Coal Ash Contamination

  • 2.6 billion pounds of arsenic and other toxic pollutants flooded over nearby farmland and into the river. (Photo courtesy of the Tennessee Department Of Health)

When a dam broke a year ago in Kingston,
Tennessee, the town experienced one
of the biggest environmental disasters
in US history. Billions of gallons
of waterlogged coal ash from a nearby
power plant streamed into the Emory
River. Tanya Ott reports
the contamination was even greater
than originally thought:

Transcript

When a dam broke a year ago in Kingston,
Tennessee, the town experienced one
of the biggest environmental disasters
in US history. Billions of gallons
of waterlogged coal ash from a nearby
power plant streamed into the Emory
River. Tanya Ott reports
the contamination was even greater
than originally thought:

2.6 billion pounds of arsenic and other toxic pollutants. That’s how much
contamination flooded over nearby farmland and into the river.

That comes
from a report by the Environmental Integrity Project.

Eric Schaeffer is the
project’s Executive Director and a former official with the Environmental
Protection Agency. He says 2.6 billion pounds is more than the total
discharges from all U-S power plants last year.

“The toxic metals, once they get into the environment,
and especially once they get into sediment, are notoriously difficult to
clean up.”

Difficult and expensive. The Tennessee Valley Authority puts the price tag
at about a billion dollars.

The EPA was supposed to propose tougher
disposal standards for toxic ash by the end of 2009. But the agency delayed
that decision.

For The Environmental Report, Im Tanya Ott.

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Will Coal Ash Spill Get Into the Air?

  • Airborne toxins could be causing health problems for residents near this coal ash spill (seen in the background) in Tennessee. (Photo by Matt Shafer Powell)

Environmentalists don’t want a lot of new coal-burning power plants to be built. They’re concerned about more greenhouse gases from the plants and environmental damage from mining the coal. Late last year, another concern came to light. For decades a power plant disposed of coal ash in a pond next to it. The dam holding back the coal ash sludge failed. Matt Shafer Powell reports more than a billion gallons of the sludge caused plenty of damage to the soil and water. Now, there’s concern about the air:

Transcript

Environmentalists don’t want a lot of new coal-burning power plants to be built. They’re concerned about more greenhouse gases from the plants and environmental damage from mining the coal. Late last year, another concern came to light. For decades a power plant disposed of coal ash in a pond next to it. The dam holding back the coal ash sludge failed. Matt Shafer Powell reports more than a billion gallons of the sludge caused plenty of damage to the soil and water. Now, there’s concern about the air:

In December, the massive coal ash spill at a Tennessee Valley Authority power plant in East Tennessee made people aware of a hazard they’d never really considered before. And no one knows how much of a problem it’s going to be.

“We’re looking across the Emory River.”

Matt Landon is a volunteer for the environmental group United Mountain Defense. These days, he spends a lot of time near the Tennessee Valley Authority’s ash spill site. His double respirator mask, his personal video camera and his vocal criticism of the T.V.A. have all become fixtures here. It was on one of his recent rounds near the Emory River that he saw something that scared him.

“I drove around the bend here on Emory River Road and I witnessed a massive dust storm coming off the entire coal ash disaster site.”

Landon says the dust cloud was about 70-to-80 feet high and about a half mile wide. Coal ash can contain several toxic heavy metals — like arsenic, lead, and mercury. For Landon, the site of this swirling cloud was a sobering and frightening reminder that it wouldn’t take much for the toxic materials contained in the wet cement-like sludge to dry out and become airborne.

When Landon walks up to Diana Anderson’s house on the Emory River, her shih-tzus go nuts. And no wonder. Here’s this tall, lanky guy in a double-respirator mask headed their way.

Anderson has lived here for forty years now, just downwind from the plant. And she never worried about it. But since the spill, she’s begun to notice changes in her health.

“My sinuses are irritated, I have a raspy throat, and I do a lot of coughing and my head hurts and I feel very, very, very fatigued.”

Anderson has volunteered to let Matt Landon test the air near her home. So, the two head to her kitchen sink, where they wash and prepare Pyrex dishes.

They’ll set the dishes out on Anderson’s back porch to collect dust. After a while, Landon will send the dust samples off to a lab to find out what’s in the air.

The T.V.A. is also testing the air, with help from the state of Tennessee and the E.P.A. T.V.A. Spokesman Gil Francis says they’ve already collected more than 10-thousand air samples.

“We’re taking samples 24/7, the samples are coming back that the air quality is meeting the National Air Ambient Standards and we’re going to continue to work hard to make sure that’s what the case is going forward.”

That might be easier said than done. Francis says the T.V.A. has done a lot to keep the ash from drying out and blowing around. They’ve dropped straw and grass seed from helicopters and coated the ash in an acrylic mixture. But Steven Smith of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy says nobody really knows what it’s going to take to clean this mess up. Or how the people who live downwind will be affected.

