Coal Ash in Alabama

   

A TVA coal ash retaining pond burst in 2009.

  A coalition of environmental groups has released a report titled "Closing The Floodgates", about water pollution from coal ash, the remnants from coal-fired power plants.
    About Alabama, it says:

The Black Warrior is not free from coal plant pollution

further downstream, either

.

After leaving Bankhead Lake and passing by Tuscaloosa, the river winds

through small towns and farm country where, near the

town of Demopolis, Alabama Power’s Greene County

plant sits. It, too, has been among the dirtiest plants in

the country based on its dumping of toxic coal ash in

some years, and it lacks limits on toxics other than a lenient, monthly average arsenic limit.*

Trains are loaded with coal ash for a ride to Alabama in 2009..

     The Southern Company owns Alabama and Georgia power, and announced in January it will close down fifteen Georgia coal and oil-fired plants...but no word yet on any closing in Alabama, where there are six such plants operating. 

[*The irony here is that there are hundreds of tons of coal ash in Perry County. Alabama. It came from the Tennessee disaster and was deposited at the largest commercial landfill East of The Mississippi.]