Look back | Tennessee coal ash disaster; 5 years, $1 billion later

Editor's Note: This story was originaly published in the Dec. 22, 2013 edition of The Courier-Journal.

KINGSTON, Tenn -- Witnesses still recall with horror the sights, sounds and smells of the Tennessee Valley Authority's power plant disaster here five years ago, when a mountain of toxic coal ash broke loose in the middle of a frozen night to bury hundreds of acres and devastate a community.

"It was not a spill," said Roane County resident Steve Scarborough. "It was a geologic event. People that lived right there looked out their windows and saw a forest moving by."

Miraculously, nobody was injured when 5.4 million cubic yards of piled, sodden ash broke loose on Dec. 22, 2008. But the slide, which destroyed three homes, damaged dozens of others, and poured into two tributaries of the Tennessee River, has required a $1 billion cleanup, with $200 million more to go.

That bill will be paid by the 9 million residents of the Tennessee Valley — including more than a quarter of a million households in Central and Western Kentucky — at the rate of 69 cents per month per person through 2024.

The catastrophic slide also sparked a national debate that's still unresolved over how to manage one of the nation's largest sources of industrial waste — which contains arsenic, lead, mercury and other metals that can contaminate groundwater, lakes and rivers, and cause cancer and other health and environmental problems.

After the Kingston disaster, newly appointed Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson, who has since left her post, promised the nation's first federal regulations to ensure environmentally safe and structurally sound coal-burning waste storage.

But, so far, the EPA has failed to enact a single regulation — even as the agency has documented an increasing number of ash sites that have polluted the environment.

In 2000, the EPA had counted 50 sites where groundwater or surface water had been contaminated by coal ash. The most current number of these so-called "damage cases" is now more than 130.

Two are in Indiana, including Duke Energy's Gibson plant near Princeton, where ponds contaminated a wildlife sanctuary for endangered birds and the drinking water of a neighboring community.

EPA has also identified three potential cases in Kentucky, including at LG&E's Mill Creek power plant in Louisville, though R. Bruce Scott, commissioner of the Kentucky Department of Environmental Protection, said, "We are not aware of any off-site migration that has resulted in any impacts."

The search for solutions is particularly crucial in Kentucky and Indiana, which are among the nation's leaders in producing coal-burning waste such as bottom ash, fly ash and scrubber sludge.

Kentucky ranked second behind Texas last year, churning out more than 10 million tons of coal-burning waste, according to U.S. Energy Information Agency statistics analyzed by Earthjustice, a national nonprofit law firm based in San Francisco. Indiana ranked sixth at 7.4 million tons.

The impact of a mountain of coal ash breaking loose reinforces the urgency of the situation to people like Donna Lisenby, who remembers how the 2008 slide pushed ash several miles up Tennessee's Emory River.

The Waterkeeper Alliance environmental advocate recalls the eerie silence and rotten-egg smell of sulfur and dead fish, as she canoed toward ground zero on a fact-finding mission just days after the spill.

"The first thing we encountered were these floating rafts of white ash, coating the river," she said. As they got closer, she said, "We were paddling between these giant ... ashbergs of coal waste, in what was once the deep-water navigable channel of the Emory River."

EPA gridlock

What has been in place to regulate coal-ash ponds is a hodgepodge of state regulations. Some are more protective than others, but often they fail to require even basic protections such as ash pond liners to protect groundwater.

Environmental groups have found regulations in Indiana and Kentucky particularly lacking. They note that Kentucky, for example, does not require groundwater monitoring at ash ponds.

And without federal rules, utilities were under no obligation to follow the EPA's safety inspection recommendations.

Even so, Scott argues that Kentucky's rules are working, as evidenced by a lack of documented environmental problems from coal ash in Kentucky and confirmation of ash-contaminated groundwater leaving utility properties.

"We clearly agree additional measures ought to be put in place," he said, adding that if the EPA or Congress finalizes new regulations, "Kentucky will move to adopt those requirements in our statutes and regulations."

The EPA proposed two possible rules in 2010, one that would treat the waste as hazardous, and another that would consider it solid waste, with less stringent requirements.

Several hearings were held across the country, including one in Louisville on Sept. 28, 2010, that drew 350 people to the Seelbach Hilton hotel.

Utility and industry representatives attending that hearing argued that a hazardous-waste designation would be too costly and stifle recycling. But environmentalists called for full protection, and outside the hearing, Greenpeace activists scaled the front of the hotel, unfurling a banner that read, "protect people, not polluters" and "quit coal," before being arrested.

Rallies for and against the coal industry were held nearby.

