GQ Magazine  [Printer-friendly version]
June 1, 2009

BLACK TIDE

By Sean Flynn

Tom Grizzard shot his first two geese in the fall of 1961, one in the
morning and the other in the evening, and both from the tip of a slim
peninsula bordered by the Emory River to the east and a spring-fed
inlet to the west. The morning kill landed on a small island where Tom
and his father would forage for arrowheads left by the Cherokee, and
the other, the twilight bird, flopped into a shallow pond of gray
sludge across the channel.

When Tom was a boy, back in the'40s, that pond had been a swimming
hole, a clean pool notched into the edge of the Emory. But then, in
the'50s, the Tennessee Valley Authority built the Kingston Fossil
Plant on the spot where the Emory empties into the Clinch and just
north of the town, Kingston, for which it was named. It was the
largest power station in the world: nine boilers that fed steam into
nine turbines that spun 1,400 megawatts of electricity out through
miles and miles of wire to the nuclear labs down the road at Oak Ridge
and farther still, into the hills and hollows of east Tennessee and
Kentucky. The boilers were fired with coal, 14,000 tons a day brought
in by trains a hundred cars long, and when the coal burned it left
piles of ash that had to be disposed of somewhere, which happened to
be on top of Tom's old swimming hole. Bulldozers pushed clay into a
low dike surrounding the spot where Tom used to splash and then filled
the cavity with fly ash, the finer particles that fluttered up into
the flues. The ash was then watered to keep it from blowing all over
Roane County, which gave it the consistency and color of hardening
cement.

Tom's dead goose lay in the middle of the pond. It wasn't deep -- the
Kingston plant had been completed only six years earlier -- so he
waded in, gray muck sucking at his boots, fetched his bird, and waded
back out. He stood at the edge, stamping his feet. Just coal ash, was
all, no worse than mud. And what was a little ash on a man's boots,
especially after everything the TVA had done for east Tennessee?

The Grizzards went back six generations in Roane County, and the first
five were born into a world without electricity. No lights, no air
conditioners, no refrigerators. The TVA changed that. It was a federal
agency, a product of the New Deal, created specifically to power the
Tennessee Valley. It dammed rivers and flooded fields to feed
hydroelectric plants, and it built coal-fired generators in Tennessee
and Alabama and Kentucky, until all of poor, forlorn Appalachia was
ablaze with light and promise. There was more, too: Those dams and
boilers and turbines all had to be built and operated, and
transmission towers had to be raised and rail lines laid and cables
strung, and the men who did that work had to be fed and housed and
entertained. An entire economy blossomed out of the TVA's money. Tom
Grizzard's father-in-law helped mortar the bricks for the original
smokestacks. Tom spent most of his working life at Oak Ridge, which
wouldn't exist without the TVA's electricity. Years later his own boy
would open a shop, Accu-Rite Machining, and one of his customers would
be the Kingston plant.

We could hardly do without the TVA, Tom likes to say.

Not even God's above the TVA, Tom's aunt used to say.

So Tom never thought much about what had become of his old swimming
hole, all things considered. He never minded the soot, either -- which
back in the day, when the coal smoke vented out of nine short stacks,
would settle on houses and cars and etch yellow stains on the
arrowheads he'd find on the riverbanks. And anyway, that was a long
time ago. In the'70s, the TVA put up two new stacks, each more than
1,000 feet tall, that lifted the smoke into the prevailing winds,
which carried it east into the Smoky Mountains and North Carolina. By
then the Kingston plant had been there so long it melted into the
landscape, no more or less ominous than the interstate loping over the
river or the tombstones staring down from the Methodist cemetery on
the hill. Birds nested in its evening shadows and deer grazed at its
edges and kids swam in the waters creeping past it into the Watts Bar
Reservoir, and the fields right next to it were designated, by an
official brown-and-white sign, as a wildlife viewing area.

Meanwhile the Kingston plant was incinerating 5 million tons of coal
every year and dumping the ash at the edge of the river. Every so
often, bulldozers would sculpt bottom ash, the heavy and coarse
material left in the furnaces, and dirt into the dike, raising it a
few feet one year and a few feet more another year, then add interior
barriers until it was actually several ponds -- cells, in the jargon
-- enclosed by one massive levee. It grew longer and wider and higher,
but the sides were always seeded with grass so that after more than
fifty years it had come to resemble a well-manicured mesa, standing
upwards of sixty feet high on eighty-four acres of riverbank. And if a
little ash water seeped out, which it had for decades, or part of the
dike blew out, which it did in 2003, the TVA dutifully patched the
walls and mopped up the puddles, and nobody fretted about it because
nobody paid it much mind.

And why would they?

Electricity has to come from somewhere, and so long as the coal was
mined somewhere else and the smoke blew somewhere else, what was the
downside? The wildlife sanctuary? The green mountain on the riverbank?
The payroll? Ask almost anyone in Roane County what he thought about
the Kingston plant and he would have told you the same thing: Good
jobs and cheap power. Nothing less and nothing more, and it is
difficult to imagine what more there could be.

"We have a good life here," Tom Grizzard says, five decades after
pulling that dead goose from the ash pond. He and his wife, Dolores,
raised two sons and a daughter on 140 ancestral acres along Swan Pond
Circle, where he hunted deer in the woods and pheasant in the fields
and fished crappie and bass from the river. When his children were
grown, two of them settled in houses up the road with their own kids,
and Tom still hopes his grandchildren will lay claim to a piece of
that land someday, too.

