About eighty miles from where I grew up and spent the first eighteen years of my life and forty miles from where my father lives now (and where I lived and worked for three years) in Knoxville, Tennessee, fifteen homeowners escaped with only their lives when a sludge of coal ash broke through an earthen dam and covered their houses in muck two days ago http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/us/27sludge.html?_r=1&8au&emc=au

That must have been a fun early Christmas present.

The Tennessee Valley Authority TVA (who rules the world in that part of the country) and destroyed thousands of acres of farmland when it dammed them up years and years ago to create a series of man-made lakes (that I innocently swam and boated on as a child) says the spill is being cleaned up and the water is “safe” to drink,  but no one is buying it when there are dead fish lying around and the Tennessee River doesn’t look like it once did and Emery River will never be the same again.

Houses being destroyed like that happens in countries far away, not in my home state, right?  Nope. I looked on, horrified, as I saw the incredible damage and heard that the size of the spill is larger than that caused by the Exxon Valdez.

I may have not liked growing up in East Tennessee but it was physically gorgeous.  And now a large portion of it won’t be again for a very long time. If ever.

The coal ash is classified as a toxic substance.

And the government wants us to believe in clean coal.

Uh huh. 

Once again, what we don’t know is going to hurt us again and again.  And once again, the safety regulations regarding our energy supplies and infrastructure are woefully inadequate.  Earthen dams to protect toxic wastes with people living nearby?  Oh, yeah, that makes sense.

Line right up for the next line of bull-sh--.

(From Opensalon.com---December. 24, 2008)