With coal ash, one date stands out: Dec. 22, 2008.
Before then, relatively few people in the United States knew or thought much about the residue left behind at the hundreds of power plants that were then burning coal—even though it amounted to one of the largest sources of industrial waste. For a report I did in 2002 when I worked for The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, an engineering expert helped me calculate that one year’s worth of the nation’s coal ash, placed on a football field, would extend more than 11 miles high.
By the early- to mid-2000s, just a handful of environmentalists were trying to get the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to classify the material as hazardous waste. A few scientists had documented how the toxic chemicals and heavy metals in coal ash were deforming frog tadpoles and fish. And in Pines, Indiana, where coal ash had been used to fill wetlands and build roads, the contamination polluted water wells and resulted in the designation as an EPA Superfund site.
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Tennessee journalist Jared Sullivan, in his new book, “Valley So Low,” described the moment this way: “When it did, more than a billion gallons of coal-ash slurry—about fifteen hundred times the volume of liquid that flows over Niagara Falls each second—broke forth. A black wave at least fifty feet high rushed northward with the power and violence of water punching through a dam.”
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They Fell Sick After Cleaning Up a TVA Toxic Disaster. A New Book Details Their Legal Battle
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https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/690554/valley-so-low-by-jared-sullivan/
