DIKE BREAKS - ASH SLIDE DAMAGES HOMES IN TENNESSEE

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Gadzooks, the whole ash pond has collapsed and flooded the outhouse!  I agree (as likely does the TVA) that they should pay for this gross underestimation of their business and replace all damaged property with "new".  That's professional malpractice, like a professional wordsmith who doesn't know the meaning of the word "breech", isn't it?

I also agree in principle with the point that we need to disconnect ourselves from naughty coal suppliers.  Eventually.  But I do feel that all those proposing this action should first set a good example by going outside right now and pulling the meter on their own home and chopping out the weatherhead, just to make their point a little more strongly.  Kind of like putting their money where their mouth is. 

Believe me, if all those who then followed the wonderful example, sure to be set by Pseudo-Santa and his buds, and did as they demand everyone else do, then the TVA might be able to lower their electric rates to the rest of the populace (who LIKE electricity) and be a little more picky about what they have to do to keep the lights on for the REST of the TN valley.  AND, I'd even push for a TVA-funded annual recognition dinner for Pseudo Santa and his wonderful off-the-grid Example Setting Elves, so they could have hot food at least once a year.

Sign me

Happy to be a TVA Customer

57 years and no brownouts at my house.

This HAS happened before, it happened in Martin County and it took 6 months to clean up two streams that were damaged.  How on earth will the clean this up and how will TVA be held accountable?  Coal is over, done, this is not an acceptable consequence, use of coal for electric generation cannot be justified.  I'm looking for more information and am astounded on the dearth of coverage.  This will NOT be covered up!  TVA gets more than a lump of coal tomorrow night!

Here's a post on this with information on the Martin County mess in 2000:

http://gulahiyi.blogspot.com/2008/12/disaster-in-tennessee.html

Santa,

You are under arrest for use of illegal drugs.  The only reason you aren't under arrest for distribution is because you are obviously using them all yourself.  You may want to slow down on that crack you are consuming!

Let's look at your your "solutions".

1.  Investigate the failure.  What do you think TVA is going to do, ignore it, pretend it didn't happen?  Don't you think this will be investigated?  Do you think TVA or anyone else wanted this to happen?  Do you think TVA is eagerly looking forward to this happening at another of its plants?

2. Identify the locations of ash ponds and toxins.  TVA has eleven coal fired plants.  You can find the locations of them all on the TVA website.  Since you got on a computer to post your drivel, I think even in your crack-induced haze you can manage to type "tva.gov".  If you can't do that, try google earth and you can look at them.  None of them are covered by satellite blocking tarps and each is conveniently located near a smokestack that is at least 500 feet tall.  As for the toxins, go look at one of these ponds and at the immense variety of wildlike and flora that grow in them.  It's ash that came from the earth!

3. See item two for locations. Each pond does receive an annual inspection.  If they need it more often, please furnish your address so the citizenry of the TVA area can send you the bill.

4. The warning system.  Yeah.  Where do you buy those?  Wal-Mart, Radio Shack?  Have you developed one of those tinkering in the garage at night?  Since these events occur with such alarming frequency, I have invested heavily in the "ash pond dike rupture warning system manufacturers" mutual fund.  It is performing at least as well as my "wish there was a technological answer for everything" stock.  Educating the people likely to be affected?  Which do you think was there first: the ash pond or those houses?  The education would have to be in Braille.  If they weren't worried about the ash pond when they built the house what would the education consist of other than "If ash pond dike fails, RUN!"

5.  Won't dignify this one with an acerbic comment.  Do you really think they will do less??

6.  OK, I'll concede this one, but only if you concede that we as the denizens of this wonderful region get together and pay the TVA for more than 75 years of alleviating human suffering, backbreaking toil, improvement of the air and water quality that existed when everyone in this valley used a non-regulated coal or wood burning stove and urinated in the streams.

7.  Check this one off of your list.  It already exist.  It's called a "Board of Directors".

8. Good idea.  Please send your address again, as I want to send YOU the bill for the doubling of elecric rates that will occur when this takes effect.  I really feel sorry for the poor who will suffer even more from this, but I'm sure you have another government program, replete with citizen advisory boards, high rate warning systems, public disclosures, et al., that will take care of them.  The poor don't know just how fortunate they are to have an advocate like you , Santa!

9. This is the easiest one of all, and TVA can accomplish this is 15 seconds flat.  At the same time, TVA's power production levels will also be cut to zero kilowatt-hours per year.  Life will be tough for a while here in the valley.  As long as TVA does this in the winter, it won't be too bad, because the corpses won't really start stinking until mid-March.  By then, the few who are still alive will have moved to another region or at least buried some of the dead.  The ones who didn't freeze to death early, or starve in a few weeks will soon be killed by the roving gangs and tribes who are hoarding and protecting their few remaining canned goods.  That must be some dynamite stuff you got hold of!

