Clean Coal is a Dirty Lie!

Although this coal disaster happened a month ago, I am posting this now because there will be an organized civil disobedience in Tennessee this weekend regarding this matter. For more information read the last paragraph. The video and the following paragraphs are incredible reports from several people who care and do something about it. Click on their links to learn more.

“The morning of December 22nd, a dam holding back an ash pond burst at the Kingston Fossil Fuel Plant in east Tennessee and covered 400 acres twenty feet deep in toxic coal ash. Except it wasn’t a spill and it wasn’t a dam failure. A fifty foot high pile of toxic waste collapsed and took the dam with it. Except it wasn’t a even a dam and it sure wasn’t a pond, as the TVA calls it. It was a berm made of the same toxic material that was in the pile.” Mike Roselle from Drowning in a Toxic River.

“This is a monumental and unprecedented environmental catastrophe. The TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) disaster is now estimated at 5.3 million cubic yards of coal ash, or almost twice as large as the 2.8 million cubic yards generated by the World Trade Center collapse. There are 200 gallons in a cubic yard, so that equates to about 1.06 billion gallons — almost 100 times the size of the Exxon Valdez spill of 11 million gallons in 1989.

It’s hard to comprehend the enormous size of this spill. TVA’s coal ash mountain was stacked over 50 feet high — as high as a 5 story building. If a dump truck can hold 20 cubic yards of dirt and ash, it will take 265,000 truck loads to haul away all the ash (they are taking it back to the power plant). If they fill one dump truck trip every 5 minutes and work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, it will take about 2.5 years to clean up the spill. TVA has been telling the media it will be cleaned up in about 6 weeks – this is a ludicrous claim.” Dave Cooper from A First Hand Account of the TVA Coal Ash Disaster in Kingston, TN

The remaining text is again from Mike Roselle’s Drowning in a Toxic River. “The coal trains will soon be bringing coal from Zeb Mountain to replenish the two piles that rise above everything on the site save the massive smoke stacks. This is the end of the line for the coal that is being ripped out of the Appalachian Mountains. From here, the clean invisible electrons will zip at dazzling speed through high tension wires to homes and factories across the country providing America with clean and cheap energy.

Except it isn’t clean and it sure isn’t cheap. Every day, plants like this one will consume 10,000 tons of coal and release three times that much carbon dioxide into the air, along with mercury, arsenic and lead. What they take out of the stacks will be concentrated in the ash, and that ash will eventually wind up in a river, and this is all that’s left of the mountain. All along the way, laws and regulations designed to prevent this disaster were ignored by the TVA managers. They spent millions lobbing against treating this ash as what it clearly is: toxic waste.

So what do we do about this? Can we afford to sit by and watch this for any longer? Can we afford to wait and let the environmental movement and the democrats try to solve this problem with more studies, more press conferences, and more e-mail? As I write this, news about another TVA coal ash spill, this one in Alabama, is burning up the news wires. More toxic waste has been released into the Tennessee River. I believe it is long past time for a non violent response to the ongoing criminal activity of the coal industry. It is time to shut them down.

On Sunday, the 25th of January, I will be organizing civil disobedience in East Tennessee. If you are able to be there with me, please come. If you can’t be there, contact me at roselle@lowbagger.org and find out other ways to offer support. For more information on the TVA ash spill and how you can get involved, go to www/unitedmountaindefense.org.” Mike Roselle from Drowning in a Toxic River.

More Resources:

http://current.com/users/JanforGore/all/0.htm

http://action.thisisreality.org/facts