The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) has a coal-burning power plant located near Harriman, Tennessee, along Interstate 40 between Knoxville and Nashville, USA. On December 22 homes near the Kingston coal plant were flooded with over a billion gallons of coal waste. It covered 400 acres of land up to 1.8 m and flooded into tributaries of the Tennessee River – the water supply for Chattanooga and millions of people living downstream in Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky.
Preliminary water tests from rivers near the spill show elevated levels of pollutants such as mercury and lead, a environmental group said on Friday. “We’re concerned that the water poses a greater risk to residents in the area than has been revealed so far,” said Matt Wasson, a program director at Appalachian Voices, an environmental group that co-ordinated the testing of the water with scientists from Appalachian State University.
The environmental group’s tests, undertaken on December 27, showed higher levels of the pollutants of arsenic, mercury and lead than reported by the TVA and the US Environmental Protection Agency.
Arsenic levels from the Kingston power plant canal, for example, tested at nearly 300 times the allowable limits in drinking water. A sample from over 3 km downstream revealed arsenic at about 30 times the limit. “Although these results are preliminary, we want to release them because of the public health concern and because we believe the TVA and EPA aren’t being candid,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., chair of the Waterkeeper Alliance, said in a release.
The United Mountain Defense (http://www.unitedmountaindefense.org/) reports: “This spill is over 40 times bigger than the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. This is a huge environmental disaster of epic proportions.
“United Mountain Defense has been at the site of the spill sharing information about the extremely serious threats to human health and the environment. We have been going door to door passing out information about the chemicals that may be present in impacted drinking water. TVA is advising families to boil water however they are not informing anyone about the reasons for needing to boil the water or sharing any chemicals that may be present in their water.
“TVA has reported that preliminary water test show that the drinking water at the nearby water treatment facility meets standards, but lots of community members have well water or depend on water being pumped from a spring located in the flooded area. There is also still the potential for more sludge to enter the water supply thorough waste runoff.
“TVA says the area is not toxic but you can see coal sludge in the water and dead fish on the banks. The members of this community are without clean water and many without electricity or gas heat.
“Residents say that they are not surprised by the flood because TVA has been fixing leaks in the retention wall for years and one person said this wall had been leaking for months before it broke.”