The Tennessee Valley Authority says cleaning up the site of the ash spill at its Kingston plant will take until 2013. That’s after an earthen dam broke there one year ago, spilling over a billion gallons of ash sludge into a nearby river and countryside.
TVA is still working to speed up shipment of coal ash from the site to a landfill in Alabama.
TVA President Tom Kilgore says dredging ash out of the rivers is TVA’s first priority, and is about 2/3 complete, with the rest finished in May of next year.
TVA has been dredging ash out faster than it can send it by train to Perry County, Alabama. Kilgore says about a million cubic yards are waiting to be sent.
“We’re building some additional rail facilities so we can begin to move more trains off the site. We were averaging about 65 cars a day; yesterday we sent I think 105 cars out.”
Once the dredging finishes, TVA will switch to what it calls the “non-time critical” part of the recovery – cleaning the surrounding land. Kilgore expects that to go on roughly four years.
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Kilgore says aside from the billion-dollar cleanup at Kingston, TVA will spend another billion closing its other wet ash storage sites.
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