Over the years, more people came, because this part of Tennessee truly
is beautiful; it was a good life on the banks of the Emory in the
shadow of the steam plant. The peninsula was sold off and subdivided
for small houses that perched on the edge of the river or at the top
of wide lawns that sloped down to the inlet. Rick Cantrell's sister
rented a trailer on the inlet side, and there was a dock with a slide
for the kids and a spot for Rick to sit out all night catching catfish
and watching deer totter down from the ridge across the still water.
Once the trees leafed out, he couldn't see the Kingston plant at all.
"In the summertime," Rick says, "there was nothing but beautiful
water."

Up the road, between Tom's land and the peninsula, streets were paved
for developments called Swan Harbour and Emory Cove, where half-acre
lots, $300,000 and up on the water, were cleared for half-million-
dollar homes. Larry Allen came west from Knoxville with his wife and
kids and built the first house in Emory Cove, in June 2007, then the
second, and once the market picked up again he figured he'd spend the
rest of his working life there, framing houses on all the other lots,
too. More homes were going up on the back side of Swan Pond Circle,
over where Terry Gupton had his spread, 245 acres where he grazed a
hundred head of beef cattle he watered from a spring. If the weather
was dry and the winds were gusty, he might see riffles of gray dust
skittering off the top of the ash pond in the distance, but he never
worried about it. The TVA had taken good care of east Tennessee, and
there was no reason to fear it wouldn't still.

Sarah McCoin always wanted a piece of that good life, too. She is Tom
Grizzard's cousin, and though she grew up on Air Force bases and had
settled in St. Louis for thirty years, Swan Pond Circle was home,
where the family's roots grew deep.Last year, after her father, a
lieutenant colonel who retired to Knoxville, came down with a rare
form of leukemia from breathing benzene on the flight line, she moved
into her grandmother's ranch house on the property next to Tom's.
There were pastures where she could raise Irish sport horses, and
there was hay from Terry Gupton's fields to feed them, and one of
these days she hoped to open a therapeutic riding school for disabled
kids, right down the road from the giant coal plant and its giant ash
pond. "My whole life," she says, "we drove past there and just, I
don't know, assumed. Like when you turn on your faucet. You just
assume."

In June 2008, Sarah packed her grandmother into the car for an
assisted-living facility. They turned left onto Swan Pond Circle,
followed it up toward the plant and onto Swan Pond Road. Grandma
stared at the great, green slope of the ash pit. "Sarah," she said,
"how high do you suppose they're gonna make that mountain?"

"I don't know, Grandma," Sarah said, and she kept driving, not even
thinking about the question, let alone the answer.

Which was: sixty feet above the waterline. And then it fell down.

*****

Late december was rainy and cold in east Tennessee, the temperature
ricocheting from freezing to mild, and maybe that had something to do
with it. Maybe the rain saturated all that ash, and tiny rivulets bore
into the dike and then froze in the cold and expanded and thawed and
froze and expanded again. Or maybe the weight of the wet ash, the
downward force of it, was more than the lateral force the dike could
withstand and overrode the friction that held the walls in place.

The dike was not merely breached. It did not spring a leak. It
collapsed, most of the northern and western walls disintegrating into
mud and mush just before one o'clock in the morning on December 22.
When it fell away, the wet ash behind it -- more than a billion
gallons of gray slurry, a hundred times more than the oil spilled by
the Exxon Valdez -- gushed out with the fury of a reservoir bursting
through a dam, which, really, was exactly what it was.

"You know how people always say a tornado sounds like a freight
train?" says Travis Cantrell, who lived in the trailer above the dock
where his uncle Rick sat out all night fishing. "That's what it
sounded like."

The sound lasted less than a minute, ash thundering from the pit,
gravity smashing down those billion gallons that had stood in a high,
fat column. The ash, moving fast in a solid wall, mangled the rails
that carried trainloads of coal into the plant and washed out Swan
Pond Road, the connector between Swan Pond Circle and everything
beyond. It destroyed one house with blunt and vicious efficiency and
tore another from its foundation, lifting it up and carrying it like a
leaf in a rushing stream, then setting it down. It roared into the
channel, almost forty feet deep, where the inlet meets the Emory, and
filled it -- the ash thicker and heavier than water, plowing to the
bottom -- throwing fish onto the banks and into backyards. It charged
up the inlet, too, ripping Rick Cantrell's dock and all the other ones
from their footings, crumpling a steel-beamed boathouse like so much
foil, wrapping around thick-trunked trees and pulling them from the
earth, their roots exposed and dangling like innards. It swept around
the ridge into a second inlet, yanking out more trees and tossing bass
and catfish and gar onto the edge of Terry Gupton's fields, where they
flopped and gasped until they died in the cold.

And then it was quiet. The ash covered more than 300 acres, but not
level and smooth like an oil slick or a flood. Solid blocks of it were
scattered like boulders the size of cars and small trucks. In the
channel and the inlet, odd stalagmites ten and fifteen and twenty feet
tall poked up from what had been the surface of the water, which
wasn't water at all anymore but an enormous gray puddle.

In the summertime, there was nothing but beautiful water.

It was gone. All of it, everything buried and gray and poisoned.

