The Kingston Fossil Plant burns coal, and dumps the ash into a number of retaining ponds, trying to contain it so that we don't kill ourselves with the afterproducts of our modern life. Monday morning, early, one of those walls failed and dumped a deluge of crap into the Emory River Valley. The Emory feeds into the Clinch River, which eventually dumps its waters into the Tennessee, which flows down into Alabama, back across Tennessee, and across western Kentucky before it hits the Mississippi.
I am fortunate enough to be upstream from this catastrophe, both on the Clinch and the Tennessee, but millions of people live downstream. This threatens Chattanooga, for instance, and Nashville, not to mention the people of Alabama and Kentucky.
Not to mention my wife's grandmother, who lives just off the Tennessee.
And the national cable news airheads, and the national print press, and the national blogs are ignoring it. Quoth PZ Myers:
We're looking at a major environmental catastrophe, bigger than any oil spill, and most of the news media are silent about it. I checked CNN, MS-NBC, even Fox News…not a word. The local newspapers have a few articles, and the regional blogs are trying to follow it, but otherwise, I guess we're going to pretend it didn't happen.
In fact, due to being unplugged for the holiday, I didn't hear about it until today.
No one got seriously hurt, so thank God for small miracles, but we don't want Bush's FEMA anywhere near us, thank you very much.
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