Toxic Tsunami

At about 1 a.m. last Dec. 22, James Schean awoke with a start. He heard what sounded like a furious thunderclap and a staccato of snapping trees. Then his house shuddered and heaved. Swept up by some mighty force, it tore clear of its foundation and rumbled off like a derailed freight car. "I could hear everything breaking," he says, "the rafters cracking, Sheetrock falling off, the furniture getting twisted and moved, all the pictures falling off the walls, glass breaking everywhere." Amid the upheaval, the power had been knocked out. He groped frantically in the dark for his pants, coat, and work boots, which he'd laid out beside his bed, and struggled to get them on. When the house finally stopped moving, everything went silent.

As he headed for the bedroom door, Schean realized he was ankle-deep in some kind of mud, thick and viscous like quicksand. All he could think about was his fiancée, Crystell Flinn, and their daughter, Heather Schean, who had come to visit. He called out their names, but heard nothing. He searched for them, feeling his way through the house and bumping up against walls and furniture in places they shouldn't have been. Still unable to find his family, he concluded (correctly) that Flinn had driven Heather home after he'd gone to sleep at 10 p.m. Now he just wanted to escape before the whole place collapsed. He tried the front door, but it was jammed shut. So he worked his way to the living room, where he jumped on a desk, kicked out the window above it, and wriggled through. An embankment that used to be across the road was now staring him in the face. Hearing people at the top of the hill calling to him, he clambered toward them, to safety. (When he later returned to his house, he found that the ceiling over his bed had caved in.)

As Schean soon learned, the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston Fossil Plant had experienced a catastrophic failure. He knew the place well. He'd been working there as a boilermaker for two years, and its towering twin stacks loomed over his waterfront property on Swan Pond Circle Road in Harriman, Tenn. Just across the pond where he and Flinn fished for bass, bluegill, and crappie sat a colossal 80-acre mound filled with fly ash, one of the waste products left over from burning coal for electricity.

On that December night, the dike surrounding the mound collapsed, unleashing a tsunami that coated 300 acres of gorgeous countryside and waterways with 1 billion gallons of gray sludge. The wall of ash surged with such ferocity that it destroyed three homes, including Schean's, which it carried about 40 feet and slammed against that embankment. The wave crumpled docks and wiped out roads and railroad tracks. It swallowed a small island, chewed up poplars and pines, and completely choked two sloughs where deer used to water. Miraculously, no one died; the breach occurred on one of the coldest nights of the year, when everyone was buttoned up indoors. But the devastation was overwhelming. When the ash finally settled, it looked "like the surface of the moon, all gray and craters and mounds," says Janice James, who owned one of the other destroyed homes and also managed to escape. "It was the saddest thing I've ever seen."

Yet the Kingston disaster had only begun to wreak its havoc. The largest industrial spill in U.S. history, it has created an environmental and engineering nightmare. The cleanup effort, which the Environmental Protection Agency is overseeing, could cost as much as $1 billion (though estimates continue to climb) and take years to complete. Meanwhile, the released ash—which is packed with toxins like arsenic, lead, and selenium—threatens to poison the air and water. Congressional committees are investigating the failure, some lawmakers are calling for greater regulation of utilities, and the EPA is probing about 400 other facilities across the country that store ash in similar ways. Yet the debacle has had another, potentially more far-reaching, impact: it has displayed in the most graphic manner imaginable just how dirty coal is. At a time when seemingly everyone from President Barack Obama on down is talking about "clean coal," the spill showed it's anything but. "Kingston opened people's eyes," says Lisa Evans of Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental-law firm. "Clean coal is an impossibility."

Growing up in the Kingston area in the 1950s, Peggy Blanchard heard regularly about the virtues of coal and the Tennessee Valley Authority's mission to harness it for power. "The story I always heard," she says, "was that TVA provided jobs and electricity and flood control all throughout Appalachia, that that changed people's lives and made this a productive area." When TVA completed the Kingston plant in 1955, it was seen as a blessing. The smokestacks may have been unsightly, but the surrounding area was nevertheless stunning. Along Swan Pond Circle—a horseshoe-shaped road on a peninsula ringed by the Emory River—Blanchard would marvel at the rich variety of birds: cardinals, robins, great blue herons. Come April, she says, "you'd see beautiful colors reflected in the water, the tender green of spring leaves and redbud and dogwood."

Granted, the soot released from the plant could be unpleasant. It would drift down onto clothes left out to dry and would blanket vehicles so thickly that TVA used to provide free car washes. But over the years, as clean-air laws and regulations tightened, the utility cleaned up the emissions from the smokestacks. It installed scrubbers to filter out sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, which contribute to acid rain. And it added devices called electrostatic precipitators to trap fly ash, which is so fine that it would otherwise shoot out through the flues, float into the atmosphere, and potentially lodge itself in people's lungs.

But all that sequestered fly ash has to go somewhere. Many plants dispose of it using a "dry" method, piping it into storage silos and then trucking it off to landfills. More, like the Kingston facility, opt for the cheaper "wet" method, which environmentalists consider far worse. It involves mixing the ash with water and sluicing it into a collection pond. From there, the ash is dredged and dumped in an impoundment, which usually lacks a protective liner, meaning that over time all those toxins could leach into the groundwater or nearby streams. According to a 2007 EPA study, residents living near such unlined ash ponds face heightened cancer risks from drinking water polluted by arsenic, as well as increased chances of lung, liver, and other organ damage from metals like cadmium and cobalt. In a separate report that same year, the EPA documented 67 contaminated sites in 23 states where coal-combustion waste—including fly ash and bottom ash, the stuff left over in the boilers—contaminated the water.