The 2008 coal ash disaster in Kingston, Tennessee

https://oxfordamerican.org/oa-now/the-toxic-wave-that-swallowed-a-tennessee-town

by awnird • 1 year ago

107 65 1 year ago

Without spoilers...what a disappointing article. This feels like it should have been a long read, and yet, the article ends just as it started, with no explanation, investigation, or conclusion.

tomrod• 1 year ago

It's a long form, unclassified advertisement for a book mentioned at the end. Decently written if a little too reliant on cliffhangers.

animal_spirits• 1 year ago

This was recently an episode topic on the podcast 99% Invisible. It brought up a lot of interesting questions for me mostly about the systemic differences between public and private operations and pros&cons on both. Plainly shown TVA has been abysmal after it was forced to operate as a profit motivated institution. Though it was still federally owned it received nearly total immunity from the mishaps it caused through sovereign immunity laws. What is the check on disasters like this happening again? Will more regulation prevent it? The EPA's regulations incentivized it to further endanger workers during the cleanup. It needs to either be fully privately owned (still regulated) or fully federally owned and funded.

- https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/613-valley-so-low/

jillesvangurp2• 1 year ago

Coal plants being dirty, toxic, and generally not good for the health of nearby populations isn't exactly new information of course. But they were important for energy generation for a long time.

That's the reason the resulting pollution and toxic waste is tolerated. Coal contains all sorts of stuff besides organic matter. When you burn it, the non organic stuff remains. It will typically contain metals, heavy metals, and other stuff that isn't good for you. That's also the reason coal smog isn't good for people. You don't want that stuff in your lungs. It's similarly bad as smoking is.

The ash needs to go somewhere and the standard practice with a lot of coal plants has been to just dump it outside, try to contain it with some infrastructure, and not worry too much about it. Nobody really cared. Except now a lot of these plants are going out of business and the the toxic waste remains. And most of these plants needed cooling water so they tend to be close to water ways. So, there's that.

Earw0rm• 1 year ago

How does domestic coal ash compare to this stuff?

Do the higher temperatures and pressures in power station liberate more of the harmful stuff, or is it basically as bad?

UK homes were commonly coal heated as late as the 1980s, a few still are. Its contribution to air pollution was well-understood, but this has got me wondering about ash exposure, as people would routinely handle the stuff with basically nothing in terms of protective gear.

wqaatwt4• 1 year ago

That's the reason the resulting pollution and toxic waste is tolerated

Yet nuclear despite inherently being much less harmful weren’t historically that well tolerated.

myrmidon9• 1 year ago

The ash needs to go somewhere and the standard practice with a lot of coal plants has been to just dump it outside, try to contain it with some infrastructure, and not worry too much about it.

More precisely: The standard EPA recommended practice would have been to dump the dried fly ash in a lined landfill (to prevent poisoning groundwater). This is also what whas done in the cleanup.

Allowing the disaster to occur was a clear case of insufficient regulations combined with the sort of cost-saving sloppiness that is to be expected from private companies.

Those regulations were amended and risks at other potential disaster sites were mitigated (which cost billions), finishing in 2022.

I'd like to note here that muntzing government regulations in a style that Musk advocates for ("you can always reinstate some regulations later if you run into problems") is not only irresponsible, but also impractical; it takes decades to implement regulatory changes and switching is very expensive.

wat10000• 1 year ago

That's one reason the resulting pollution and waste is tolerated. Another big reason is that the harms are diffuse and often hard to see. If coal power plant operators had to actually pay for the harms they produce, coal would have started phasing out much earlier and faster.

latchkey• 1 year ago

I am guessing this is coming up now due to the recent changes in regulations.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43357447

"Prioritizing coal ash program to expedite state permit reviews and update coal ash regulations (CCR Rule)"

DecentShoes• 1 year ago

If you want me to read your article, don't cover it with a stupid popup in the middle of the screen. I closed the page as soon as I saw that.

wglb• 1 year ago

Wikipedia article with more detail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...

hinkley• 1 year ago

Man that still feels like it was ten years ago. 17, really?

Carrok• 1 year ago

This article has some great writing overall, but ends with this

How could this happen? Ansol wondered.

