern Tennessee.
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Dirty Coal is Dirty Energy. If we fail to protect our environment, our air and our water, what have we left?
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Maybe Walt Kelly was right. We have met the enemy and he is us.
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