No one died and no one was seriously injured, which was a fortunate
fluke of timing. If a coal train had been trundling in or out and cars
had been backed up at the railroad crossing, that would have been bad,
and if the pond had collapsed on a bright afternoon in July, with
people boating and swimming in the river and grilling on the banks,
that would have been catastrophic. "If this had happened in summer,"
Rick Cantrell says, "there would've been a body count." But it
happened in the wee hours of a cold December morning, so there was
only a colossal mess.

At daylight, TVA workers surveyed the wreckage. They guessed at how
much ash had covered how much land. They drew water samples from the
Emory, Clinch, and Tennessee rivers, which supplies the drinking water
for the city of Kingston and, farther downstream, much of the mid-
South. And the next day, some flacks in the TVA's press office wrote a
talking-points memo about the spill and the local water quality that
some other flacks then rewrote (and which someone else later
mistakenly sent to the Associated Press). After the editing, the spill
was no longer catastrophic but merely sudden and accidental, and it
did not dump 2.6 million cubic yards (which was off by more than half,
anyway) but 1,600 acre-feet, which employs both a smaller number and a
unit of measurement few people can readily visualize. The toxic metals
in the ash -- lead, mercury, arsenic, thallium, selenium, the list
goes on -- were now merely contaminants, and there were only minute
quantities of those, which, relative to a billion gallons of slurry,
is not technically inaccurate. All the water tests, meanwhile,
indicated that the contamination was below state limits set to protect
fish and aquatic life, though the more ominous phrase from acute
effects was deleted, and of course, there was no mention of the fish
and aquatic life already dead from the force of the sudden, accidental
release of this large amount of material.

A few days later, on a tree next to that metal boathouse that had been
twisted and mangled by the ash that surrounded it for hundreds of
acres, someone hung a square of white cardboard on which was written,
in black marker, a shorter memo, a single, simple talking point: clean
coal?

*****

The term clean coal entered the lexicon in its current faux-eco-
activist incarnation -- with the implication that coal can be a source
of nonpolluting fuel, that it can be scrubbed of its toxins and its
carbon dioxide rendered harmless -- with stunning speed, largely in
the past two years through the expensive efforts of two groups: the
American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a lobbying group for
coal-burning industries, and the Hawthorn Group, a marketing firm
hired by ACCCE.

They are quite proud of their success, too. In December, about the
time of the Kingston disaster, Hawthorn posted a newsletter on its Web
site extolling the "highlights of a recent grassroots campaign
Hawthorn created and managed" for ACCCE. Leaving aside the fact that
grassroots campaigns typically are not created and managed by hired
flacks, Hawthorn did have much glad news to report. Throughout the
presidential campaign, it had focused on "finding creative ways to
increase the visibility of the issue and...demonstrating strong voter
support," which is marketing-speak for littering crowds with fresh-
faced human props in shirts and hats screened with clean coal. Do that
with enough "branded teams," as Hawthorn calls them, at enough
rallies; buy enough TV spots; plead your case to enough reporters, and
eventually the idea spreads that coal is downright pristine -- that it
can even, as Hawthorn puts it, "be part of the solution to climate
change." It was genius, and extremely effective. By the fall of 2008,
President-elect Obama and Senator McCain, their running mates and
their surrogates adopted our language and included it as part of their
stump speeches. ACCCE shaped the debate by finding supporters of the
candidates and turning them into clean coal advocates.

Obama still talks about it, and he gets cheers every time. Because the
public now believes in clean coal. Hawthorn polled what the firm
considered "public opinion leaders" in September 2007 and again at the
end of 2008 on, among other things, whether they favored burning coal
to generate electricity. The first go-round was a split: 46 percent in
favor, 50 percent opposed. But after a year of Hawthorn bleating
"clean coal" over and over, support rose to 72 percent -- and
opposition nose-dived to 22 percent.

Results such as these would be impressive no matter what the issue.
Yet they are especially so in this instance, because the idea Hawthorn
is selling -- Coal is clean! -- is complete horseshit.

Now, ACCCE obviously will dispute that characterization, and it will
do so in several semantically nimble ways. For instance, Joe Lucas,
ACCCE's vice president for communications, explains that "clean coal,"
the tagline tacked onto the end of $17 million worth of commercials,
is not a statement of precise fact but, rather, shorthand for "clean-
coal technologies," which encompasses efficient furnaces and
particulate scrubbers and the like. While that is not inaccurate --
energy geeks have used the truncated version for years -- Lucas
suggests that this linguistic curiosity is widely known by the average
American, so no clear-thinking person could possibly presume clean
coal means that coal is, in fact, clean. "We use the term because it's
a stated term of art, an accepted term of art," Lucas says. "And it's
an evolving term."

As is, apparently, the word clean itself. Who says, Lucas wants to
know, that the environmentalists get to define the word? He rightly
points out that the amount of coal Americans burn to generate
electricity has tripled in the past forty years, yet toxic emissions,
particularly sulfur dioxide (the chemical that makes acid rain) and
nitrogen oxides (ingredients in ozone and smog), have been reduced by
upwards of 90 percent in newer plants. "What would you call that," he
asks, "if not clean?"

Cleaner, maybe. Or not as dirty as it used to be. But not clean.

Yes, coal has its advantages. It is plentiful and cheap, which is why
Americans for more than a century now have enjoyed a plentiful and
cheap supply of electricity. If the megawatts generated by coal --
roughly half the entire grid -- were suddenly taken off-line, the
economy would collapse and we'd all be burning oil lamps in the dark.
We are, for the immediate future, stuck with the stuff.

