January 21

Today volunteers for United Mountain Defense traveled to Harriman, TN for a media messaging workshop. There were a few local residents who attended the media training. It was a very effective session where the residents crafted their message for the press conference and worked on their sound bites.

United Mountain Defense volunteers made follow up phone calls to the media that received press releases about the citizen's press conference. We also called other media outlets that were not on the email list. 

January 22

Today started out as we facilitated an interview between a community member and GQ magazine. As we were driving up to the road block on South Swan Pond Rd we were halted even though we had a community resident pass. The TVA police officers questioned us about our intentions for driving onto the public road. Of course the rolling video camera may have had some impact on the situation. Our license plate was radioed in and we were allowed to enter this distressed community. For the most part the corporate media has not reported the stories of many of the residents living on this portion of Swan Pond Rd because they don't have coal fly ash in their front yards though they did drink tap water impacted by the coal ash disaster for nearly 10 days.

This particular resident was more than happy to share her story about how she got blisters on the roof of her mouth on Dec 24, 2008 after boiling and drinking the tap water and cooking Christmas Eve dinner with it. She was very happy to receive the 10 gallons of bottled water we delivered for her today.

After the interview United Mountain Defense volunteers headed to the citizen's press
conference at the Harriman community center. This press conference garnered more media attendance than any of the TVA press conferences attended by Independent Media outlets. There were at least four television stations including the Jim Lehrer News Hour and more than four news papers with large readerships including GQ, the Tennessean, and the Chattanooga Times Free Press. The main topics of the citizen's press conference detailed the health concerns of the community members and exposed TVA's cover up of the doctor ordered evacuations due to negative health impacts. To this point TVA has said that everything is fine with the air quality in the area while paying to temporarily relocate families living next to the coal ash disaster. The people are in respiratory distress because of TVA's coal ash disaster.

After the successful citizen's press conference United Mountain Defense volunteers traveled down to Swan Pond Circle Dr to do an interview with the Jim Lehrer News Hour. It was very productive and we used the time to record TVA's changes to the disaster site. After the interview we visited a local volunteer who had recently gotten home from the hospital, and then we headed home.