Before the TVA disaster, EPA didn't even know for sure how many ash landfills and ash ponds existed. It counted 618 landfills and ponds in 2000, but after the spill, a detailed survey found more than 1,000 ponds and 437 landfills containing coal ash.

"Kingston was a watershed event that should have brought quick federal controls on the disposal of this waste," said Lisa Evans, a Boston attorney with Earthjustice. "Instead, it brought on widespread paralysis at the EPA and within the (Obama) administration. It's as if Hurricane Katrina happened, and they didn't fix the levees."

For its part, the EPA said it is reviewing 450,000 comments submitted during the rule-making process. "EPA will finalize the rule pending a full evaluation of all the information and comments received," said an agency statement provided to the The Courier-Journal.

Environmentalists are forcing the issue with a lawsuit, and a recent U.S. District Court decision requires the EPA to submit a schedule for agency action by Dec. 29.

Meanwhile, a bill authored by Rep. David B. McKinley, R-W.Va., that would prevent a hazardous-waste designation by the EPA and put states essentially in charge of coal ash regulations passed the House of Representatives in July.

Kentucky Reps. Ed Whitfield, Hal Rogers, Brett Guthrie, Andy Barr and Thomas Massie, all Republicans, voted for the bill.

Rep. Todd Young, R-Ind., also voted for the bill. Louisville Rep. John Yarmuth, D-3rd District, voted against it.

Industry also favors the bill. It would establish "a baseline" of protection, and "EPA would have backstop authority," said Thomas Adams, executive director of the American Coal Ash Association, whose members include utilities and other businesses.

"Unfortunately, the (threat) of a policy of hazardous waste regulations has been very harmful to our members," by discouraging recycling, he added.

Environmentalists disagree. Evans, of Earthjustice, said the bill would only "preserve the status quo."

And the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service last summer found that it would largely remove the EPA from regulating coal ash and concluded it would not establish a "minimum standard of federal protection."

The bill faces an uncertain future in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

It is opposed by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., the chair of the Energy and Environment Committee, who has promised to "oppose this bill at every turn, because if it became law, coal ash would continue to pose a grave threat to public health and safety."

Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader from Louisville, supports the legislation and was a co-sponsor of the Senate version in the last Congress, said a spokesman, Rob Steurer.

Cleaning up Kingston

At Kingston, TVA is less than a year away from wrapping up a cleanup overseen by EPA.

At the beginning, "It looked like, 'Oh my God, are we are we ever going to get done with this?'" said EPA project engineer Craig Zeller. "But we have accomplished a great deal."

TVA shipped 3.5 million cubic yards of ash dredged from the water to a landfill in Alabama. It constructed a concrete underground wall reaching as deep as 70 feet around the perimeter of the failed impoundment, corralling some 18 million cubic yards of ash that would be forever entombed there.

Crews are installing a plastic, clay and soil cap to prevent rain from washing through the ash and releasing its pollution.

After completing a $40million ecological study, EPA let TVA leave a half-million cubic yards of ash in the Emory and Clinch rivers. It was considered too difficult and expensive to remove without disturbing radioactive elements that have been released into the rivers from the U.S. Department of Energy's nearby Oak Ridge nuclear reservation.

In about 10 or 15 years, enough river sediment will blanket the bottom to encase the ash and effectively meet environmental cleanup goals, Zeller said.

But TVA must monitor the area for 30 years, and it is adding new recreational facilities.

TVA pledged five years ago that it would make the area better than it was before the spill, said Duncan Mansfield, an agency spokesman.

"We have stood firm in our commitment," said Bob Deacy, a TVA senior vice president.

Scarborough, the Roane County resident who is also a former chairman of the Tennessee Conservation Commission, said TVA has done a good job with cleanup.

"We are not irreparably damaged and forever harmed," he said. "It's come back a long way. Environmentally, we are better than we have been."

The company also decided to phase out wet storage of ash at all of its 11 power plants, including two in Kentucky, at a cost of $2billion.

In addition, TVA purchased more than 180 properties covering about 960 acres and settled more than 200 other claims from area residents, he said.

A lawsuit involving several hundred other claims is working its way through the legal system. Scarborough is among the plaintiffs. He said he owns waterfront property nearby that he hasn't been able to sell.

Environmental advocates say the jury is still out on the disaster's long-term environmental implications.

And Scarborough said some wounds may never heal.

"TVA has shattered Kingston's and Roane County's reputation," he said. "We are never going to get that back."

Reach reporter James Bruggers at (502) 582-4645 or on Twitter @jbruggers.