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There was a huge and terrible environmental disaster in Tennessee on Monday, Dec 22.

The Tennessee Valley Authority, better known as TVA, has a coal-burning power plant located near Harriman, Tennessee, along Interstate 40 between Knoxville and Nashville. The stuff that is left over after TVA burns their coal is called coal ash.

Coal ash contains mercury and dangerous heavy metals like lead and arsenic - materials found naturally in coal are concentrated in the ash.

TVA has a huge mountain of this coal waste material stored in a gigantic pile next to their Harriman (Kingston) power plant, alongside a tributary of the Tennessee River.

On Monday morning Dec. 22 around 1:00 am, the earthen retaining wall around this mountain of coal ash failed and approximately 500 million gallons of nasty black coal ash flowed into tributaries of the Tennessee River - the water supply for Chattanooga TN and millions of people living downstream in Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky.

This Tennessee TVA spill is over 40 times bigger than the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, if local news accounts are correct.

This is a huge environmental disaster of epic proportions.

To see an amazing aerial video of the spill, go here. The big hunks and chunks in the river are mounds of coal ash.

Here is better aerial footage, but you have to watch a commercial first. Go here, then scroll down to the "Most Popular" section and find the button that says "aerial footage."

The local media are downplaying the spill, but the Nashville newspaper (The Tennessean) has a decent article.

When I first saw the 300 million gallon Martin County coal sludge spill in Kentucky in October 2000 I was outraged. I was sure that it would be a national news story, but it never was, because the coal companies and local law enforcement blocked the road leading to the spill and kept the media out. The national media was confused because they didn't know what "coal sludge" was. And ....the big national environmental groups didn't do enough to bring media attention to the Martin County disaster.

Thats not going to happen this time, because we have

1. You Tube

2. Bloggers

3. Digital cameras

4. You!

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Rikku said:

........   Don't drink the water

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Baby_Hitler said:

Shit. I have a friend in Chattanooga.

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dr_gonz said:

fuck the holidays, and fuck those evil demons and their sludge.

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Polluting bastages...

Hopefully it gets cleaned up quickly and correctly to minimize impact.

The bud factory in ST.Louis canned water instead of beer during the great flood in 1993.Hopefully this happens again if need be.

Prisoner#1 said:

Rikku said:

........   Don't drink the water

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although I'm in the path if that water supply, mine is clean,
my comes from an artesian spring and even though it's a
municipal water supply it's untreated

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mathewww said:

So you live nearby there?

What are the locals reaction to this?

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BrainChemistry said:

I wonder how hard they worked to examine and check the stability of their retention wall.

I bet they didn't bother to check it at all, and overlooked the capacity limit. Either that or they decided it was worth the risk to overfill their storage area instead of building a new one or hauling it away.

Fuckin hate economics for that exact reason. Do you know how many companies each year forgo building things like carbon and sulfur srubbers, waste treatment equipment, simply because it is cheaper to get fined by the EPA instead of to build it. Its unethical, and frankly, its pathetic.

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