Staff Photo by Margaret Fenton
Appalachian State University associate professor of biology Shea Tuberty, right, and graduate student Danny Jackson pulled fish out of the Tennessee River on Wednesday near Kingston, Tenn. A team of researchers from the Tennessee Aquarium and Appalachian State University have taken soil samples and fish from various points along the Tennessee, Clinch and Emory Rivers, periodically testing the biological welfare of the area following the TVA coal ash spill in Dec. 2008.

In a quiet, beautiful stretch of the Tennessee River about 20 river miles upstream of Rhea and Meigs counties, scientists from the Tennessee Aquarium Research Institute and Appalachian State University on Wednesday found coal ash.

With a blue heron carrying a stick high above the trees to its onshore nest and an osprey sailing above the soft ripples looking for prey, this idyllic view, doesn’t look polluted, but it is.

Coal ash, loosed into the Emory River at Harriman, Tenn., after a TVA coal ash berm collapsed last December, now has washed at least 10 miles downstream from the spill site. Three days before Christmas, ash belched into the Emory River and 300 acres of rural residential land on its far shore.

“I’m still hoping it doesn’t mean anything for Chattanooga,” said Anna George, Tennessee Aquarium Research Institute’s director and chief researcher.

The researchers say the ash — migrating downstream with each heavy rain and continual dredging as TVA tries to clean up the mountain of spilled waste from the Kingston Fossil Plant — can bode no good for Watts Bar Reservoir and the Tennessee River.

“My biggest fear is that it could cause a collapse of the fisheries in the Watts Bar game fish, and that’s a huge recreational industry here,” Dr. George said.

TVA and EPA officials have said they are asking contractors to work as quickly as they can with the dredging to try to prevent seasonal heavy rains from pushing more ash out of the Emory River, through the Clinch River and on downstream in the Tennessee.

However, already in March and again this week, Dr. George and fellow researcher Shay Tuberty, an associate professor from Appalachian State, have found emaciated, deformed and sick fish.

Dr. Tuberty said autopsies of fish recovered from research during their March trip were very alarming. Many had no reproductive organs at all.

“No ovaries, No eggs. Nothing,” he said. “We were completely unable to tell if the fish were male or female.

“Others were emaciated. Some I don’t even know how they were alive,” he said.

“I was appalled at the condition of the fish,” Dr. George said.

The scientists say the problems are directly related to the ash and the resulting high selenium levels in the water and sediment. Selenium alters proteins and amino acids, Dr. Tuberty said, alterations that produce changes in hormones and, consequently, mutating the fish.

From their earlier studies, the scientists reported that the Emory River is at a “tipping point.”

Fish reproductive systems soon could be so damaged from the toxic levels of selenium that their eggs and young will die, and their population eventually will be eliminated, Dr. Tuberty said.

The ash may have migrated further downstream, but the scientists said that Wednesday’s work on the river bottom at Tennessee River Mile 564.6 was as far as their research could carry them this week. They only had two days in which to work.

On Tuesday, TVA CEO Tom Kilgore admitted to members of the U.S. Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment that a 1987 report found problems with the Kingston ash landfill. The fix in that report called for daily inspections of the berms, he said.

“We know now that was not enough,” Mr. Kilgore told the panel Tuesday.

The congressional testimony came on the heels of the public release of TVA Inspector General Richard Moore’s review of the ash spill and TVA’s “root cause” study.

Mr. Moore found that TVA failed for more than 20 years to heed warnings that might have prevented the spill.

Donna Lisenby, Watauga Riverkeeper and a research associate with Appalachian State and Dr. Tuberty, said TVA dredging is adding to the ash migration and selenium problems.

“Wet-dredging ash out of water is the worst way to do it,” she said, explaining that the heaviest particles of ash will settle to the bottom, gradually be silted over by river mud and tend to stay there if left alone.

But when it is dredged, she said, “they’re just resuspending some of it in the water and the heavy metals are released to move on downstream.”

The Emory flows into the Clinch River about a mile downstream of the spill, where ash still covers at least one Emory finger channel. The Clinch flows for about a mile before it empties into the Tennessee River just south of Kingston.

On the bright side, Dr. George said, had a similar spill occurred a few miles higher on the Clinch, some fish species likely already would have been made extinct.