Tisha Calabrese

Tennessee environmental officials have given the Tennessee Valley Authority 20 days to turn over any documents that might explain the cause of the “catastrophic failure” of an earthen berm that held back a wet ash landfill near Kingston, Tenn.

The ultimatum, part of a 14-page enforcement order issued Tuesday against TVA by Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation Commissioner Jim Fyke, also orders TVA to pay the department for all costs the state has and will incur in its investigation of the Dec. 22 ash release and future cleanup.

The order gives TVA 45 days to prepare and submit a cleanup plan to restore the land, air and water.

“I am committed to making sure this spill is cleaned up and doing everything we can to prevent any similar situation in the future,” said Gov. Phil Bredesen in a statement released at the same time the order was made public. “I’m also committed to making sure Tennessee taxpayers don’t foot the bill.”

TVA spokeswoman Barbara Martocci said utility officials agreed with the state’s priorities and are working hard to achieve them.

“We welcome the department’s oversight and review,” she said.

She said TVA is committed to cleaning up and restoring the site as well as managing all of its facilities to prevent a similar situation.

“We intend to do this work in a way that will rebuild confidence in TVA’s ability to properly manage coal ash,” she said.

The Kingston ash landfill became a sludge slide just before Christmas when its embankment collapsed, dumping 1.1 billion gallons of wet fly ash laced with toxic heavy metals onto about 300 acres of land and into the Emory River near Harriman, Tenn. The ash was waste from the Kingston Fossil Plant, a coal-fired electric plant.

At least one longtime TVA critic, Alliance for Clean Energy Director Stephen Smith, said the state’s wording and speedy action speaks volumes.

“TDEC is showing that their patience has worn thin with TVA, and that’s pretty important,” Mr. Smith said. “I think the order requires a comprehensive look at this, and that’s good. ... TVA is a big enough organization that they can walk and chew gum at the same time.”

In the three weeks since the Kingston disaster, TVA has had two more spills — a smaller fly ash spill Friday at the Widows Creek Fossil Plant in Stevenson, Ala., and a sediment/sludge release into the Ocoee River on Jan. 4, In the Ocoee incident, decades of copper mining waste accidentally flowed through a dam’s sluice gate and into the Olympic Whitewater Center’s rafting course.

Harriman resident and farmer Sandy Gupton applauded the state’s order.

“I think they (TVA) should be held accountable,” she said. “TVA is still holding public meetings up here, saying they’ll do this and that, but some of the people who live close — well, things for us are still just status quo.”

Mrs. Gupton and her husband own a farm where water and sludge from the Kingston landfill has contaminated pasture and the spring that watered their cattle. Now they say they can’t allow their registered herd of beef cows and breeding bulls to graze there, and they must water them with costly city water.

Mrs. Gupton said TVA personnel have sampled water at the farm only once and never took samples from the pasture. She said she has yet to receive the results from that sampling, nor has she received results from two other samples made by TDEC and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“I think (TVA) needs penalties put on them,” she said.

The state order says TVA must turn over “all existing studies, reports and memoranda that are potentially relevant” to explaining the spill. The documents must be in an electronic format that can be searched by specific words and by phrases, according to the order.

The information may include structural integrity analyses, engineering studies, results of previous investigations, documents discussing the potential for failure and documents recommending limiting the use of the landfill “due to structural problems and water levels within,” the order states.