Fines for TVA's ash spill

Among the enormous cost of $1.2 billion that TVA estimates it ultimately will pay to clean up the devastating Kingston ash spill, the $11.5 million fine levied Monday by Tennessee's environmental regulators seems relatively insignificant. Compared to the damage the spill caused, it is barely a slap on the wrist. But in this case, the symbolic value counts.

The Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation hardly could let TVA off the hook. Even though it's apparent that TVA will have to roll the costs of the fines, as with all other cleanup costs, int o the electric rates that TVA's customers must pay, it is essential that TVA be held accountable by both the state and the federal Environmental Protection Agency, which has yet to levy any fines.

TVA's management -- which is clearly responsible for the spill -- must be required to acknowledge its management failures and negligent oversight of operational procedures and standards that led to the spill. The fines help establish that sense of responsibility, accountability and fault, and reasonably so.

We're aware that TVA's management has moved gradually since the spill to acknowledge the scope of its failure. But its initial response was to attempt to minimize the extent and toxic nature of the spill. Then it seemed ready to bury any blame -- any notion of its own apparent causal incompetence and negligence as factors in the spill -- by seeking and controlling the range of multiple consultants' studies to assess how the spill might have happened.

In fact, one of the studies still made clear that TVA's regular dam inspectors were kept separate and not made part of the apparently lax inspection regime for the massive earthen berms that held back the lake of 40 years of wet ash storage. That occurred not at just the Kingston plant, but at other plants as well. Perhaps it was TVA's silo bureaucracy: you take care of your area, I'll take care of mine.

Moreover, TVA had been among the American utilities that had resisted the EPA's consideration in 2000 of requiring replacement of wet-pond ash disposal with a shift to dry, lined landfills for coal ash -- the system that European utilities use, and that TVA has come to accept in the wake of the Kingston spill.

In any case, the berm rupture that allowed the spill, even if aggravated by heavy rains, occurred mainly because the earthen dams had become obviously inadequate to hold the volume of wet ash that TVA continued to put in them out of complacency and negligence bred over decades of that ongoing operation. Periodic heavy rains are normal in the Tennessee Valley. If TVA wasn't prepared for that at Kingston, or at any of coal-fired plant and related ash-pond sites, it might as well turn in its portfolio. To suggest that heavy rains caused the spill was to implicitly acknowledge incompetence.

The result was that, during the night of Dec. 22, 2008, the earthen dam holding one of TVA's larger ash ponds burst, freeing a rushing wall of 1.2 million gallons of coal-combustion ash slurry to flood over 300 acres of land, carrying a house across a road and choking a portion of the Emery River's main channel. Part of that ash load, in turn, was carried out into the Clinton and Tennessee rivers.

Dredging and removal of the ash spill, in the water and on land, won't be finished for some time. And 18 months into the clean-up, TVA has spent just -- and we say just in the relative sense -- $500 million of the $1.2 billion it estimates the clean-up to cost.

That, unfortunately, is wasted money and effort that never should have been required. The fine doesn't make the burden of this environmental tragedy in Kingston any easier to bear, but it makes clear that TVA is unquestionably responsible for it, and for violating the state's water quality control act and solid waste disposal act.

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