Black Tide

Just days before Christmas last year, an environmental disaster one hundred times the size of the Exxon Valdez (yes, you read that right) unfolded on a riverbank in eastern Tennessee. A wave of poisonous sludge buried a town…along with the myth of clean coal

By Sean Flynn

Tom Grizzard shot his first two geese in the fall of 1961, one in the morning and the other in the evening, and both from the tip of a slim peninsula bordered by the Emory River to the east and a spring-fed inlet to the west. The morning kill landed on a small island where Tom and his father would forage for arrowheads left by the Cherokee, and the other, the twilight bird, flopped into a shallow pond of gray sludge across the channel.

When Tom was a boy, back in the ’40s, that pond had been a swimming hole, a clean pool notched into the edge of the Emory. But then, in the ’50s, the Tennessee Valley Authority built the Kingston Fossil Plant on the spot where the Emory empties into the Clinch and just north of the town, Kingston, for which it was named. It was the largest power station in the world: nine boilers that fed steam into nine turbines that spun 1,400 megawatts of electricity out through miles and miles of wire to the nuclear labs down the road at Oak Ridge and farther still, into the hills and hollows of east Tennessee and Kentucky. The boilers were fired with coal, 14,000 tons a day brought in by trains a hundred cars long, and when the coal burned it left piles of ash that had to be disposed of somewhere, which happened to be on top of Tom’s old swimming hole. Bulldozers pushed clay into a low dike surrounding the spot where Tom used to splash and then filled the cavity with fly ash, the finer particles that fluttered up into the flues. The ash was then watered to keep it from blowing all over Roane County, which gave it the consistency and color of hardening cement.