TVA – Peck’s Bad Boy?
March 14, 2009
“Repeat offender” could be an apt classification of the Tennessee Valley Authority since 1933. But TVA is still running loose, spreading mayhem, and spending money it does not have or cannot even borrow at a reasonable rate.
It’s not just mischief TVA plays as in the fictional character Peck; TVA impacts without much congressional oversight the daily lives of millions of people in TVA’s vast 80,000 square-mile territory. TVA is a monopoly with rights no other federal agency has. TVA makes its own rules and then enforces them.
Setting electricity power rates at whim, the TVA “gets away with it” simply because it can. No other elected official in the region can tell the TVA what to do except perhaps the governor of Tennessee.
It’s time now for the Congress to wake up and “do something about it”; it has shirked its duty for decades. Even Sen. Barbara Boxer said as much in the senate hearing on TVA’s Kingston’s dam break. But all she heard was “we’re going to fix it”.
TVA somehow believes that all it takes is to say they are going to do something, effectively distracting attention from never taking responsibility for their own mistakes. This happens not just once in a while but as a repeat offender over much of TVA’s history of bungling, misjudgments and serious mismanagements. You might say, well, since no one is ever fired from the TVA those mistakes must not be too serious. And that would be a wrong assumption.
Here are a few of the latest ones:
· Even when told by professional inspectors that the Kingston ash dam required extensive repairs, TVA chose the cheap route and just patched it. A catastrophe followed. A similar but much smaller breach happened at one of TVA’s Alabama plants.
· EPA now calls for a survey of all such ash holding dams in the country. Ash-waste ponds, some quite large, totally may be prohibited in the future because of their hazardous wastes. That makeover alone will cost utilities billions of dollars.
· TVA has known for a long while that air pollution from their coal-fired plants were emitting toxic wastes that could have been reduced as current technology became available. It would be expected of a federal agency whose primary concern should be the health of citizens impacted by their noxious emissions.
· It took a lawsuit by the state of North Carolina against TVA to cause a federal judge to require a speed up of four of TVA’s coal-fired plants nearest North Carolina in the installation of state-of-the-art air pollution scrubbers. The scrubbers are very costly and some electricity production is lost. TVA knew about the dangers to the health of North Carolina citizens and the decimation of forests in the Great Smoky Mountains.
· What the federal judge did not do was to require similar action by TVA to install upgrades to other plants deemed to be too far away to affect North Carolina. It is patently obvious that other states in TVA’s seven-state domain should require the same kinds of upgrades for their citizens.
· Having lived downwind to the Colbert plant in North Alabama, I can attest that the air pollution there is bad; that TVA also knows about it and has delayed installing scrubbers because of cost factors. Investor-owned utilities would not even think of evading their responsibilities of abiding by both state and federal laws thus avoiding stiff fines.
· With declining sales and increasing costs it is time to liquidate the TVA for the health-sake of millions of people in TVA’s filthy flume of air pollution. Hopefully, some of TVA’s $25 billion debt also can be satisfied.
· While TVA has fought just about every federally instituted regulation it thought it could get away with by claiming “sovereign immunity”, the district judge in North Carolina blew away that cover and found the TVA guilty.
· It took TVA’s Office of the Inspector General two years to come up with a report that apparently many, many of TVA VISA credit cards were being used for personal reasons. And in one such instance a TVA supervisor okayed $18 million in credit card expenses in just two days. Management of the TVA if there still is a TVA after all this, should be changed and the sooner the better.
· There is good reason for TVA’s foot-dragging and recalcitrance to move into the modern era of electricity production. Their system of pay calls for bonuses for the cheapest way to maintain production often at the expense not only of safety as in the Kingston disaster but in the proper maintenance of old, outdated production systems.
TVA for too long has relied on its “future action” statements as a way to get off the hook; now is the time to reel in the TVA and to get the American people off the hook.
Ernest Norsworthy
emnorsworthy@earthlink.net