When TVA dumps, everybody else jumps
June 7, 2009
When you’re dealing with a large, multibillion dollar federal agency that doesn’t hesitate to throw its weight (and money) around, what is about to happen to Perry County Alabama shouldn’t be too surprising.
That is where the TVA plans to dump tens of thousands of train carloads of toxic waste from the Kingston, Tennessee ash dam disaster. Perry County is one of the poorest in the state and unemployment there now stands at over 30%. Not that this TVA intrusion would add many employees, maybe a few dozen at the most at a private landfill.
The Kingston disaster happened on December 22, 2008 and TVA yet has come up with a report on its root cause and why it was allowed to happen in the first place.
There have been Congressional hearings this year, one just last week where the chairman of the subcommittee with TVA oversight asked a lower level TVA employee when the report would be available. His stuttering, overly qualified and vague answer was not forthcoming. It was the next day at a TVA board meeting that CEO Tom Kilgore gave a less vague and non-assuring answer, “two or three weeks” when the report would be available.
The reason this report is so important to TVA is that it hopes it will exonerate TVA management and employees from what apparently is gross negligence and from possible criminal prosecution.
They would kill the report entirely if they could because TVA management was forewarned in ample time to take corrective action. TVA took the cheap route and today that resulted in a giant billion dollar mistake.
Typically, TVA claims innocence in every management mistake it has made since actually the beginning of the agency in 1933. “Heads do not roll” at TVA when mistakes occur, promotions, yes, but nobody ever gets fired.
Some of TVA’s gross errors have caused the agency to be $25 billion in debt today with no chance of ever repaying it. The carrying charge on that debt is about a billion dollars a year.
It is past time for the governors of the seven states where TVA supplies over 8 million customers with federal electricity to stand up and say, enough!
Governor Riley boldly killed a “bribes” in lieu of taxes bill recently that would shift some of that TVA rebate money more to the northern counties of Alabama. I applaud him on that move.
The next step is to give the TVA a date certain to turn over (sell) its electricity production capacity in Alabama to other utility companies, local utilities or to proceed to conservatorship under the control of the State of Alabama.
In the short term, all Alabamians should resist with every tool at hand to stop the federal TVA from dumping on Alabama once again, this time in Perry County.
Ernest Norsworthy
emnorsworthy@earthlink.net
http://norsworthyopinion.com