July122009
In the TVA’s Garden
Today, I visited the town of 
Norris, which is about an hour and half drive west from the farm. Modeled after English garden cities, its small, neat houses sit on well-tended plots along winding roads. The Tennessee Valley Authority built the town in 1933 to house workers and administrators building nearby Norris Dam. To someone who grew up in today’s suburbs, Norris looks like a quaint, well-to-do, but not unusual little town. But to the TVA workers, Norris must have been something entirely new. Most of them came from the surrounding countryside, where poor farming practices had allowed rain and floods to literally wash the tops off the land. The term “dirt farm” would be appropriate. Norris, by contrast, embodied everything the TVA hoped to bring to the Tennessee Valley: a lush landscape, individual prosperity, and an economy based on industry as well as agriculture.
Thanks to the TVA, the dirt farms are gone, but now east Tennessee faces new problems. I walked into Archer Food Center—which, like Norris Middle School, Norris Drug Store, and most of the town’s houses, remains from TVA days—and saw today’s Knoxville News Sentinel. “Under Pressure” read the headline in the center of the front page, and above it was a before-and-after picture of TVA’s Kingston coal plant.
In the middle of the night on December 23, one of the pools holding coal ash generated by the Kingston plant burst, sending 5 million tons of sludge into the adjacent Emory River. Needless to say, it’s a huge mess in many respects, one that won’t be cleaned up anytime soon. Several homes were destroyed. Despite early attempts by the TVA to deny it, it’s now clear that the coal sludge contains high amounts of toxic chemicals. The estimated price tag on the cleanup is approaching $1 billion dollars (although completion is still years away), and lawsuits are looming. Somehow there’s still debate about what went wrong at the Kingston plant (this was the subject of the News Sentinel article), despite the fact that the dike that separated the coal ash from the Emory River was fifty years old. More frightening is that the TVA has eleven coal plants, all located next to rivers, and most of which—like the Kingston plant—were never designed to operate this long.
