30 Times The Size of Exxon Valdez

A spill, 30 times the size of the Exxon Valdez occurred Monday with little attention from the media.

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Photos available on Nashville Tennessee Green.

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Is the national media ignoring the TVA disaster?
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The following excerpts are from DemocracyNow, but worth reading in their entirety --
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Early Monday morning, a forty-acre pond containing toxic coal ash collapsed.
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Greenpeace is calling for a criminal investigation into a major environmental disaster at a coal plant outside Knoxville, Tennessee. 2.6 million cubic yards of coal ash spilled out of the retention pond, burying homes and roads. Over 400 acres of land are now under as much as six feet of sludge.
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Environmentalists say the spill is more than thirty times larger than the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
The sludge has flowed into the Emory River, a tributary of the Tennessee River, which provides drinking water to millions of people downstream in Tennessee, Alabama and Kentucky.
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Environmentalists say the disaster could take months, if not years, to clean up. The Environmental Protection Agency staff member has arrived at the scene to test the ash for toxic metals and mercury, a neurotoxin that concentrates in coal ash. Greenpeace warned that coal ash typically contains high concentrations of toxic chemicals like mercury, cadmium and other heavy metals.
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The coal plant and retention pond are both operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority. Authority spokesperson Gil Francis talked to reporters Tuesday.
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Well, this coal plant is over fifty years old, and it has several of these ponds that contain the coal ash, which is really just unburned coal that is brought over from the smokestacks that you described. It’s an inevitable part of the coal burning technology, which is polluting from beginning to end, from the mountaintopping we see to clear whole mountains away to bring the coal to the power plants. This is 40 percent of US electrical supply, is burning coal. It’s a nineteenth century technology that really needs to be substituted with safer, clean and renewable energy.

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