But it's still filthy. Getting it out of the ground, depending on the
method used, is at best dirty and dangerous and at worst ecologically
ruinous. Washing it -- literally cleaning it -- is a grimy process
that often involves filling valleys and hollows with lakes of
poisonous black water held back by dikes not unlike the one that
collapsed at Kingston. Burning it releases an assortment of toxins
that, according to one study, kill an estimated 24,000 people each
year -- people who, on average, die fourteen years before they
otherwise would have. The Kingston plant, for instance, primarily uses
a low-sulfur coal and has scrubbers to capture nitrogen oxides, yet in
2007 its stacks still vented approximately 50,000 tons of sulfur
dioxide, 12,000 tons of nitrogen oxides, 1,700 tons of hydrochloric
acid, 329 tons of sulfuric acid, and ten tons of ammonia, as well as
lesser (though not insignificant) amounts of arsenic, barium,
chromium, cobalt, copper, lead, mercury, nickel, selenium, vanadium,
and zinc -- all of which, in case that sounds like a multivitamin, are
not things anyone should be breathing. That's the inventory from only
nine furnaces in east Tennessee; there are 1,470 more incinerating
coal in 616 other power plants across the country -- roughly a third
of which have no pollution controls at all. Finally, there is carbon
dioxide, the greenhouse gas that is helping steam the planet to
perhaps catastrophic temperatures; coal burned in the United States
each year releases about 2 billion tons of CO2, a full third of the
nation's entire output of that particular gas.

In a sense, then, our appetite for coal -- our want and need for
lights and televisions and toasters -- is a slow-motion suicide pact,
no different really from that of a two-pack-a-day smoker: It's all
very pleasant and satisfying in the moment, but sooner or later...

When it speaks of clean coal, ACCCE is focusing only on the process of
burning it, the midpoint of the coal cycle. Its premise, its promise,
is that the marvels of science can strip most of the toxins from the
smoke, and that carbon dioxide can be captured and safely stored deep
underground. "There's never been an environmental issue facing this
industry that hasn't been met by technology," Lucas says.

Technological innovations have, in fact, reduced overall air pollution
by about half since the'70s, though those innovations have almost
always been the result of legislation, regulation, or lawsuits. And
yes, carbon dioxide can be captured and stored, but in the same way
that we can establish a colony on the moon: The science exists and has
been proven to work in small experiments, but the process is years,
perhaps decades, away from being viable on any kind of significant
scale. And it may never work everywhere: Duke Energy, the country's
third-largest CO2 emitter, says the geology beneath its planned $2.3
billion Cliffside Unit 6 plant outside Charlotte, North Carolina,
isn't suitable for holding in place the 6 million tons of that gas the
stacks are expected to release.

As for scrubbing out the poisons in the smoke, there have been great
advances in that area. Here's the rub, though: Even if the toxins were
removed -- which won't happen anyway, since most older plants sidestep
environmental standards through grandfather clauses, but let's pretend
-- where would they go?

Into the ash pile.

Coal plants will create 130 million tons, ballpark, of ash each year.
Some of it will be sold off -- gypsum for wallboard, tiny globules
called cenospheres for industrial filler, some more for asphalt and
cement and soil conditioners -- but the rest of it, most of it, will
have to be stored. There is no standard method for its disposal, or
even an accurate count of disposal sites, because the federal
government does not consider coal ash to be hazardous waste requiring
regulation, and state rules vary from lousy to middling. So some of it
will be dumped into dry landfills, yet over time, rain and gravity
will pull the heavy metals to the bottom; even if the pit is lined
with clay or plastic, the liner will eventually fail and those poisons
will leach into the ground. And some 7 million tons a year will be
shoveled into abandoned mine shafts, where, just as with the
landfills, the heavy metals will quite likely seep into the water
table. The rest -- 27 million tons -- will be dumped into containment
ponds.

Like the one in Kingston, where the coal came from somewhere else and
the smoke went somewhere else and it seemed, for a time, that coal
really was clean.

*****

The night before New Year's Eve, eight days after a billion gallons of
ash buried 300 acres in Roane County, Penny Dodson's grandson, Evyn,
got sick. He started coughing, hard and racking, shaking his tiny
body. His nose ran, and his eyes watered and itched so badly that he
rubbed small bruises around them.

Penny had been worried the ash might make Evyn sick, especially Evyn,
because he was so vulnerable. He'd been born eighteen months earlier
with cerebral palsy and weak lungs, and Penny stopped working as a
nurse to take care of him, to feed and bathe him, monitor his
breathing, make sure he was on the floor every day for exercise and
therapy. The two of them, Penny and Evyn, lived in a trailer they
rented from Tom Grizzard at the end of a lane off Swan Pond Circle
that sloped down to a cove on the Emory. Penny always wanted to live
on the water. "I'm originally from Joliet, Illinois," she says. "We
don't have this kind of beauty up there."

On the day of the collapse, Penny, fretting about Evyn's lungs, called
his pulmonologist. He told her to call the TVA and find out the
particulate count -- the amount of ash particles floating in the air.
Which she did. She was told, "It's wet. Don't worry about it."

