Tom Kilgore, TVA CEO, Talked To Angry Victims Yesterday, Senate Today

Tom Kilgore, CEO of the Tennessee Valley Authority, testified today before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee at 10 a.m. EST today.

VIDEO UPDATE: As we understand it, there are at least two places you can watch this hearing live. One is at the Senate committee site. A red button will appear on this page when the hearing is live. You will need RealPlayer and you will need to disable your popup blockers. Another option is WATE, a local ABC affiliate.
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A few tidbits from the hearing:

Barbara Boxer (D-CA)

"More than 1 billion gallons of waste rushed down the valley like a wave."

"The volume of ash and water was nearly 100 times greater than the amount of oil spilled in the Exxon Valdez disaster."

"Coal ash contaminates groundwater across the country."

"We have no federal standards for the disposal of this."

Here's Sen. Boxer's full opening statement at the coal ash hearing.

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Tom Udall (D-NM) on the fly ash piles that TVA keeps:
"Your plan is just to keep accumulating them and hope that they go away? I don't understand where you're headed here."

Tennessee Valley Authority CEO Tom Kilgore:
"If people don't want to come back, we're willing to purchase the property."

Kilgore was being hauled into answer questions about a disastrous dam break that led to coal ash from his federally-owned energy company spilling into the Emory and Clinch Rivers in Roane County, Tenn. The spill is in the running for worst environmental disaster in US history.

When Congress said earlier this week that it would bring Kilgore in, Bloomberg and others reported that the questions would focus on whether or not TVA was the beneficiary of "exaggerated deference" from other government agencies and regulators because of its unique makeup.

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, chaired by Sen. Barbara Boxer, was briefed yesterday by a group of residents carrying a jar of toxic coal sludge sample they took from the massive spill that ruined homes, killed wildlife and may currently be poisoning local water supply.

But Boxer wasn't the only one talking to residents yesterday. Kilgore, in Tennessee, attempted to answer the questions of some angry coal ash spill victims.

John Hoag, of Harriman, took Mr. Kilgore to task for being too concerned about money to take the safest possible fix years ago for previous dam leaks on the earthen landfill berm that gave way just before Christmas. The collapse dumped 1.1 billion gallons of wet fly ash sludge from 50 years of waste on more than 300 acres around the Kingston plant.

Mr. Kilgore told him he had seen nothing in those previous problems that made him think spending $25 million to line the landfill -- one of the options TVA considered -- was the right option.

"I did not find anything I thought was not an abnormal tradeoff," Mr. Kilgore said.

"What you call 'not an abnormal tradeoff' we call a disaster," Mr. Hoag shot back.

Comments

[powerboy]

I used to work with Mr. Tom Kilgore and he is keenly aware of risks associated with his business processes. Hindsight is 20-20; had his subordinates reported the potential risk before the breach, Tom would have taken the neccesary actions to mitigate the risk. In my opinion Mr. Kilgoe is extraordinarily competent as an operational manager. He will make things right!

Powerboy

[deepfreezevideo]

PART TWO
Do you know what the acronym EPCOT means?
It means Experimental Planned Community of Tomorrow.
As far back as the early 1960's WALT DISNEY was saying that communities, industries and business were interconnected and that they needed to exploit this interconnection in order to survive and be practical and profitable in the 21st century.
Again, nobody listened. The scientists back then were already saying that if we do not connect and co create, and co generate, that we would not survive. Nobody listened.
The father of the nuclear Navy, Admiral Hyman Rickover, was telling people in speeches that we had to develop alternatives to petroleum, as far back as 1958!!! Nobody listened.
Well, guess what? Turns out these people were right...and now it's the 21st century and all of a sudden it's time to pay the piper for not listening for sixty years!
Do you think people will start listening now?
Are humans smarter than yeast?

[deepfreezevideo]

PART ONE
Look, the biggest part of this problem is that for the last sixty years industries and businesses have operated in an apparent vacuum, thinking that what one does has no effect on everything else in the environment, in the community, in the system itself.
This is 20th century thinking, and the most bizarre part of it is that, for the last half of that 20th century, scientists have been saying "hey, listen, everything is connected, and industries have to connect to each other"....but nobody listened.
The coal ash contains arsenic, mercury and cadmium. ALL of these are useful materials that are used in business, even the ash itself has an industrial use.
The pig farmer in Alabama can connect to a waste to energy company which will process the pig crap for its hydrocarbon content, the landfill in Arkansas can connect to the power generating plant which will process the landfill for the methane gas, all of this is connected.

TO BE CONTINUED

[hollybork]

TVA should be compelled to buy the properties of all people who have been inundated with sludge, plus some money for the inconvenience and expense of moving. That would protect the people adequately. If they can clean it up to a standard approved by the EPA, then they can sell the property later on. For the time being, nobody should live there.

[deepfreezevideo]

It might cost a little more, but all that cadmium, mercury and ash have industrial uses.
TVA will have to decide to process these materials out of the sludge because there is no practical place to put all of it.
They can use the proceeds to offset the cost of the cleanup, and industry will be able to use the materials. The cadmium can be used in batteries, the mercury can be used in electronic circuitry and lighting, and the ash itself also has several industrial uses that can be exploited.
Since this is an unconventional situation involving a toxic cleanup we can forget about the direct profit potential but it doesn't change the fact that TVA is going to have to do more than simply scoop it all up and put it somewhere.

