It Was the Worst Industrial Disaster In US History, and We Learned Nothing

superboj writes "Forget Deepwater Horizon or Three Mile Island: The biggest industrial disaster in American history actually happened in 2008, when more than a billion gallons of coal sludge ran through the small town of Kingston, Tennessee. This story details how, five years later, nothing has been done to stop it happening again, thanks to energy industry lobbying, federal inaction, and secrecy imposed on Congress. 'It estimated that 140,000 pounds of arsenic had spilled into the Emory River, as well as huge quantities of mercury, aluminum and selenium. In fact, the single spill in Kingston released more chromium, lead, manganese, and nickel into the environment than the entire U.S. power industry spilled in 2007. ... Kingston, though, is by far the worst coal ash disaster that the industry has ever seen: 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash, containing at least 10 known toxins, were spilled. In fact, the event ... was even bigger than the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in April 2010, which spewed approximately 1 million cubic yards of oil into the Gulf of Mexico."

Comments

Re:There real reason ...

[gurps_npc]

So much easier for you to blame someone else (the media...) than to accept responsibility for you own apathy.

We had the huge recession, and the media was more interested in Obama's victory.

More importantly, the coal industry spent a lot of money and legal effort to prevent the media from getting photos.

I heard about it from the main stream media and remember being offended by how the industry was restricting coverage.

If you didn't, then perhaps you should accept responsibility for watching crappy media instead of blaming the media for being crappy.

That is, not all media is as incompetent as the ones you watch.

Re:Deepwater Horizon non sequitur

[ColaMan]

Ash = ash.
Coal ash is different from volcanic ash.

I used to do ash analysis on coal samples - coal ash is pushing 95% silica and alumina. The rest of the elemental analysis are trace elements, which can be made to sound super-scary when you scale up the quantities to thousands of tons. OMG! There's 100,000 pounds of this KILLER element released! Yes, but it's spread out evenly though 10 million tons of slurry over 100 square miles. You could probably strip-mine the top 5 feet of the same area in a city and find higher concentrations.

The biggest problem is not all the toxic waste, it's all the bloody inert sludge that's everywhere.