That was the sum total of the TVA's immediate response plan: keep the
ash damp so it wouldn't dry out and blow all over the county. To even
call it a plan, though, is generous, because there was not, in fact,
any document filed away detailing what should be done if the dike
holding back fifty years of ash were to collapse. It was more of a
reflex reaction, and a weak and impractical one at that: How,
precisely, were 300 acres of ash supposed to be kept perpetually
moist, particularly once the weather turned bright and breezy?

Yet at the same time, TVA officials insisted the ash was basically
harmless. Its main component, they said, was silica, which is the same
sort of technical parsing that allows tobacco companies to maintain
that their products consist primarily of dried leaves. (Though
breathing a cloud of silica is awfully hard on the respiratory system,
too.) Sure, they'd made an unfortunate mess, the TVA seemed to say,
but nothing to panic about. The cleanup would take only four to six
weeks -- honest, four to six weeks -- and in the meantime, just don't
let your kids play in it. Or your dogs romp in it. Or drink from the
sludgy puddles. And just to be extra cautious, take your shoes off and
wash the dog's paws before you go in the house.

On New Year's Eve, with Evyn coughing harder, Penny called the number
the TVA had given out for residents who had any concerns, left a
message, said she was taking her grandson to the emergency room. In
the ER, she says, a doctor told her the ash had most likely irritated
Evyn's lungs and eyes and nasal passages.

The doctor also told her not to go home. "I'd tracked the ash in the
house, and Evyn plays on the floor," she says. "The doctor said we'd
contaminated all the floors in the house." And she was told to leave
everything -- the boxes for her eBay business, Evyn's bouncy seats and
walkers, and the electronic Elmo covered in red fur that he found
under the tree Christmas morning -- that couldn't be washed. TVA
workers called her back three times that night and immediately booked
her into a Holiday Inn Express. It was the same hotel where some of
the men working the initial cleanup were staying, clomping into the
lobby and through the hallways in their dusty boots. Penny and Evyn
stayed there nineteen days, until the TVA leased her a small house in
Harriman, upwind from the plant. "I still wonder if I'm far enough
away, though," she says. "The wind can blow this way, too."

Evyn wasn't the only one getting sick. Travis Cantrell, Rick's
asthmatic nephew who lived not a hundred yards from the edge of the
muck, was evacuated by the TVA a few weeks after the disaster. "Travis
had to bother them so much until they just moved him out to get him to
shut up," Rick says. As for Rick, who kept coming up to stand in front
of his old dock and talk to reporters, he came down with a sinus
infection that three courses of antibiotics haven't purged. Volunteers
for United Mountain Defense, a Knoxville advocacy group that lugged
clean water and fact sheets to residents beginning only hours after
the spill because, well, someone had to do it, at first wore cheap
dust masks. But then Matt Landon got wheezy enough that he shaved his
unruly beard so a proper respirator would seal around his face.

The TVA maintains that every air-quality sample it has collected shows
the particulate levels to be within acceptable limits. Yet whether the
ash is directly responsible for making people sick is almost beside
the point. Some people fear the ash, and the stress of that alone can
make a person sick. And there is little, if anything, the TVA can do
to dissipate that fear, because the spill was more than an
environmental disaster. It was also a breach of the public's trust, a
violation of the unwritten compact between a seemingly omnipotent
agency and the people it serves.

We could hardly do without the TVA, Tom Grizzard likes to say.

Not even God's above the TVA, Tom's aunt used to say.

My whole life, we drove past there and just, I don't know, assumed,
Tom's cousin says.

You assumed, when you live next to one of the largest coal-fired
plants in the world, that it would not harm you, and that is not as
irrational as it might first appear. You assumed that coal was at
least relatively clean because you've been told that it is, and the
air is clear and the water, nothing but beautiful water, is clean and
there is a wildlife sanctuary in the big plant's shadows. You assumed
that a green levee engineered by federal employees would not fall
down. You assumed that the place you always wanted to live because it
was so much prettier than anywhere else you'd ever lived wouldn't, in
an instant, turn gray and poisoned.

And when you discover all of those assumptions were false, what more
are you willing to believe? What more should you believe?

*****

Fifty miles north of Knoxville, a stream is trickling down the side of
what used to be a mountain but is now merely boulders shoved into a
shape that roughly resembles a mountain. The water is splashing out of
a pipe poking from the hillside and flowing through a narrow channel
across a rutted road before continuing down to a small pool.

The stream is bright orange. The pool is a neon shade of green.
Neither is a natural color, and neither the stream nor the pool is a
natural formation. And they are all, the stream and the pool and the
colors, symptoms of the first, and perhaps worst, damage that coal
inflicts. It -- or rather, the cheap and sloppy way coal is carved out
of mountains -- is wreaking havoc on watersheds, which is to say our
water supplies, clogging them with silt and soil and poisons. "That
orange is from iron pyrite," says a man named Chris Irwin, who found
the rogue stream in the Tackett Creek watershed in Claiborne County.
"Rust, basically. That'll give you brain damage. Or kill you."

Irwin, who is 42, is a self-proclaimed tree hugger, the co-founder and
staff attorney of United Mountain Defense (though he actually
practices criminal defense, not environmental law). Before December
22, the UMD focused on monitoring mining and its effects in the
Tennessee mountains, which is also a disaster, albeit one that is so
visibly remote that few people ever notice. "The cost of coal, really,
for me, is the water," Irwin says. He's a sixth-generation
Appalachian, the grandson of a TVA accountant, and as a younger man he
worked on watershed preservation and restoration as a Peace Corps
volunteer in West Africa. So he's got some perspective on what's
happening to the mountains around him. "My grandmother used to say
Appalachia is the Fourth World," he says. "Because we allow things
here that we would never tolerate in the Third World."

