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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Feds Say No to Private Developers

For most of the last century, the federal
government has engaged in a practice known as “land
swapping.” That’s where the federal government sells
or trades land with private property owners. In recent
years, land swapping has become increasingly controversial
as developers build neighborhoods on previously undeveloped
public land. But one federal agency has put an end to the
practice. Some conservationists hope this recent development
represents a new era for the protection of federally-owned
land. Matt Shafer Powell reports:

Transcript

For most of the last century, the federal
government has engaged in a practice known as “land
swapping.” That’s where the federal government sells
or trades land with private property owners. In recent
years, land swapping has become increasingly controversial
as developers build neighborhoods on previously undeveloped
public land. But one federal agency has put an end to the
practice. Some conservationists hope this recent development
represents a new era for the protection of federally-owned
land. Matt Shafer Powell reports:


In the 1930s and 40s the federal government used eminent domain, or the threat of it, to
seize land all over the country. It bought up the land to build dams to make electricity.
One of the biggest projects took place in the Southeastern US. That’s where the federal
government created the Tennessee Valley Authority and flooded much of the Tennessee
River Valley. What was once deep gullies and hillsides became lakes and reservoirs
surrounded by forests. The TVA still owns about 300,000 acres of undeveloped land
throughout the region. For most of the last seventy years, the public has used this land
for recreation and conservation. Billy Minser is a wildlife biologist. He says the public
is very protective of that land:


“It provides outstanding public resource for recreation and beauty, it gives people a place to
rekindle the human spirit, a place to relax, hunt, fish, camp, bird watch or maybe to sit
home and think about how pretty the lakes are.”


In 2003, the TVA angered conservationists like Minser when it traded some of that land
to a residential developer, who built an upscale subdivision on it, and it happened again
last year with another swatch of pristine lakeshore property. Minser claims those deals
betrayed the public, but they also betrayed those families who lost their land to the
government years ago:


“If the government takes your house and bulldozes it down because it’s not enough value
and then sells it to me so I can build another house on it in the same place. Is that right?
That’s wrong. That is absolutely wrong and the public’s done with it.”


Land exchanges are nothing new. Federal agencies like the US Forest Service and the
Bureau of Land Management have been swapping land with private property owners and
state and local governments for decades. The practice is often used to fill in holes in
national forests or get rid of land that the government can’t use. Glenn Collins is with the
Public Lands Foundation. In some cases, he says the feds end up with more and better
land, but that means a lot of previously untouched land ends up in the hands of
developers:


“The federal lands that are placed into private ownership invariably go into development.
Either the land, the large blocks are subdivided into smaller blocks on paper, there may
be roads, improvements, it’ll be put up for sale.”


Over the years, the public has become increasingly wary of these land swaps. In the
Tennessee Valley, public outcry about the deals eventually forced a change in the TVA’s
philosophy. The agency’s Board of Directors recently voted to approve a new policy that
bans the sale or trade of TVA land to private residential developers:


“All those in favor of the committee’s policy on land, say aye.”


“Aye.”


“Opposed?”


“No.”
That one dissenting vote came from board member Bill Baxter, demonstrating the fact
that not everyone is wild about the ban. In explaining his “no” vote, Baxter echoed the
sentiments of economic development officials who worry that an all-out ban on
residential development will compromise their chances of attracting people and money to
the region. Baxter used the example of rural communities that would normally have a
hard time attracting industry:


“Perhaps their best hope for doing some economic development and increasing the tax
base so they can improve the schools for their kids and their roads and their health care is
to have some high-end residential development. It’s a beautiful part of the country and
we’re fortunate that a lot of people want to retire here.”


In the end, Baxter’s claims that residential development is economic development failed
to resonate with either the public or his colleagues on the board. After the vote at the
TVA’s board meeting, Michael Butler of the Tennessee Wildlife Federation called the
new policy a “monumental accomplishment.”


“I think it’s also part of a sound quality-of-life and tax policy into the future to look at
how we use conservation lands to really develop a sustainable way to have a growing
economy, which has got to be part of the equation, and to have a place where these
people can go enjoy themselves that isn’t in front of a television set all the time.”


The fact that the government used eminent domain to acquire a lot of the TVA’s land
means the people in the region are passionately vigilant about what happens to it, but the
public’s passion for land isn’t exclusive to the Tennessee Valley. And so the decisions
made here could have a long-term effect on the way the government approaches future
land exchanges throughout the country.


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

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