“There are still a lot of unknowns about this. We’ve never had an ash spill this size and I think people ought to err on the side of caution.”

If there’s one bit of consolation for the people living near the Kingston coal ash spill, it’s this: the National Weather Service says that during the summer months this region is among the least windy and most humid in the country.

For the Environment Report, I’m Matt Shafer Powell.

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Local Blowback From Wind Farms

  • Two cranes lift wind turbine blades off the ground at the Noble Environmental Power wind farm in Ellenburg, NY. (Photo by David Sommerstein)

America’s hunger for new, greener sources of electricity, and a generous
federal tax credit, are fueling a wind power boom. According to the
industry, almost 6,000 megawatts of new wind energy are under construction
nationwide. That’s 40% of all existing wind power in the U.S. The federal
government doesn’t regulate many aspects of wind power. Neither do many
states. That puts a lot of pressure on local town councils to decide if a wind
farm will be a good neighbor. David Sommerstein reports:

Transcript

America’s hunger for new, greener sources of electricity, and a generous
federal tax credit, are fueling a wind power boom. According to the
industry, almost 6,000 megawatts of new wind energy are under construction
nationwide. That’s 40% of all existing wind power in the U.S. The federal
government doesn’t regulate many aspects of wind power. Neither do many
states. That puts a lot of pressure on local town councils to decide if a wind
farm will be a good neighbor. David Sommerstein reports:


It’s 7:30 in the morning on a crystal clear day in northern New York State.
A dozen ironworkers huddle between two monstrous red cranes and one
gleaming white tower, rising 22 stories tall:


“Everybody know their tasks? Anybody got any questions? Got a beautiful
day to fly this thing. No wind.”


Today the crew’s going to lift the thing you see spinning on a wind turbine –
three blades twice the length of semi trucks – to the top of the tower and
attach it. Dave Talley’s the supervisor. He’s from Petersburg, Tennessee:


“I live 20 miles from the Jack Daniels distillery.”


Talley’s helped build some of the wonders of the modern world: the
monorail at Disney World, the world’s largest furnace, the largest stamping
press.


“Yeah, we got a saying in our business. My work is my play, my play is my
work. I work harder than I play, and I play hard. If it ain’t hard, I ain’t
playin’. If it ain’t fun, I ain’t sayin’. And that’s all I’m sayin’.”


The cranes ease the blades into the air. Talley’s crew will do this 122 times
to erect Noble Environmental Power’s wind farm here. Noble’s owned by JP
Morgan Partners. The company spent millions of dollars and years of
permitting and negotiating to get to this point.


The wind farm touched off a fiery debate in town. Local board meetings
erupted in yelling. Neighbors and families became estranged:


“I think there’s a lot of people who have family members who totally fight
over it. I mean my sister and I don’t. We just don’t discuss it.”


Julie Ribot can see the turbines from her porch. Her sister works for the
wind power company. Ribot, however, is dead set against them:


“I don’t want to live here. There’s supposed to be 27 going up across the
street alone. Somebody said, ‘oh, it’s just like a ceiling fan.’ Well, would
you want 27 ceiling fans going off in your living room? No.”


Just next door to Ribot, Richard Widalski thinks they’re great:


“We do have to find an alternative source of energy. The price of oil and
everything, it’s getting ridiculous. I was told it’ll put up 1.5 megawatts of
power, which will, y’know, supply power for quite a few homes.”


Wind developers pay landowners thousands of dollars a year for hosting
turbines on their land. But neighbors have to live with the windmills, too,
and they don’t get paid. Planner John Tenbush says money pits haves
against have-nots in a small town:


“One guy’s gonna get a lot of money and the guy right next door, who’s
going to suffer from the noise or the blinking effect or some other adverse
impact, gets nothing.”


Across the country, industrial-scale wind project are forcing small, mostly
rural town councils to make big decisions. The federal government and
most states offer little guidance on a blizzard of complicated issues: how far
should the turbines be from a house or a road? How loud can they be? Do
they boost or blemish property values? Do they kill too many birds?


David Duff is on the planning board in nearby St. Lawrence County. He
says it’s easy for town councils to get in over their heads:


“Maybe they buy snowplows and they put out contracts for salt. They are
not in the same league in terms of negotiating as a multinational company
who has done this before.”


Until regulation catches up, the burden falls on local town councils when
wind power moves in.


For the Environment Report, I’m David Sommerstein.

