Toxic Tsunami

How TVA decides whether to purchase a particular property is an especially incendiary topic. The company immediately bought out people like Schean, whose homes were either ruined or damaged. Then it made offers on places that it judged would be affected by the recovery effort—all the dredging, hauling, and rebuilding. TVA has acquired more than 100 properties so far and may buy as many as 140 altogether. A lot of folks in the area, though, consider that far too limited. If property values were already sinking because of the economic crisis, living near an ecological calamity has sent them into free fall. "The community has a big X on it," says Grizzard, whose opinion of TVA has soured since those early days. "You couldn't give land away now." Considering how deep his roots run in Harriman, he wouldn't want to sell. But he thinks TVA should at least compensate him for the diminished value of his land—a request the company has ruled out. "How can they draw a line and say, 'Here is affected, and here isn't affected?' " asks Grizzard. To which Kilgore responds: "You have to draw the line somewhere."

Kilgore, understandably, has been concentrating on a far more urgent issue: how to mop up 1 billion gallons of coal ash. Roughly half of it gushed into the channel fronting Schean's property and into the nearby sloughs. The water is gone, replaced by an enormous expanse of ash that has been bulldozed and graded into a somewhat tidier plain. TVA's main priority: to keep the ash from fluttering into the wind and dispersing throughout eastern Tennessee. After trying early on to seed it with grass and cover it with hay, officials settled on spraying it with a fluorescent green substance called Flexterra (typically used for erosion control) that seals the ash in place. Workers reapply the material to a few acres per day, leaving behind neon stains that give the site an even more dystopian look.

Dealing with the other half of the ash presents a thornier problem. It poured into the main part of the Emory River, settling in layers as thick as 30 feet. Dredge it, and you risk sending a stream of toxins downriver. Leave it in place, and you allow fish and other aquatic species to feed on it and introduce those toxins into the food chain. Making matters worse, the fish were apparently already poisoned before the spill even happened. Shea Tuberty, a biologist at Appalachian State University whose research team sampled species from the river a few weeks after the disaster, found that their tissues had dangerously high levels of selenium. Since that element usually takes at least a month to accumulate in an organism, the contamination probably occurred much earlier. One possible explanation: according to a TVA document, the Kingston plant was discharging about three pounds of selenium per day as part of its routine operations. The spill probably added some 27 tons more, by Tuberty's estimates. He found one catfish whose gut was filled with ash and others whose gills were coated with it. The adults will likely survive, he says. It's their offspring he's worried about.

To get an idea of what could happen to them, ask A. Dennis Lemly. A researcher at Wake Forest University, he studied the impact of coal-ash contamination on fish in Belews Lake, N.C., in the 1970s. Selenium entered their reproductive systems and produced a host of defects in their young: bulging eyes, twisted spines, deformed heads. Out of 20 species in the lake, 19 were wiped out. Something similar could happen in Kingston, according to Lemly. "The system was already saturated" with selenium, he says. "If anything, the spill will increase levels above that threshold."

With no good options, TVA is just trying to dredge the ash out of the river as quickly and carefully as possible. But workers ran into difficulties from the start. The dredges vacuum up ash with long suction tubes, and at their tips are round cutter heads with claws that crunch up solids into a purée that can be piped out more easily. As the cleanup crews discovered, though, the ash slide swept up so much debris in its path that the riverbed is teeming with trees, rocks, and pipes. So the cutters regularly jam up, halting activity until a backhoe can be barged in to clear the clutter out of the way. "That slowed us down a lot," says Anda Ray, the TVA executive in charge of the recovery. By late April—four months after the spill—only about 26 million gallons, roughly 4 percent of the total that landed in the Emory, had been removed.

Around that time, Steve Scarborough sat on his office balcony, from which you can see the affected area in the distance, and explained why he was so worked up. It wasn't that he owned a few lots out there and now had little hope of unloading them any time soon. It was the glacial pace of the dredging operation. The rainy season was nowhere near over, and all it would take was one big downpour to power up the Emory and send it charging through all that ash, carrying the stuff miles downstream. "We're in a race against time to get [the ash] out of the channel before a flood moves it out of there," he said.

A few weeks later it began to rain—mostly showers, punctuated by periodic cloudbursts. On their own, they weren't much to worry about, but they persisted for about two weeks. Gradually, the ground became saturated. And right when the earth couldn't absorb much more, Mother Nature let loose. On the weekend of May 2, storms battered the region with three-and-a-half inches of rain in about 36 hours. By May 4 the Emory, which might flow at 1,000 cubic feet per second on a normal day, churned up to nearly 70,000 cubic feet per second—about four or five times the volume of the Colorado River as it charges through the Grand Canyon. "It was probably the fifth highest [rate] in as many years," says Ray.

The heightened flow generated chaos. One of the dredges tore loose and collided against an embankment. The torrent roiled up heaps of ash and propelled them past a weir (an underwater dam) that TVA had built downstream to try to keep the muck in place. That May 4 morning, one of Scarborough's friends called him in tears. "You've got to come out and look at this," said the friend, who lives on the Emory about a mile below the spill. When Scarborough arrived, he went out to the guy's dock. The river looked like a tar pit—dark gray and swirling with sludge. "Oh, my God," he thought. It was worse than even he had imagined. According to bathymetry studies conducted afterward, millions of gallons of ash were dislodged and sent downriver. "Everything that we were afraid was going to happen, happened," says Scarborough.

As TVA continues to grapple with the cleanup, Schean is working through his own form of recovery. His cream-colored cottage with red trim, his beloved pond where he cast lines at sunset, his plans to build a second deck overlooking the water—"all of it got swept away," he says. He has few complaints about TVA. In settlement talks "they told me, 'Come up with a figure,' and I did," he says. "They gave me what I asked for" (a number he can't disclose, under the terms of the agreement). He and Flinn bought a brand-new house on the other end of Swan Pond Circle Road that's double the size of the old place. But the view—not much more than a green field—is nothing like that pond.

One recent afternoon, the couple visited the site of their old home. Where it once stood, there are now a couple of yellow backhoes and a blue outhouse. Behind that, the ash stretches out toward the ragged remains of the impoundment. And beyond that, in the shadow of the smokestacks, lies an old soccer field that's gradually filling up with the dredged ash from the river (TVA has started shipping it by rail to a landfill in Alabama). Schean recalled Kilgore's words in the aftermath of the spill: "We're going to make it whole," the CEO had said. "I think they will," said Schean, as he gazed out at all that gray. But the look on his face said otherwise.

© 2009