10.  Why not?  Is this like the ANWR?  Afraid it's going to kill off the caribou?

Santa, I didn't intend to be mean to you.  You just said some stupid things, and as Ron White says "You can't fix stupid!"  Perhaps you can blame your thoughts on the press.  Maybe you would have looked at it differently had the headline said "Ash Pond Dike Collapses, 2 Million Homes in the TVA Region Unaffected!" with a subtitle that said "TVA continues to produce safe, reliable, affordable electric power to region, millions sleep warmly in their beds and their companies still have jobs for them!"

If you have your way, none of these benefits will go on long.  Maybe you should head back to the North Pole.

Great job on this - looks like it is just absolutely devastating.

I learned how to fish in the cove that is now full of ash sludge. I dread seeing it first-hand this weekend.

Well reported, thank you.

The Tennessee Valley Authority is working hard to contain the spill from the coal Kingston power plant.

funny you demand action but when major projects are under way to make the plants safer enviornmentalist groups have it stopped completely in federal court because it isn't good enough and we hav gone on 2 more years with no improvements.  thanks a lot!

Hi all,

The Narc is back again trying to improve the level of education in the Tennessee River Valley.

To Santa's Helper: thank you for a much more temperate response to a difficult technical problem than Santa's diatribe.  The device you mention, the piezometer, actually measures the pressure of water (or another fluid).  These are often used in wells.  There are also instruments capable of measuring the moisture content of soils and other substances and also for measuring soil density (a nuclear soild density monitor). 

Could these have been used?  Certainly!  Why doesn't TVA use them?  I don't know but I'll venture a guess.  It isn't spelled out specifically in a regulation and the generally good record of these ponds (I think this is TVA's first break in an ash pond dike - could be wrong though) would lead a rational person to think that perhaps it isn't necessary.  It isn't always economically feasible to do everything that CAN be done, and at some point some things that anyone (TVA, pick a company, you, me) might wish to do, have to be pushed to the side for something else that screams for those same dollars.

My thoughts are that TVA may well look into placing some sort of monitor in certain of the ash ponds, but you would have to ask them that.  Anyway, good point and well taken.

To Ms. Shillings, I certainly sympathize with you for your loss of your familial abode.  I do not wish to trivialize that loss, but the wonderful thing about memories is they last a long, long time.

I find interesting your comment about the ash pond which the current dike surrounded.  You (again using those memories) refer back to when said pond "was nothing more than a POND!  No ash!  There was hardly even any ash in it in the 70's"  Let's examine what happened there.  When the TVA built Kingston Steam Plant back in the early 50's, there was little, if any, regulation about what an industrial plant could spew from a smoke stack.  That started changing in the 60's and 70's with the Clean Air Act.  In response to that and an agreement called the "Consent Decree" TVA made  with some organizations (the Sierra Club amongst them), TVA began a massive, multi-billion dollar program to reduce the particulate emissions from it's coal-fired plants.  This was accomplished by installing devices known as "electrostatic precipitators" on these plants.  These devices took the amount of ash collected from nearly zero to more than 99 percent in some cases.  That ash has to be stored somewhere!  The pond was built for that purpose, although not for that post-Consent Dcree quantity.  Had anyone (in TVA or out) in the late 40's or early 50's ever envisioned what was in store environmentally, I imagine TVA would have bought MUCH more property to contain the ash.  Had someone been that prescient, I suspect that your childhood home would have been much farther away from the current site and escaped any damage.  By now though, (1970's) the plant is landlocked, and condemning homes to expand it would have created more vitriole from the public.  This leave the TVA with no where to go but up, so they build dikes around these ponds to increase their storage capacity and mollify people who probably like the electricity but don't want to move.  The increased quantity of ash, is now going into the pond.  This is because well-meaning environmentalists got their way and now the ash isn't going out the stack, it is going to the pond.

Do you see where this is going?  We can't have everything we want.  Hard choices have to be made.  Santa apparently doesn't realize that, and hence demands zero emissions without stopping to think what that might cost.  Electric power comes at a cost, but it's like a prison - no one wants one nearby.  We love the positive impact electic power has on our lives (how many of you would have learned of this occurence without it?) but we sure don't want to bear the cost of it: coal plants that produce ash, nuclear-fueled plants which produce spent uranium, dams which consume farmland, windmills which spoil the scenery, etc.

Whether we like it or not, electric power is part of our lives.  The memories which Ms. Shillings refers to probably include being warm, having lights in the house, a washer for the clothes, a job for her father to earn a living to restore that house, and lots of others that were made possible in large part by our friend, Reddy Kilowatt.  Why not temper our thoughts of "let's kill the TVA monster" as we collect villagers with pitch forks, and see what we can do to help prevent this sort of thing in the future.  That won't happen by making irrational demands that will hurt the general populace more than they help.

i didn't get the memo that we were sposed to stop peeing in the streams.  Great report, Mushy.  Great comments.