The following article was pulled from Scholars & Rogues RSS Feed

A major environmental disaster occurred yesterday, but few news outlets outside Tennessee appear to be covering it: 2.6 million cubic yards (about 525 million gallons) of fly ash sludge poured out from behind an earthen dike at the Kingston coal plant (source: The Tennessean). S&R’s Wendy Redal blogged about the October, 2000 Massey Energy coal slurry flood earlier this month - this flood is bigger, and while it’s more solid, it still covers 400 acres in up to 6 feet of toxic coal ash.

To put this into scale with the Exxon Valdez spill, this coal ash spill is presently estimated to be 48 times larger (in volume) and at least as dangerous. The spill is on a tributary of the Tennessee River, which provides water to millions of people in Tennessee, Alabama, and Kentucky before joining up with the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. This quote from the Tennessean puts this into some perspective:

Viewed from above, the scene looked like the aftermath of a tsunami, with swirls of dirtied water stretching for hundreds of acres on the land, and muddied water in the Emory River.

The Emory leads to the Clinch, which flows into the Tennessee.

Workers sampled river water Monday, with results expected back today, but didn’t sample the dunelike drifts of muddy ash.

That could begin today, officials said, and the potential magnitude of the problem could make this a federally declared Superfund site. That would mean close monitoring and a deep, costly cleanup requiring years of work.

“We’ll be sampling for metals in the ground to see what kind of impact that had,” said Laura Niles, a spokeswoman for the EPA in Atlanta.

“Hopefully, it won’t be as bad as creating a Superfund site, but it depends on what is found.”

Here’s a bunch of resources about this story that desperately need to not go unnoticed - please pass them around:

Twitter feed (thanks to Amy Gahran)

The Knoxville News Sentinal’s first story, and it’s second story.

James Brugger’s blog on this story at the Louisville Courier-Journal

YouTube video of the spill:

It’s Getting Hot In Here blog on this spill

David Sasson at SolveClimate blogged on this news as well

Associated Press story

WYMTnews story

I’ll have a great deal more to say about this over the next few days, focusing most on the toxic threat of fly ash (and how it’s used and abused, and how it’s radioactive, etc.) and why combustion byproducts like fly ash are part of the reason why “clean” coal is complete and utter bullshit, even if 100% of the carbon dioxide was capture and sequestered.

The Exxon Valdez was terrible. This could be much, much worse.

Go to Source