The Appalachians are the oldest mountains on the planet. They are also
one of the most diverse ecosystems in the world, with more species of
trees in the Smoky Mountains than in all of Northern Europe. And for
eons, those hills and valleys were a spectacularly abundant watershed.
It is impossible to overestimate the value, the necessity, of
maintaining it as such, too.

"The Appalachians are the Saudi Arabia of clean drinking water," Irwin
says, "and they're blowing it up for a couple of years' worth of coal.
It'd be like the Saudis blowing up their oil fields to get at the
gravel underneath." He shakes his head. "A hundred years from now
they're going to look back and say,'Those damn fools.' "

Probably. And here's why they will say that, and why, on a gloomy
February day, there is an orange stream dribbling into a neon pond.

Woven into the western Appalachians, from Alabama north through
Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, and into Pennsylvania, is a broad
seam of bituminous coal, the remnant of swamps that, 300 million years
ago or so, decayed into peat. As the mountains grew and shifted,
tremendous heat and pressure transformed that rotting vegetation,
first into lignite and finally into coal. At the same time, the
surface of those mountains developed into a complicated filtration
system. Rain would soak the ground and meander through roots and
underbrush into streams, where insects and macroinvertebrates and
rocks would clean out the organic matter and the particulates and feed
clean water into creeks and rivers and lakes and so on. Occasionally,
a rock riddled with mercury or arsenic or some other heavy metal might
rise to the surface, where it would be gradually eroded over thousands
or tens of thousands of years, releasing infinitesimal amounts of
those elements into the water supply, so dilute as to be harmless.

Fast-forward to the present day. Miners want the coal. The easiest way
to get it is to simply blow off the layers of mountain above the coal,
then scrape it out, a process known as mountain-top-removal mining, or
MTR. The rubble -- called spoil -- is dumped into neighboring valleys,
obliterating them and any streams and creeks within, and the mountain
itself is left flat and bare. There are swaths of West Virginia, where
MTR is most rampantly practiced, that have been leveled into deserts.

In Tennessee the preferred method is cross-ridge mining. Rather than
coming down from the top, miners blast away the sides of mountains at
the level where the coal is. To do that, the miners first must clear-
cut where they plan to gouge the mountain, and that is also where the
degradation of the watershed begins: With no trees to hold the topsoil
in place, it washes into the streams and rivers, smothering the
ecosystem.

Then the spoil is removed and the coal carved out, miles of it,
leaving long, deep cuts ribboning around the mountains. When the coal
has been depleted, the mountains are then "restored": The rubble is
bulldozed back against the exposed cliff, compacted into a shape
reminiscent of the original, and then planted with grass or long-
needle pines where once stood hardwood forest. Instead of functioning
streams -- which are extremely difficult to re-create -- the miners
install "wet-weather conveyances," which are basically rocks piled
into gutters to steer rainwater down the hill. They also build
containment ponds, theoretically designed to last forever, to catch
any heavy runoff.

That orange stream is not flowing through a wet-weather conveyance,
even though there are two nearby, one on either side. Rather, it's
doing what water does, which is take the path of least resistance.
"It's just the water lottery," Irwin says, crouching over the rusty
stream. "This water came through a bad part of the spoil and blew
across the road, and this is what you get."

He ponders that for a moment, traces the orange stream down to the
green pond. The amount of toxin in the water is magnitudes greater
than what would naturally occur, for the simple reason that it was
exposed in an unnatural quantity. Left undisturbed, that pyrite would
have worked its way to the surface through erosion, and it would have
been washed away over thousands of years in minute traces. But because
the mountain has been jumbled and water has found that pocket of
exposed metal, a century's worth of runoff is washing away on a
Saturday.

"At least iron pyrite's a convenient metal," Irwin says. "It turns
bright orange. You can see it. The others, the arsenic and selenium
and mercury and manganese, you can't see."

Irwin is halfway through a six-hour drive through strip-mined
mountains, a continuous slog through brown and gray slopes flecked
with neon ponds and yellowing pines struggling for purchase in a mix
of mud and shale. "Lipstick on a corpse," he mutters. "It's just a
giant experiment on the most valuable resource we have."

Farther along he gets out of the car and hikes down a slope, reclaimed
and planted with thick grasses but still crumbly, his footing unsure,
then a mile or so along a trail to a spot he calls Mega Slide Alpha.
It's on a site that was long ago mined and filled in with sculpted
rubble, and for a while maybe it approximated the look of a genuine
mountainside. But then it fell down. Most likely, water from the top
undercut the fill, and then all those busted-up rocks avalanched down
the slope. All that's left is a gaping gash at the top, maybe 200
yards across, and at the bottom, a valley floor filled with debris.

This is not an uncommon occurrence. Irwin likens the basic physics to
removing the top of an Oreo cookie, smashing it, then piling the
crumbs back on top. Everything is back where it was, more or less, but
it's hardly a proper Oreo.

Just as these are no longer proper mountains. "There's just no
ecologically sound way of blowing up mountains," he says. "It's just
the cheapest, sloppiest way to get the coal. And of course it's cheap.
They're passing all the costs along to the future."

*****

Four weeks passed after the Kingston ash pond collapsed, then eight,
winter giving way to the first buds of a Tennessee spring.

