Toxic Tsunami

Coal-industry groups dispute the depiction of fly ash as inherently noxious. "If coal ash is not managed appropriately, it can produce adverse effects," says Jim Roewer, executive director of the Utility Solid Waste Activities Group, a lobbying organization. But "we believe coal ash can be safely managed." Not only that, he notes, plenty of fly ash is repurposed for "beneficial uses," including as a replacement for Portland cement in concrete. Environmental groups, however, argue that there's no getting around the fact that fly ash is filthy. And the more utilities scrub the air emerging from the stacks, the filthier the ash gets. Basically, "you're transfering the problem from the air to the ground," says Jeffrey Stant of the Environmental Integrity Project, which advocates for stricter coal-ash regulations.

In the wake of the Kingston spill, the fight over how to regulate the 129 million tons of coal-combustion waste produced in the U.S. each year has intensified. The EPA came close to regulating it as a hazardous waste in 2000, during the final months of the Clinton administration—a decision that would almost certainly have mandated dry storage of ash in double-lined landfills. But after coal lobbyists howled in protest, the EPA backed off, deciding to regulate it as a nonhazardous waste instead—the option favored by pro–coal lobbying groups like Roewer's. The agency never followed through on that determination, though. And once the Bush administration came to power, all movement on the issue ceased, thereby preserving the status quo: a patchwork of inconsistent state regulations that environmental groups consider, for the most part, anemic (though Roewer would dispute that).

Under Obama's new EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson, the calculus has now changed. In March she announced that the agency will propose new rules by the end of the year, and her staff has made clear that all options, including regulation of coal ash as a hazardous waste, are back on the table. The EPA is also scrutinizing ash piles across the country. Of the 400 or so sites similar to Kingston's, the agency identified 44 that pose a "high hazard"—meaning that if they fail, they present a lethal threat to nearby communities. At first, the EPA declined to make the list public, citing national-security concerns raised by the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Homeland Security. But after Sen. Barbara Boxer, chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, raised a stink, the agency released the list last month. It catalogued ash dumps in 10 states, including Arizona, Kentucky, and North Carolina. Though no TVA sites were named, the company announced this week that four of its facilities—two in Tennessee (not including Kingston) and two in Alabama—should have been labeled "high hazard."

Under tighter controls, the Kingston impoundment may never have reached the proportions it did. Blanchard remembers when the spot where the mound rose up was still an actual pond. Over the years, she watched as TVA walled the area off and gradually filled it in. The pile grew 10 feet high, then 20, then 30—fed by more than 1,000 tons of fly ash per day when all the boilers were burning. Occasionally, Blanchard would ask herself: "How high are they going to build that?" By last year the pile had reached 60 feet, sculpted into a massive tiered plateau held back by a dike made of rolled earth and … more ash. In the wee hours of Dec. 22, the pressure of all that waste—five decades' worth—simply became too much to bear. A root cause analysis released last month cited a number of potential reasons for the failure, including the height of the pond, the high water content of the ash, and the construction of the sloping dikes.

In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, TVA strived to reassure the surrounding community. "We're going to clean it up right," vowed CEO Tom Kilgore. "We're going to make it whole" and compensate affected residents. Among the many who trusted him was Tom Grizzard, whose family has owned land in the Swan Pond area since 1802. "TVA has been good to our community," he says. Apart from delivering jobs and cheap electricity, it donated computers to schools, sponsored local charities, and built parks and playing fields.

But in the months since, that trust has steadily eroded. Documents surfaced showing that the ash pond suffered repeated failures over the years and that TVA responded with what appeared to be patch-up jobs. In 2003, for instance, dredging had to be halted because of a leak in the dike. Among the eight solutions that TVA considered, according to one of its reports, was converting to a dry-ash collection system, which would have cost $25 million. In a table listing the pros and cons of that proposal, the former included "Global Fix" and "Benefit to Marketing???" while the latter cited "High Cost." In the end, TVA chose the cheapest option: constructing a new dredge cell (a subdivision of the pond) for $480,000, even though it listed under cons that this would be a "Short Life/Term Fix." Asked by NEWSWEEK whether it might not have been wiser to pay $25 million in 2003 to guard against the potentially billion-dollar cleanup TVA now faces, Kilgore replied: "In 20/20 hindsight, we ask ourselves that question too."

TVA has fanned suspicions further by seeming to downplay the dangers of the released ash. Early on, a TVA spokesman declared that the material "does have some heavy metals within it, but it's not toxic or anything." The utility says that all its air, water, and soil samples have fallen within environmental standards, with only a handful of exceptions—a spike in arsenic in the river water near the spill and some high thallium readings in a few soil tests. Yet a number of scientists and environmental groups have released more-worrisome findings—for example, elevated levels of not just arsenic, but barium, cadmium, lead, and selenium in water at the spill site. All of which has prompted arcane debates over sampling methodologies, leaving everyone who's not a chemist utterly confused—and scared.

Charlotte Phillips, for one, doesn't know what to think. Her daughter, Autumn, 6, had always been a healthy girl, never battling more than a runny nose or pinkeye. But a few days after the disaster, which occurred a couple miles down the road, Autumn developed a dry hack and suffered persistent vomiting bouts. Her condition worsened in subsequent weeks, prompting multiple trips to the emergency room, the pediatrician, a gastroenterologist, and a pulmonologist—roughly $12,000 worth of treatment and counting. Eventually, Autumn was diagnosed with asthma and now uses an inhaler. Her doctors think the spill—either ash released into the air or dust kicked up by the hundreds of dump trucks working on the cleanup—might have triggered it. No one can say for sure. But Phillips says she certainly didn't get any answers from TVA. She visited the company's outreach center in town at least 10 times to file medical claims and explore the possibility of TVA buying her house so she could move Autumn out of the Swan Pond area. But the company maintained that she wasn't entitled to such compensation. (She has since joined one of the seven lawsuits against the utility.)