Green Scales

Fly Ash Spill In Tennessee

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.

I Smell Trouble

I wrote last week over at Green Daily about factory farms and the air and water pollution that they have the potential to create. But at least in Iowa, no one knows exactly what kinds and amounts of pollution are arising from these operations, which was incredibly frustrating to one citizen who happens to be a practicing nurse as well. If we cut funding for monitoring of air and water, we lose our ability to identify threats to our health. Whose job is it to do this monitoring? Citizens? Local universities (as the University of Iowa did in the case of citizens' concerns about factory farms)? The government?

I just googled "Air and water monitoring" to provide some links to useful sites with information for citizens on this topic. My article from last week was the second hit. It came before any state Department of Environmental Quality website. It came long before any EPA site.

So, what does this mean? Does it mean that not many people are out there searching "air and water quality," or does it mean that the sites that provide this information are hard to find? What do you think?

I did find this nifty and information site from the Canadian Ministry of Environment, titled Water and Air Monitoring and Reporting: Environmental Databases.

What's the best way to make this information available to citizens in a useful and accessible manner?

Justice and toxics monitoring

I've just posted an introductory piece over at Green Daily to a series I'm writing about the way that water and air quality monitoring-- or lack thereof-- are affecting communities.

One of the authors of a Natural Resources Defense Council paper on these cutbacks, Miriam Rotkin-Ellman, gave me her thoughts on environmental justice:

In my own work, I look for communities to define their own environmental issues and concerns ... communities that are underserved in many ways often have been the brunt of chemical pollution." Rotkin-Ellman says that she tries to let those definitions guide her own work, because "[These communities] need more justice on reducing exposure to hazardous chemicals in the environment and more .... opportunities for better health."

In the coming days I'll be posting on the ways that Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), also known as factory farms, affect air and water in surrounding communities,  and I'll talk to several others affected by these changes in monitoring.

We currently depend heavily on the EPA to tell us not only when chemicals have reached hazardous levels, but also which chemicals might be dangerous. How much do you trust the EPA to identify risks to your health?