The Sludge That Dare Not Speak Its Name
by Jim Washburn
Back in January I wrote about a coal ash spill in Tennessee. It was pretty much the landlocked version of a major oil spill: over a billion gallons of "pudding-like" coal ash, chock full of mercury, benzene, cadmium, lead, uranium, arsenic and other unpleasantries, spilling out over the countryside, flooding farms and clogging rivers. It's a byproduct of the "clean coal" industry, don'tcha know. Despite the spill's immediate impact and long-term environmental damage, it warranted only a brief hiccup in the news cycle, nothing like the attention devoted to the Octomom's much-traveled uterus.
And don't expect to hear much more about the sludge, until the next major spill: The Department of Homeland Security has told Senator Barbara Boxer that she, her staff and fellows on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee she chairs cannot publicly discuss the locations of the nation's coal ash storage sites. That's because they are so dangerous and vulnerable that a terrorist attack could easily lead to a lethal environmental disaster, which would be horning in on the coal industry's exclusive right to cause such disasters.
Oh, I left out an important word: they are unregulated coal ash sites, maintained in casual-Friday fashion by the coal industry with scant government oversight, which is why in Tennessee 5.4 million cubic yards of the stuff spilled out of a pond that the government thought had only 1.7 million cubic yards in it.
Yes, there's an argument to be made for keeping terrorists away from this sludge, but it comes at the larger cost of stifling public discourse on whether such dangerous sites, and the industry practices that create them, should be allowed to continue unchecked. What's the point of "government by, for and of the people" if your government helps industry hide the fact that there's a flood of lethal sludge behind a flimsy earthen wall just upriver from you? Wouldn't it be better to flush all this info into the open, to raise the heat under the coal industry to properly store and guard this crap so that neighbors and terrorists alike could see it was safe from attack?