Related Links

Preserving Indian Mounds

  • Roger and Margaret Martin visit the effigy and burial mounds. (Photo by Brian Bull)

Historians, archaeologists, and Native American tribes are fighting to save ancient
mounds. The mounds are found scattered across much of North America. These
earthen, man-made formations mark the presence of prehistoric, indigenous people. But,
Brian Bull reports many are disappearing because of development or neglect:

Transcript

Historians, archaeologists, and Native American tribes are fighting to save ancient
mounds. The mounds are found scattered across much of North America. These
earthen, man-made formations mark the presence of prehistoric, indigenous people. But,
Brian Bull reports many are disappearing because of development or neglect:



Jay Toth is walking through the Kingsley-Bend Indian Mounds site. Toth is an
archeologist with the Ho-Chunk tribe in Wisconsin. He surveys nearly 30 mounds here,
including several that he says contain human remains. Toth says these mounds range
from 800 to 2000 years old, and are considered sacred, which is why Toth isn’t happy
when a man lets his dog use one for a bathroom:


“There’s a sign right there…”



“The guy saw the sign coming in, he didn’t bother…think that’s a good reflection on why
mounds are continually destroyed. There’s just no consideration.”


The tribe has painstakingly restored and maintained this site with its own money. But
Toth says out of 20,000 groups of mounds across Wisconsin alone, only a quarter
survive today. Many are still being desecrated or destroyed by construction and
development:


“It’s just too bad that we don’t have the respect for the religious aspects of what these are
all about. No one would expect the Ho-Chunk Nation or
any other tribe to go in and buy up public cemeteries and subdivide it up for housing
development, but somehow mound sites and other native burial seem to be okay.”


And it’s not just in Wisconsin. Similar problems exist for Indian mounds in other states,
including Ohio, Illinois, Minnesota, and Tennessee. Development is supposed to stop if a
mound is discovered, but authorities can only act on the calls they receive.


Samantha Greendeer is a Ho-Chunk attorney. She’s working with tribal, state, and federal
officials to revive legislation first introduced by West Virginia Congressman Nick Rahall.
It would proactively protect burial mounds, rather than after they’re disturbed:


“We seem to have to deal with this a little bit more just because a lot of the old ancestral
mounds and burials of native people are not in organized European-type cemeteries that
are zoned and properly accounted for. They don’t get that extra
bit of protection that a normal burial site would get.”


If passed, the federal government would have to deal with Native American and Native
Hawaiian tribes before taking action that would affect any land deemed sacred. Attitudes
about the mounds are changing.


(Sound of jackhammers)


Construction workers are tearing up old concrete foundations, to help set up new
buildings on the University of Wisconsin campus. But it’s a different story near the
University observatory. Campus developers plan to displace newer structures with the
older architecture. Gary Brown points to a sidewalk built in the 1950s. It’s right next to a
centuries-old bird effigy mound which some Native Americans still use for ceremonies:


“We’ll be coming back several feet away from the edges of the mound, carefully remove
the sidewalk, reconstruct the sidewalk a little bit further away. It’ll be a lot of hand labor,
there won’t be a lot of major big machinery…”


And moving the sidewalk will create a buffer zone to help protect the ancient mound.



Some people outside of the tribes realized the value of the mounds decades ago.
Roger and Margaret Martin walk in the rain with umbrellas, to show several effigy and
burial mounds in their backyard:


“When friends come to visit, we take ’em out back and point them out…We’re standing
on the bird effigy, swept back from both sides are the bird’s wings…the one on the left is
much more pronounced.”


Back when the neighborhood was being built, most people flattened the mounds. But, he
Martins signed up with what’s called an archaeological covenant program. They’ve
promised not to alter the mounds on their property. They also get a tax break on any land
containing a mound.


The Martins say they’d like to begin a ceremony where they visit the mounds and think of
their makers, the early North American cultures. Such reverence means a lot to Ho-Chunk
archeologist Jay Toth, who says the formations are rich in meaning and history for his
people:


“These mounds represent the deed to the land for all Native Americans. This you can’t
take away.”


Toth and other preservationists hope Congress passes laws to better protect ancient
mounds. They hope in time that people come to regard both burial and effigy mounds as
items to preserve, rather than destroy.


For the Environment Report, I’m Brian Bull.

Related Links

Warming Trends to Increase Energy Demands

Researchers say as average temperatures rise in the US, the demand for energy will go up as well. The GLRC’s Matt Shafer Powell explains:

Transcript

Researchers say as average temperatures rise in the US, the demand for energy will go up
as well. The GLRC’s Matt Shafer Powell explains:


Researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee say they loaded all kinds
of climate, pollution and population data into one of the lab’s supercomputers. As
expected, they found that demand for heating in the winter will drop as the earth warms,
but not enough to compensate for the higher demand for air conditioning in the summer.


David Erickson led the project. He says that could make the problem of global warming
even worse:


“You’re going to end up having to create electricity by burning of coal, which feeds back
and adds more CO2 into the atmosphere that causes warming.”


Erickson says the computer models they’ve created can be adjusted to adapt to any
changes in energy technology or policy.


For the GLRC, I’m Matt Shafer Powell.

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