The ash was all still there, smothering the same land and inlets and
river channel that it had claimed in December. The cleanup was costing
the TVA more than half a million dollars a day, but despite its early
promise to make everything pristine again in four to six weeks, little
had actually been cleaned. A sharp channel had been cut through the
ash plugging the inlet, allowing the spring to flow out into the
Emory, and helicopters had dropped eighty-five tons of grass seed on
the mess (the idea being that turf might hold the ash in place) and
spread hay on top of that, as if it were any other new lawn. But
barely anything sprouted, and the straw covered the ash the way moss
dapples a stone, in patches and clumps.

Mostly, the TVA had been busy building weirs, which are dams below the
surface of the water, to prevent more ash from migrating downstream,
and a dike that stretches from the site of the collapsed pond clear
across the channel to the land on the other side. When it was
completed, ash on the eastern side of the new dike -- that is, the
sludge sitting in the Emory proper -- would be dredged and then dumped
onto a new spot on the west side. How long all that ash will remain
there is unclear. The state and the EPA have to approve any disposal
plan, which could include rebuilding the pond on the site of the
Kingston plant or hauling it away. Or maybe it will stay forever, 300
acres of ash, forty feet deep in spots, too much to ever be properly
cleaned. It could be leveled and sodded and rechristened a ballfield
or a park or another wildlife viewing area, and eventually it will
have been there so long that it will have melted into the landscape.

On the other hand, a group of residents have sued to stop the TVA from
hauling the ash away, because they don't want it tracked across the
county. (Of course, other residents, dozens of them, have sued the
TVA, too, for negligence.) Just building the dike and the weirs
created a lousy mess. An endless convoy of heavy dump trucks circled
from the quarry north of the spill with loads of rock and gravel, fine
specks of dust billowing from their tires and chassis and beds. At
Anything on Wheels, the used-car lot at the corner of Swan Pond Road
and Highway 70 (guaranteed financing! everyone's approved!), David
Pittman was paying a guy to hose off the pickups and sedans every
other day. "I come down here and everything's normal," he says.
"Except there's dust everywhere."

There was, however, finally a rough consensus about what was in the
ash. On January 9, not quite three weeks after the disaster, a
professor of geochemistry at Duke University named Avner Vengosh
collected samples from the site, took them back to the lab, and
analyzed them. At the end of the month, he released the results, which
were somewhat reassuring and thoroughly disquieting all at once.

First, the good news: The river water was not, at that time, badly
contaminated. "But we think that's only because of dilution," Vengosh
says. Assuming the TVA's air-monitoring samples are accurate, there
was also little reason to fear that anyone had inhaled an acute amount
of toxins. The immediate risk, in other words, appeared to be low.

Now the bad news: If the ash dries out and starts to waft about in
particles of ten microns or less, people breathing that air are going
to suck it deep into their lungs. Depending on which bit of ash is
inhaled, the results can be anything from irritation -- from, say,
silica -- to an increased likelihood of dying from cancer. Among the
most worrisome elements in the ash, according to Vengosh, are two
radium isotopes: 226, which has a half-life of 1,600 years and decays
to radon, a gas known to cause lung cancer; and 228, which with a
half- life of less than six years decays much more rapidly, releasing
a higher rate of radiation. As it breaks down, 228 decays to thoron,
which also increases the risk of cancer.

There is also the litany of other heavy metals in the ash --
including, Vengosh found, arsenic at a level twenty times higher than
the local soil -- but those should be relatively harmless if they
don't float around in the air and nobody mucks around in the stuff.
But the key word in that premise is "if," and there are more ifs to
negate it.

"First of all," says Vengosh, "if you leave it there, it will become
airborne. And the problem is, if you're living next to it, the dog is
drinking the water, the kids are playing outside, they're tracking it
in the house. And if the ash is part of the mud, then you're bringing
those metals into your house."

As for the river, well, ash sinks. So the water might be fine, but the
sediment, where catfish root and bivalves feed, is poisoned with
mercury and lead and everything else. "The ecological system," Vengosh
says, "is probably going to be severely affected."

Dredging the ash from the river, as the TVA began doing in the spring,
will remove much of it, but at the risk -- unless the dredge is
manipulated with the precision of a microsurgeon -- of stirring up
toxins to resettle downstream. Leaving them in place, meanwhile, means
they'll eventually work up through the food chain. Already, according
to one study, one in six women of childbearing age has an elevated
level of mercury in her system, which can cause neurological damage in
unborn children (and, obviously, adults). The main cause of mercury
poisoning? Eating contaminated fish.

The main source of mercury pollution?

Coal-fired power plants.

*****

Suzanne burton and her husband bought a beige house with a sweeping
front porch on five steep acres above the inlet in 2004. She knew
there was a power plant across the channel, of course, but the Realtor
had mentioned it only in passing and none of the neighbors seemed
worried about it and, well, electricity has to come from somewhere,
and it'd been coming from the Kingston plant for so long that surely
everyone would have moved away if it'd been noxious or dangerous or
even annoying. Except for the black spots she had to power-wash off
the siding every few months, she never gave the turbines or the green
hill much thought.

Suzanne's a Jewish girl from Miami Beach, her husband a redneck from
Miami Springs, and they'd moved north to find a place as different
from Miami as possible, which is about as apt a description of Roane
County as any. Her husband could target-shoot into the hillside from
the patio, and deer bedded down in the tall grass behind the house,
and the view from the deck, all green trees and pale water, was just
about the prettiest thing. By the spring of 2008, they'd remodeled the
house and owned it outright and debt-free.

