Even as late as Sunday, the Environmental Protection Agency was seeking to downplay risks from the billion-gallon spill of coal ash in Tennessee by implying that arsenic-contaminated river water would not cause a problem even if you drank just a bit. The next day, the agency made something of an about-face.
In an EPA Region 4 press release issued on Sunday, the agency said that “unless people regularly drink untreated river water, the arsenic should not cause any adverse health effects.” On Monday, the EPA, working with state and local agencies as part of the Roane County Joint Information Center, had this to say in a press release:
“Though there is no indication of acute health effects resulting from contact with the coal fly ash material, it is recommended that direct contact with the coal fly ash be avoided, including preventing children’s play in affected areas and keeping pets away from the coal fly ash material . . . These precautions are in accordance with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Centers for Disease Control recommendations for public health protection.”
I suppose the author of the first press release wasn’t aware of those sensible EPA and CDC recommendations.
The New York Times is now reporting that more than 2.2 million pounds of toxic materials from the TVA’s coal-fired power plant were dumped into the waste impoundment that burst open. “And the holding pond, at the Kingston Fossil Plant, a TVA plant 40 miles west of Knoxville, contained many decades’ worth of these deposits,” Times reporter Shaila Dewan writes.
TVA officials had to know this when they were busy telling the public that the sludge was not toxic. That they actually thought people would believe them is shocking but perhaps not surprising.
Some of the authority’s many false reassurances were patently absurd. For example, right after the disaster it suggested that residents boil their drinking water — which kills pathogens but does nothing to remove contaminants. A little more than two days after the disaster, when concerns about health effects were running high, the TVA stated in a press release that the huge spill posed no threat to the environment. But residents as well as millions of Americans who were accessing photos, videos and personal accounts of the disaster on the Web, could see the mountains of sludge rising from the river — some as high 50 feet tall — and the scores of dead fish washing up on the shores of the Emory River.
TVA: This poses “no threat to the environment.” (Video by Jason Carpenter)
The TVA also sought to falsely minimize the potential hazards with the misleading statement, reported by the Associated Press, that the bulk of the coal ash “consists of inert material.” While most of the materials in the spill may be inert, harm could come from very tiny amounts of toxic materials such as arsenic.
The TVA did little better with the dead fish. At first, spokesperson Gil Francis maintained that the authority’s environmental team had actually not seen any dead fish. Maybe so, but photographs and video of the die off were circulating widely on the Internet. So then Francis suggested that the fish had died from cold weather.
Two days after a billion gallons of toxic coal ash spilled into the environment fish are turning up dead and citizens are supposed to believe they died from a cold snap? They could be forgiven for not taking taking this seriously.
And then came yet another explanation: the fish had been violently lifted out of the water by the tsunami of sludge and had suffocated as a result. At least this had the virtue of sounding plausible. But by this point, days of dissembling by the TVA had left many people distrustful of anything the authority said.
“They think that the public is stupid, that they can’t put two and two together,” said Sandy Gupton, a registered nurse quoted in today’s New York Times story.
Christian Grantham points out in his blog at Nashville is Talking that many bloggers are now accusing the TVA of lying about the quality of drinking water. “The fact is they didn’t,” Grantham writes. “The EPA found all the same contaminants the TVA did in river water.” But many people simply don’t trust the TVA even with simple, objective toxicity reports. And I suspect that this trust can never be won back, if it ever existed in the first place.
Imagine how residents affected by the catastrophe would have felt if both the TVA and EPA had communicated right from the beginning in a way that emphasized clarity, objectivity, honesty, transparency, and a tone of public responsibility. It’s true that the TVA was going to have a tough time from the outset, since it was responsible for the catastrophe in the first place. And that made it especially important for the authority to get public communications right. In the case of the EPA, there really is no excuse for not getting things right at the outset, with a team of skilled communicators who could serve as honest brokers of information.
Consider how the situation might be different today if both the TVA and EPA had followed these words of advice from a crisis communications plan developed by Sandra K. Clawson at Northern Illinois University:
“One thing to remember that is crucial in a crisis is tell it all, tell it fast and tell the truth.”
One Comment
Wonderful article. My parents live on the ashtray. I, too, am frustrated by all the lies, half-truths, misrepresentations and total disregard for the people TVA says they’re putting “first”. I published a video on youtube of the before and after. Search, “TVA before and after”. I’m working on a new video I hope to have out in the next day or so on the very subject of your article. It might make a nice compliment to this article.