Illnesses emerge in Tennessee town after toxic coal ash spill

By Stephanie Smith, CNN Medical Producer HARRIMAN, Tennessee (CNN) — Pamela Hampton stands at the kitchen sink, her gaze trained out of the window of her family’s small hillside home. The disaster site is not visible from where she stands, but she knows it is there, down the hill, around a short stretch of highway, less than a mile away. Six months after the largest industrial spill in U.S. history, Hampton, her husband, Charles, and their three young children say they still do not feel comfortable going outside. “Everything here is changed,” Hampton said, her eyes glistening. “[The landscape] reminds me of what you see on the moon. It breaks my heart.” A few hours before dawn on December 22, the walls of a dam holding back billions of gallons of coal ash waste trembled and, finally, crumbled. The waste, a toxic soup containing ash left over from burning coal, which is then mixed with water, was stored at the Tennessee Valley Authority coal power plant in neighboring Kingston, Tennessee. On that cold morning, 1.1 billion gallons of coal ash sludge barreled through this community, covering 300 acres. Sarah McCoin, who lives about a mile from the spill site, awoke to a community in shambles: homes and trees uprooted and a once-lush, green landscape turned to sludge. “It makes you want to cry, knowing what has been lost,” McCoin said. “I want my life back.” Residents are afraid of the chemicals that were released into the environment: arsenic, selenium, lead and radioactive materials including chromium and barium. “It’s like dumping the periodic table into everyone’s drinking water,” said Anna George, a scientist with the Tennessee Aquarium Research Institute who has for months been testing the waters and fish near the spill site. …