Then her husband died, cancer, in June 2008. Suzanne decided to sell,
move closer to Knoxville once the market picked up again and she could
get $250,000, or at least close to that, the investment they'd made in
the house on the hill. She could afford to wait out the real estate
slump.

At dawn on December 22, she walked out on her porch.

Oh, my God.

Everything was gray, the landscape now a moonscape.

Her land was worthless. She knew it. Everyone else knew it, too. The
empty lots in Swan Harbour and Emory Cove, the patches of riverbank on
the peninsula, the fields on the back side of Swan Pond Circle --
millions upon millions of dollars of real estate, none of it worth a
bucket of spit. "Look at that," Tom Grizzard was saying a few weeks
later, idling in his red pickup in front of an undeveloped parcel on
the river in Emory Cove. "I was just flabbergasted: $325,000 for one
lot, a half-acre lot. And somebody would have paid it. Up until now.
Now you couldn't hardly give it away."

Nor could you anytime soon. If the ash is all removed, if the river is
cleansed and the inlet swept out and there's nothing but beautiful
water again, would you swim in it? Would you pay $325,000 for a half-
acre lot in the twin shadows of Kingston's smokestacks? Would you
retire at the headwaters of the Watts Bar Reservoir? Or five miles
downstream? Ten? How far is far enough? And if you won't and no one
else will, either, what happens to the tax base, to the tourism
dollars, to the city of Kingston and the town of Harriman and the rest
of Roane County? And even if the TVA promised there was no lingering
danger, would you believe them? Would you trust them?

Consider what happened in 2003, when the ash pond leaked and the TVA
mopped up the mess and nobody paid it much mind. In the aftermath of
that breach, the TVA considered eight ways to fix the pond. Three of
them, ranging from installing a vibrating beam around the perimeter,
for $2.6 million, to converting to a dry-collection system for the
ash, for $25 million, would have been global fixes, meaning permanent
and thorough. (Another potential plus of the dry-ash idea, according
to TVA documents, was "Benefit to marketing???") Instead the TVA chose
the cheapest option: building a new cell east of the existing ones for
a mere $480,000, which it knew -- knew, in black and white in its own
analysis -- was a "Short Life/Term Fix." Just as it knew -- knew, in
memos and e-mails and engineering reports going back decades -- that
the dike was unstable, that the original low wall surrounding Tom's
old swimming hole wasn't sturdy enough to support a sixty-foot mound,
that seepage and leakage had been recurring concerns since the'60s.

Would you trust them now?

Maybe you would. Maybe if you'd lived there long enough and never
wanted to leave, if you'd grown up with the TVA and its cheap power
and good jobs, even if you were an educated man who understands toxic
waste and nature and the interplay between the two, you could forgive.
"I'm not against the TVA," Tom Grizzard says. "We gotta have it. We
gotta have clean coal. But somewhere along the line, they failed. And
now we've just got to work together."

Or maybe you wouldn't trust but you'd stay anyway, despite the fear
and doubt. "I never plan on moving," says Tom's cousin Sarah McCoin,
raising her Irish sport horses on the acres next door while her father
in Knoxville is dying from breathing all that benzene. "I just hope I
live. Because I know that stuff is hazardous. I know how lifestyles
can be changed by chemicals, and I know it can take twenty years."

Or maybe you get out, take the best deal you can get and flee. On the
last Saturday in February, two TVA representatives made Suzanne Burton
an offer on her house. "They were more than fair, to be honest with
you," she says. As part of the deal, she can't say how much she was
paid (though by April, the TVA had spent nearly $20 million buying
dozens of properties). And there was another catch: She had to agree
to release the TVA from all liability, forever, which is a tremendous
gamble, especially for Suzanne. After the spill, she volunteered to be
tested for heavy-metal poisoning (which the UMD funded with a
desperate appeal to environmentalists). Her mercury level is high.
"It's not from the spill," she says. "It's from living next to a coal
plant for four and a half years. But what am I going to do? Not accept
their offer, sit here and keep getting poisoned, put up with all of
this in the hope that I might get something in five or ten years?
Doesn't that sound kind of nutty?"

She signed the papers that morning. "I'm taking the best offer I can
get," she says, "and getting out of Dodge."

Terry Gupton, the cattle rancher, wanted out, too. He stood at the
edge of his spread in February, dead gars frozen into gray curls on
the brown grass where the water and slurry had receded. Dust puffed up
from under his boots with each step. He didn't know what his land, his
245 acres under the transmission lines, was worth anymore, only that
it was worthless to him. "I wouldn't put a crop in here, once that
sludge's been sitting on it," he says. "I would never put a cow out
there. Would you want to eat a steak that's been grazing on that?"

The ash had plugged the spring-fed creek that ran through his
property, backed up the water, flooded out the road up to his house.
The TVA raised it up once for him, then built it up some more when it
flooded again. So it was making an effort, trying to do right. Terry
wanted to believe that. "Like I say, they fixed the road, and they say
they're gonna settle up with us as best they can," he says.

But he doesn't sound optimistic, standing in his field at the edge of
an endless disaster. He shrugs, turns his head, spits into the grass
and the dust.

"Well," he says, "you know how it is."

============

Sean flynn is a GQ correspondent.