I wish it had dug into this. These sort of things don't just happen. There must be accountability, and journalists are who are supposed to start that process. This was clearly an environmental travesty of monumental proportions. How do we grapple with the fact this sort of thing is apparently just allowed to continue happening?

alibarber• 1 year ago

It's an extract from a book - which I would hope digs into it.

leetrout• 1 year ago

Related I lived through a large coal slurry spill in 2000 in Eastern KY.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_County_coal_slurry_sp...

jollyllama• 1 year ago

Another lawsuit was filed in Federal Court by 15 Beaver County, Pennsylvania residents and 36 West Virginia residents who accused FirstEnergy of contaminating groundwater and leaking hazardous waste, including arsenic, sulfates, sodium, calcium, magnesium and chloride[2] into local waterways and groundwater systems.

hannob• 1 year ago

Oh, I remember that one.

At the time, the construction of new coal-fired power plants was a controversial topic in many locations in Germany. (Around 30 new coal power plants were planned at times. Some were stopped, but 10 of them were actually build, which is bad enough.) I also tried to raise awareness about this incident in Tennessee, trying to have a look at the environmental issues of coal on a more international level. But it didn't generate much interest.

sierra1011• 1 year ago

Terrifying that this could happen as recently as 2008 and, I'm sure, with better understanding of potential consequences.

In 1966, something similar (although with a mining waste dump, instead of ash) happened in Aberfan, Wales (in the UK) with a more tragic outcome[1].

The question should be whether this occurred due to ignorance or ignoring the lessons of history, which rhymes if not repeats.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster

hydrogen7800• 1 year ago

This was featured in an episode of The Crown [0]. I had never heard of it and didn't know what the episode was going to be about. I think they did a good job conveying the magnitude of the tragedy.

[0]https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/nov/17/televis...

mrlonglong• 1 year ago

You were lucky. We in the UK had this back in 1966.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster

twic• 1 year ago

I've heard of a few of these in the US, but have not heard of any in the UK, where we also burned a lot of coal. Did we manage the ash differently? I have a vague idea that we have a different kind of coal, which produces less ash.

I couldn't find anything conclusive, but found this from 2015:

Storage, whether in lagoons, silos or landfills, rather than re-use, is the default solution for coal ash management in most countries. The UK’s Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) estimates that, of the eight million tonnes of coal ash produced in the country each year, half is re-used, while over 300 million tonnes have been stored in lagoons or silos since the 1950s. [...] The American Coal Ash Association (ACAA) reports on US coal ash production and use each year. In 2013, 53 million tonnes of coal ash were generated, of which 23 million tonnes were re-used. Of the unused portion, the EPA says 36 per cent was stored in landfills, and 21 per cent in wet storage facilities. [...] Some countries are doing better, though: for example, the Netherlands recycles 100 per cent of its coal ash because landfill is not allowed in the country. In Germany, where around 10 million tonnes of coal ash are produced per year, around 97 per cent is re-used, with the rest stored only on a temporary basis. According to the European Coal Combustion Products Association (Ecoba), of the 48 million tonnes of coal ash produced in 15 EU countries in 2010 (the latest available figures), 13.8 million tonnes were re-used.

https://www.powerengineeringint.com/coal-fired/managing-coal...

The "re-use" is by processing it into materials which can be used for various construction and materials manufacturing processes. There's lots of other fascinating details about coal ash in there. Wikipedia is pretty good too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_combustion_products

throwaway519• 1 year ago

The UK had the Aberfan disaster that led to better awareness and enforcement of above-ground tip management be it mine or combusted slag or ash.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster

jamiescoop2• 1 year ago

https://tennesseelookout.com/2022/04/12/osha-officials-admit...

jamiescoop2• 1 year ago

https://tennesseelookout.com/2022/04/12/osha-officials-admit... https://tennesseelookout.com/2023/05/23/jacobs-engineering-s... These stories should give you the info you need to understand what happened to the Kingston workers. I spent years as an investigative journalist revealing this travesty through dozens of stories.

fransje262• 1 year ago

Oh. The picture at the top of the second article, with the cars for scale, really drives home how huge that storage hill was.

Thank you for sharing those articles.

pinko• 1 year ago

Thank you for your work on this.

sourtrident• 1 year ago

Feels like disasters like this aren't just random accidents - they're symptoms of slowly ignoring the cracks until everything breaks open. Makes you wonder what else we're overlooking right now that's quietly falling apart around us.

pmlnr• 1 year ago

We had a high-PH red mud slurry disaster in Hungary 15 years ago: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajka_alumina_plant_accident

The 2008 coal ash disaster in Kingston, Tennessee

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