The Sludge that Wouldn’t Budge

by Jim Washburn

The term “clean coal” has been popping up a lot this past year in ads and on the political stump. There is a push behind that, and it’s not from the tapioca industry. The people who bring you coal today want to make sure they’re bringing you coal tomorrow, so they’re trying to make sure they’ve carved out an overlarge piece of the green pie for themselves. They cite new technologies coming online so that your domestically mined coal is coming out of the smokestack cleaner than Brut aftershave.

Out in the field, though, black is the new green. Consider Tennessee last week, where a coal-fired power plant’s retaining wall broke. This particular retaining wall did not result from someone opining, “Hey, this is some great stuff! Let’s hang on to it!” Rather, it was holding back 500 million gallons of “pudding-like” fly ash sludge—a by-product of coal plants—which has now poured into local communities and waterways. It has covered over 400 acres, and in some places is six feet deep.

The plant is run by the Tennessee Valley Authority, which, despite the name, is a federal entity, so it’s only consonant that TVA spokesman Gil Francis stood up for the sludge when talking to the press, asserting, “In terms of toxicity, until an analysis comes in, you can’t call it toxic.” Meanwhile, in terms of toxicity meaning, “Hey, this shit just killed the bejesus out of me!” there is this: footage of dead fish washing up along the shores of the Clinch River and the fact that fly ash contains highly unpudding-like ingredients including mercury, benzine, cadmium, lead, frigging uranium, and arsenic in concentrated amounts.

Don’t worry, there’s only 500 million gallons of the stuff that got loose thereabouts, flooding homes, covering farmland, mucking up the watershed and generally making a large part of Tennessee look like it needs Cool Whip.

But wait, there’s more! And I mean actual “more,” as in “May I have more sludge, please?”

Certainly! TVA officials initially said the amount of escaped sludge totaled 1.7 million cubic yards. They’ve corrected themselves, saying the amount’s actually three times that, 5.4 million cubic yards, adding up to more than one billion gallons, which makes you wonder again if the Bush administration is incapable of any screw-up that doesn’t involve the word “billions.”

The curious thing about the 5.4 million number is that the amount of sludge retained by the retaining wall supposedly only totaled 2.6 million cubic yards. That’s what the TVA thought they had there. If little Billy has a malted milk, and he spills twice as much malted milk as he has, doesn’t that kind of toss reality right out the classroom window? This was real-world dangerous muck, and the only thing they’d had in place to keep it from spilling was an earthen wall, which means dirt.

Who could have foreseen a problem here? Clearly not the same administration that seven years ago said, “No one could have imagined we’d be attacked” despite having been sent a red-flagged memo titled “Bin Laden determined to strike in US”; the administration that ignored the evidence on Iraq; and the scientific consensus on global warming, etc.

In 2000, the Environmental Protection Agency cited an urgent need for federal standards to regulate coal plant waste. The incoming “What, me worry?” administration couldn’t be bothered with science that conflicted with its anti-regulation ethos, and did less than nothing. Rather, they derailed a long-fought Clinton EPA court case that would have compelled coal plants to run cleaner.

Condoleezza Rice—she with the oil tanker named after her—recently told CBS News that Americans soon will “start to thank this President for what he’s done.” I’d agree to do that, if he’d quit today, three weeks early and eight years too late. I’d send him a thank-you card and a Snickers bar.

It was not unforeseen that the Tennessee plant could have a disaster waiting in its sludge lagoon. It’d had smaller breaches, and communities near it and other coal plants complained of health problems for years. Folks who get their water from wells near the Tennessee plant have reported “prolonged vomiting” from drinking it, according to an article by the Institute for Southern Studies. If this spill gets into the Tennessee River—it’s already clogging a tributary—it will go into the drinking water of millions of people. The South won’t have seen so much prolonged vomiting since the last Charlie Daniels’ Volunteer Jam.   

I traveled by train in the Soviet Union back in the ’80s, and was surprised to find people getting their tea water from a coal-fired samovar in each car. My eyes smarted from the smoke, while reading a government pamphlet about how the progressive Soviet Union had no pollution or ecological problems to speak of.

Later we all learned just how true that was. They had burgeoning, unchecked ecological disasters all over the place—some even topping Chernobyl—they just didn’t speak of them. That’s what you get when you have a corrupt, ideology-driven government operating without checks or oversight. That’s what we’ve had these last eight years, and I’m counting the minutes until it’s over.

All this sludge doesn’t have much to do directly with housing, unless yours is one of the Tennessee homes soaking in the stuff right now. But it indirectly has everything to do with housing and transportation, because we need to get the energy for our lights, electric auto engines and such from somewhere. There’s not much point in buying a plug-in electric vehicle if it’s sucking power from the coal plant down the street. There is no free lunch and there’s even less clean coal. (You can learn more about what an oxymoron clean coal is at This Is Reality.)

Tennesseans may have an easier time digging out than we’re going to have extracting ourselves from the unbudging, filthy muck that is our energy industry today.

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