Tennessee cleanup sends coal ash, anxiety, to Alabama site
By Renee Schoof | McClatchy Newspapers UNIONTOWN, Ala. — When the mound of wet coal ash began to rise in the landfill across the road from her pretty yellow house with the peonies and roses in the front yard, Ruby Holmes felt overpowered by a horrible smell. A few doors down, Mary Williams, a retired Avon sales office manager, shut her windows and kept the air filters running and still couldn’t sleep. She was nauseated. Her eyes, nose and throat burned, and her husband, a retired Greyhound driver, had trouble breathing. “For a while, it was like we were just cast out and it didn’t matter about people living (with) that crap,” Williams said. Uniontown’s Arrowhead Landfill so far has taken in 1.8 million tons of coal ash from one of the nation’s biggest environmental disasters, the December 2008 spill from a coal ash pond at a Tennessee Valley Authority power plant in Kingston, Tenn. Trains bring about 10,000 tons a day. The transfer of the ash 327 miles from Tennessee to the mostly black community of Uniontown is partly a story about how people are faring at the receiving end. Federal environmental justice policy requires that low-income and minority communities aren’t burdened with outsized environmental risks. … The U.S. produces about 130 million tons of coal ash a year, one of its largest kind of waste, according to the EPA. In hundreds of places around the country, coal ash is stored in lagoons near power plants or in unlined landfills and abandoned quarries. … Booker T. Gipson, whose daughter lives beside the landfill with her children, said: “Everybody says it’s not harmful. But if it was harmful to the people in Kingston, I want to know in a small location like Uniontown why it’s not harmful to us.” “My biggest concern is I’ve got 16 cows over there and four horses,” he said. Animals in nearby pastures drink from creeks that flow near the landfill. John Wathen, an investigator for Ludder, photographed the site from the air and sampled water nearby. He said he took two water samples with high arsenic levels in the ditch across from the Williamses’ home, and another from a water-treatment plant where wastewater from the landfill was taken. He also took a photograph that showed workers hosing out ash-covered railcars for the return trip to Tennessee. Wathen said that water runs to a creek alongside the tracks. “What’s happening right now is simply a transfer of the disaster from Kingston, Tennessee, to Perry County, Alabama,” Wathen said. …
