It should be pretty obvious by now that we're not going to let this TVA coal sludge disaster story go silently into the night (as TVA is surely hoping we and the media masses will).  Why should you keep paying attention?  Because much of the story has yet to be told.  We don't know yet how badly the local rivers are polluted, though we do know that the EPA's original claims of safety were pretty quickly called into question by independent testing.  We don't know yet how TVA plans to clean up after itself, though we do know they're going to try really hard to do as little as possible. 

So the story needs to be followed. 

For a great recap, over on Switchboard, Rob Perks wrote a pretty thorough summary of the situation earlier today.  It starts:

Imagine an Olympic size swimming pool brimming with highly toxic waste.  Now imagine over 1,600 such sludge-filled pools -- or about a billion gallons.  That's how much liquified coal waste -- "fly ash" -- broke through an earthen dike at a Tennessee Valley Authority power plant near Kingston, Tenn. just before midnight on Dec. 22, 2008 and flooded downstream communities.  Residents living near and along the Tennessee River (the drinking water source for millions of people in and around Chattanooga) were hit by a slow-motion, muddy 6-foot-high tsunami of nasty black coal waste that covered 400 acres.

The TVA spill is more than 40 times larger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill.  Instead of oil covering pristine beaches, fly ash -- a byproduct of the coal-burning process containing mercury and dangerous heavy metals such as lead and arsenic, among many other potentially toxic and radioactive materials -- is now contaminating the river and its tribuataries, along with well water, wetlands, ponds, streambanks, fields, forests, playgrounds, backyards, houses and other property

 
It's as good a "bird's eye" summary of what's happened in Tennessee as you'll find anywhere, and definitely worth reading the whole piece. 

Here on Greenlight, we've made some great connections with folks down in Kingston and Harriman who are providing some very detailed reporting from the ground.  Last week, Dave Cooper reported on preliminary independent water tests done by United Mountain Defense and Appalachian Voices that revealed heavy metals like arsenic in concentrations well above levels deemed safe for consumption by the EPA.  And earlier today, Chris Irwin of United Mountain Defense shared a couple of videotaped interviews with local residents about what happened on their land and to their homes. 

For a click glimpse of the new landscape, check out this slideshow, also shared with us by United Mountain Defense: 

The story of this TVA and the residents of Harriman is essential.  It encapsulates perfectly the conflict between Big Coal and  American citizens.  TVA will try to make this story go away, to avoid an expensive clean-up, to disregard the health and well-being of the community it has poisoned, and to keep perpetuating the clean coal myth.  We will keep the spotlight on the story, helping the people living through this disaster tell their story.