[JohnsonDemocrat]

Someone should borrow a page from Erin Brockovich movie and make the TVA officials all drink a cup of their safe water.

[deepfreezevideo]

She's already involved in the pending litigation.

[mgtillyer]

Oh no, dana. no mention of testing. The area right where it happened in Harriman is on different drinking water than Kingston. But guess what, in parts of the the Emory River, the water flows backwards. So TVA's solution? We'll build a damn (though that hasn't happened yet and there's no timeline for it). That way, all that mess.,all that toxic crap, Is in my parents backyard. Now they, and all their neighbors, the ones who haven't heard squat from TVA about buying property, are living on the worlds largest ashtray.

As I mentioned before. My parents are in their 60s. My sister and her two young children live with them. Once the coal ash dries out and you inhale it in the air, It can cause heart disease, kidney failure, birth defects, problems with reproductive organs, cancer, brain abnormalities, I could go on and on.

But again, TVA says "water is okay."

[mgtillyer]

Sorry about the clerical errors below. I should've proofed. oh well.

Grayowl - you're not hearing more from regulatory authorities in Tennessee because the Tennessee Valley Authority doesn't have any. They have no oversight. Only deference. There's no oversight for the clean-up. There's no deadline.

TVA officials are telling people the water is okay. They're telling them that the EPA is getting dangerous levels of arsenic in the water because of the meaurements the EPA is using. They say their water samples are showing the water is just fine. And they were telling people that from day 2, I believe. Most people don't realize water samples need to be taken from SEVERAL places. REPEATEDLY. And it can take 7 to 10 days to get the results back. Even today, there hasn't been enough time to accurately determine the levels of dangerous materials in that water.

They told people that the fish kill was probably a result of the cold temperatures.

They told people that the failure in the dike was "bad luck" - even though that dike had a blowout in 2003 and 2006 and a preliminary report in October of 2008 indicated a breach but the report determined it was not a big deal.

[danawv]

I didn't hear much or any mention of the need for medical tests for people who were may have ingested arsenic during the time that TVA was telling people they just needed to boil the water -- as if boiling would get rid of arsenic? It's crazy. Regardless, there is a very urgent for comprehensive medical tests of everyone who may have drank toxic water or breathed in the dust.

Poisoning from heavy metals is terrible. www.unitedmountaindefense.org to learn more

[mgtillyer]

"If people don't want to come back, we're willing to purchase the property." He's talking about, I think, 3 families whose homes were demolished and therefore CAN'T come back. What about the people who can't get to their homes because the road leading to their house is gone? They're still there. What about the people who used to swim in this waters and boat in these waters and now won't let their children or their pets go in the backyard? They're still there. But on one side of the river all the way to the middle, the water is GONE. Replaced with toxic waste. My parents are 65 years old. They built their home. This was their dream home. Their retirement home. They don't want to move. But what choice are they left with? They're once beautiful oasis is now a toxic dump. And Tom Kilgore and his people haven't said a damn thing to my parents or most of the residents along this stretch of shoreline other than we're going to clean it up. There's not been an offer to buy their property. And again, it's not like they want to move. TVA won't let the press in to their meetings with the residents. They won't let the attorneys in. And they separate the meetings from one side of the river to the other. I posted a video on youtube. Search "TVA coal ash - before and after" to see what the residents have lost.

[GrayOwl]

Good for Sen. Boxer in this one. But I trust she and her colleagues will not allow this glib CEO's blatherings to stand unchallenged. He says the TVA is willing to buy the property of those who choose not to come back. Well, this is the least the TVA could do. But it does not address the attachment a person could have for a particular piece of land. It can be worth far more than some appraised value. I still shudder to think how we're hearing little from the regulatory authories in Tennessee. This shows how powerful the TVA is (read that: how much in the TVA's hip pocket the alleged guardians of the people are). Is anyone tracking campaign contributions, freebies (trips, visits to cabins, whatever)? Thanks to the HuffPost for staying with this.

[Tom Joad]

buying up the affected properties also doesn't clean them or the adjacent wetlands/waterways either. The compounds in these sludges could have residence times that are decades to centuries long.

[Tom Joad]

"I did not find anything I thought was not an abnormal tradeoff," Mr. Kilgore said.

What could that statement possibly mean? It's a double negative, so, apparently, everything he found was an abnormal tradeoff? What is an 'abnormal tradeoff' anyway? Are the American people fed up with such double speak from CEOs yet?

[rwt1138]

Yeah, we are, but what are we going to do? They are the nobility in our modern neo-feudal society. This is all theater anyway and won't amount to anything tangible for the serfs affected by this.

[BBackSoon]

“neo-feudal society”!

That more or less sums it up doesn’t it?

You know I don’t begrudge the rich for being rich; I just want a fair shake. All I ask is don’t poison me and leave me enough money at the end of the month for some fun.

[deepfreezevideo]

Not neo-feudal anymore...it's gone full feudal at this point.
It's just that the peasants don't realize it yet because their telescreens tell them not to worry, put another flag sticker on their SUV and keep supporting the war on terra.