A Coal-Friendly EPA Does Americans No Favors

Eleven years ago, in the earliest hours of December 22, 2008, at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston Fossil Plant in Kingston, Tennessee, a dam holding back coal ash slurry — a toxic soup of factory wastewater and burnt coal — broke. The broken dam released over a billion gallons of ash slurry into the Clinch and Emory Rivers and buried about 300 acres of land several feet deep under a poisonous sludge of lead, arsenic, mercury and other heavy metals.

The spill was three times larger than the TVA’s initial estimate — in fact, it was more than what the TVA said was in the pond to begin with. Cleaning up the spill took years; a process that was beset by further environmental crimes. The waste was mainly carted away to Uniontown, Alabama, where it was dumped into an uncovered landfill outside of a predominantly black community. Moreover, the company contracted by the TVA to clean up the site, Jacobs Engineering Group, did not provide adequate protective equipment, according to a lawsuit filed by workers, who sat atop piles of toxic waste to eat their lunches. Around 20 workers died of illnesses caused by exposure to the waste, and another 200 or so were sickened, the suit claimed — which the workers won last year.