Swan Pond Road: The Kingston TN Coal Disaster

I headed down to Kingston, TN ten days after the largest coal ash disaster in the history of the U.S. A catastrophic failure in the coal ash retention pond caused a 20 foot river swell and poured out 1.3 billion gallons of coal fly ash over 300 acres of waterways, land and people’s homes. I headed down to survey the site and speak with the local residents, all who were cordial and taking the disaster in stride. There are a lot of mixed feelings down there, so we tried to capture that in this video’s point of view and report on the matter as objectively as possible. The spill is really a national disaster, however. Environmental groups have swooped in to show that there is “no clean coal.” Many of the residents have embraced them, but some locals really just want to concentrate all their efforts on cleaning up the community.  

United Mountain Defense is collecting money for those that are sick. We’re covering more information on the spill over at Discovery Earth Live. 

I want to personally thank Jeff Wyatt Wilson from Wilson Independent who traveled with me and edited the video together. Thanks Jeff!

This entry was posted on Friday, January 9th, 2009 at 9:44 am. It is filed under activism, videos and tagged with "clean coal", coal ash break, coal ash spill, coal break, coal industry disasters, coal mining, dirty coal, Harriman coal spill, Kingston Coal Spill, Swan Pond Road, Swan Pond Road disaster, Tennessee coal spill, toxic coal ash spill. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.