Coal ash waste is a dangerous and growing pollution problem in the U.S.  Watch the video on the bottom of this article describing waste problems from coal, the waste they are now hauling into poor areas of Alabama by the truckload.

Since the disaster one year ago, the Kingston “disaster ash,” as it is known here, “has spread like a cancer across the Southeast,”

An aerial view of the 2008 Kingston Fossil Plant coal fly ash slurry spill in Tennessee. (Image: Tennessee Valley Authority)

On the third day before Christmas in 2008, the people living along the Emory River in East Tennessee were listening to songs about a “white Christmas” like everybody else in the country, trying to look forward and not back. . . . . Instead of a white Christmas, though, people like Steve Scarborough of the Dagger Kayak and Canoe Company woke up to a black-gray mess of epic proportions, a river full of toxic coal ash from the Tennessee Valley Authority’s coal-fired power plant at Kingston, Tennessee.

“There are no excuses for this,” Scarborough said. “One of the dumbest thing humans do is dig coal out of the ground and burn it.”

The largely affluent population of the area demanded action and an immediate cleanup of the largest environmental disaster in American history in the lower 48 states, second only to the Exxon Valdez spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska, in the spring of 1989. So within four months, by March 20, TVA began dredging the mountain of coal ash out of the river and shipping it by train to a landfill in the poor Black Belt of Alabama.

One year later, on the first anniversary of the second worst environmental disaster in American history, while the people in Tennessee are hiring lawyers and suing TVA and reading story after story in the local newspapers about their plight while the cleanup continues, the poor people of Perry County, Alabama, where TVA found a place to dump the toxic ash, are not singing Christmas carols. They are locked in their homes with their air conditioners running even in winter, trying to stay out of the gaseous fumes from the landfill where the coal ash is piling up on top of household garbage by the freight train load.

There’s not a newspaper or a TV station anywhere around telling their story, and most of them are so poor and living in such a remote, rural area that they can’t even turn to the Internet, either to voice their concerns and get organized or find out what’s going on to help them, if there is anything. They are not hearing much out of their local government officials or the congressman elected to represent them either, so they are living in the dark with a nagging fear for the future.

North of the landfill, other residents with nowhere to go to escape the gaseous smell from the liquid waste being dumped from [...]