The Tennessee Coal Ash Spill: Biggest, under-the-radar story that bloggers helped elevate?

Here's what happened on Monday 12/22, very succinctly described by BlogHer's Kim Pearson:

Early Monday morning, a dam containing tons of coal ash burst  in Harriman, Tennessee, burying an estimated 400-acre area in a 6-foot pile of toxic sludge. The dam belonged to the Kingston Fossil plant operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority. It produced fly ash, a byproduct of coal burning that contains troubling levels of lead, mercury and other heavy metals. That's in addition to being "100 times more radioactive than nuclear waste" according to Scientific American magazine and Dr. Steven Chu -- the man that Pres. Elect Barack Obama has tapped to run his Department of Energy.

Seeing no coverage of this in the mainstream media (gee, could that be related to the fact CNN cut its science and environmental staff to cut expenses?), bloggers and twitterers stepped in to fill the gap. Amy Gahran wrote about it over at Poynter, and she created the #coalash hash tag on Twitter.

It was more than a couple days before, finally, the mainstream started to catch up...with CNN and the New York Times finally getting in on the action on Christmas Day and following up yesterday.

Considering the buzz word "clean coal" was in heavy use throughout the presidential campaign, it's clear that this little spill throws a wrench in any thinking that we had a simple solution just waiting in the wing, and that a buzz word would be sufficient to address safety and environmental concerns.

What went wrong? How do we prevent a similar accident in the future? How long will it take to clean this up? And what are the long-term ramifications, for wildlife and for humans?

Some big questions need answering soon. Let's hope that they'll get to work on the answers now that everyone' paying attention...and kudos to those social media types who kept this story alive...or really, made it come alive to begin with. It ain't all navel-gazing, folks!

Comments

[Kim Pearson]

Thanks for helping to spread the word about this important story. From what I've read, there are coal ash repositories like this in 23 states. We definitely need to know what's being done to prevent more disasters like this.