Drink Me

Hilzoy has an excellent, but disturbing and outrageous, follow-up post on that Valdez on the Tennessee spill...

[from the NYT]: Though the E.P.A., the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation and the authority have spoken daily about their efforts to monitor air, soil and water quality, complete results have been released for only two samples, both taken from a drinking water intake site that is upstream of the spill. The water there met drinking standards.

Heckuva job. Those samples from UPSTREAM should make good "before spill" comparisons to the water supply actually affected by 2.2 million pounds of toxic materials.

Independent testing done by environmental groups and a university are looking a little more bleak:

According to the tests, arsenic levels from the Kingston power plant intake canal tested at close to 300 times the allowable amounts in drinking water, while a sample from two miles downstream still revealed arsenic at approximately 30 times the allowed limits. Lead was present at between twice to 21 times the legal drinking water limits, and thallium levels tested at three to four times the allowable amounts.

Granted, that's straight from the river and untreated, but how many people in rural Tennessee get their water from wells? They're fucked. And for everyone else, I'm not sure even a municipal water treatment facility can cope with contamination at those levels.

And of course acres of this shit is still laying around leaching into the soil, washing into the rivers with every rainfall, and soon will begin to dry up and blow around in the air.

Can we stop hearing about "clean coal" now please? At least the waste from a nuclear plant fits in a barrel and is regulated.

UPDATE: Per the photographer's request, I've removed the pictures. They are incredible pictures—Antrim Caskey has captured some hauntingly beautiful images of the utter destruction wreaked on this area. There is a slideshow at the end of this article.

Coal In Your Stockings. And your living room…front yard…neighborhood…the whole damn valley…

There's no fucking way this can be anything close to the end of the story:

Environmentalists worry the ash-laden sludge that coated a Tennessee neighborhood when a power plant dike burst could pose a health risk, although initial tests by a public utility company have shown no threat to drinking water.

Crews were expected to work through the holiday weekend to contain the aftermath of Monday's breach at the coal-fired Kingston power plant, run by the nation's largest public utility about 50 miles west of Knoxville.

Officials at the Tennessee Valley Authority have said preliminary tests suggest there is no danger to millions of people who get their drinking water from the 652-mile Tennessee River.

And TVA spokesman Gil Francis said crews were cleaning up the sludge.

"The cleanup is making progress," Francis said Thursday, adding the group was moving from the road to other areas. TVA brought in 30 pieces of equipment and more than 100 workers for the work that will take four to six weeks to complete, he said.

And the air at Ground Zero was safe to breathe.

Sorry, but there's simply no way a spill of 2 million cubic yards of industrial waste isn't doing serious damage to the environment.

Since moving to Western North Carolina, I've become keenly aware of the evil that is the Tennessee Valley Authority—we breathe the shit pouring from its smokestacks all year, and in the summer, visibility mileage here is often measured in single digits.

The TVA is a federally owned corporation, and as such, I expect Obama to kick its fucking ass into shape. Scrubbers on every goddamn stack, and no more mountaintop-removal mining or sludge pits. There's no such thing as "clean coal", but it can be a hell of a lot cleaner than this.

Video at Crooks and Liars.

UPDATE: The spill is much bigger than initially reported—5.4 million cubic yards (over 1 billion gallons; the Exxon Valdez oil spill was about 11 million gallons). Somehow that much sludge spilled from a retention pond the TVA claimed held only 2.6 million.

UPDATE 2: Officials are warning area residents with wells to "boil their drinking water." Are you fucking kidding me? Boiling water is a nice precaution after a water main break or to kill germs from sewage contamination, but I'm pretty sure it does jack to remove heavy metals. The river looks like the goddamn adamantium vat from X-Men.