TVA Coal Ash Spill

[falcon]

Yep, they piled the stuff 80 feet higher than the top of the retention dam, it got wet and run, about 1 billion gallons of toxic goo. Way to go TVA. They sure played into Obama's hands with this one.

Yep, according to the company responsible for the disaster the water is always safe to drink. They said that at Times Beach and Love Canal.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081229/ap_on_re_us/flooded_neighborhood

More than a billion gallons of coal fly ash, a byproduct of burning coal, spilled Monday when the dike burst on a retention pond at the Kingston Fossil Plant. The spill covered 300 acres with sludge in Harriman, about 35 miles west of Knoxville. It dumped a mix of ash and water in the Emory River, causing residents of nearby Kingston to worry about their drinking water.

TVA has said the water is safe to drink.

Yep accidents happen. People likes to flick on the light switch and have light. People like to sit and play on the internet in the politics section. They just don't like the accidents that go along with these perks.

[Canuck_Buck]

I wonder if this was done on purpose?

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/12/29/tennessee.sludge/index.html

[falcon]

I wonder if this was done on purpose?

No one will ever know. It was pretty dumb letting the stuff pile up 100 feet high. They use this fly ash in the remediation of old mining sites and in concrete. But not enough of it is used and it just piles up all over thecountry. It is going to cost TVA some serious coins toclean upthis one. Likely to be a big fine assed too.

ORIGINAL: falcon

Likely to be a big fine assed too.

Doubt it. I personally know a person who purposly breeched a sludge pond to a mines because the lawyer fees and fines were not enough to not do it. We about ended our friendship over that.

[hillbillyhunter1]

It was pretty dumb letting the stuff pile up 100 feet high

Nothing is "dumb" forthose who are allowed to get away with it. The dumb ones are those who put up with it in their backyard, although many of the decision makers for those areas are a little corrupt and greedy...what else is new???

It's hard to tell how many potential disasters like this just await the right circumstance or perhaps a little more time. Makes a lot of sense to put these sludge impoundments on top the mountains too, but they're all over the place in "coal appalachia"

[falcon]

I personally know a person who purposly breeched a sludge pond to a mines because the lawyer fees and fines were not enough to not do it.

My sole dumb trick was not that bad.During one of my many retirementsi drove a heavy truck at a really big WV limestone plant. Years before the EPA forced the plant owner to build two huge concrete settlement ponds to keep the limestone dust from getting into the river. It cost about $10,000 just to clean out the ponds when they were full.

One day the plant owner told me that the EPA had come to him wanting hundreds of tons of free limestone dust to put intothe river to reduce the acidity of a big lake downstream.This was the wrong thing to tell me.The settlement ponds were nearly full.Looked at the pondsand they both had lockedvalves on drainpipes thatwent to the river.To make a long story short i opened those valves one Friday night when it was raining like mad.

Cometo work Monday morning,it was still raining and the ponds were clean as a whistle. Closed the valves, locked the locks and returned the keys to to the maintenance shop keyboard.


BC, do you know anything aboutPCBs leaking into streams from deteriorated underground transformers inabandoned deep coal mines?

[hillbillyhunter1]

I liked that falcon. As I started to read I was thinking "...but limestone is actually beneficial".

The upper Clark Fork river in MT (The country's largest superfund site...copper sludge) actually turns into a beautiful trout river where it is limestone based (near the headwaters but downstream of the pollution), then is overcome with the same pollutants further downstream once the river bottom changes from limestone (about 15-20 miles)