TVA Coal Ash Spill... spells disaster

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Excerpt

But long-term exposure is precisely what worries the plant's neighbors and environmentalists trying to calculate the damage the spill could do to fish and local wildlife. At other sites, long-term exposure to coal ash runoff has had devastating effects on local fish stocks. Young fish were born with eyes that had shifted to one side of their heads, or spines twisted into "s" shapes.

"If you were to drink that water, you'd be in trouble," said Shea Tuberty, associate professor of biology at Appalachian State University, who ran independent tests on the water and ash with similar results — arsenic levels 30 times or higher than the safety standard.

Tests on the sludge itself — the accumulated ash of coal fires at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston Fossil Plant — showed unsafe levels of arsenic and vanadium and higher-than-normal levels of almost every other chemical and heavy metal found in coal: mercury, magnesium, selenium, sodium, cobalt and manganese.

"This is really toxic stuff," said Matt Wilson, who has a doctorate in ecology and directs programs for the group Appalachian Voices, which has been monitoring the disaster and conducting its own tests. "TVA has pledged to clean it up, but it's unclear the degree to which that can happen."

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