When I attended the Environmental Journalism Boot Camp through Michigan State University's Knight Center for Environmental Journalism this past October, one of our day trips took us to a small community with a big problem. A group of people who lived in a small trailer park by a river were upset that fly ash was going to be stored right next to their river-- and right next to their homes.
I learned a lot about fly ash that day. I've included a photo gallery on the right hand side of the blog of some community members who work there to educate the public about their fears and fury about the storage of the fly ash.
So yesterday, a huge fly ash storage dam broke in Kingston, TN. I covered the story over at Green Daily:
Green Daily: Ash and Sludge Cover Tennessee Town
In poking around to write the Green Daily post, I found out that the EPA actually has a partnership with several energy industry folks to promote the beneficial use of coal byproducts. In other words, the EPA (that stands for Environmental Protection Agency) is spending time and money to advocate for the use of fly ash, a waste product that contains arsenic, tends to be radioactive, and is now covering a part of a fairly important city in Tennessee.
Ann Pancake's novel Strange as this Weather Has Been imagined a scenario where a dam holding strip-mine wastewater broke, covering a section of the Appalachian West Virginia in sludge. What Ann Pancake describes that is yet to be determined in Tennessee is the long term physical and psychological effects such a spill can have on a community. In her novel, children have nightmares about sludge coming down and taking their houses, and mothers worry about what they could have done differently to protect their children. Of course, the sludge avalanche in Pancake's novel is larger and more fatal, but it does seem to me that the more we promote and produce coal-- whether it is "clean coal" or not-- the more we'll have to face the problem of storing coal waste. Common sense says there will also be more spills.
I'll be writing more on this in the coming days, including more details on the community near Roanoke, VA, that first illustrated to me the effects fly ash disposal can have on human populations. In the meantime... I'd be interested in hearing what you think it will take to get toxic chemicals and substances first recognized, then regulated in this country. I just don't know.
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