Staff Photo by Gillian Bolsover -- Police sit in the parking lot of the Widows Creek TVA plant in Stevenson, Alabama Friday. TVA workers discovered a leak Friday morning in a gypsum pond that flows into the nearby creek.

STEVENSON, Ala. - Less than three weeks after the Tennessee Valley Authority suffered the nation’s worst spill at a coal power plant in Kingston, Tenn., another ash pond leaked up to 10,000 gallons of ash-laden water at TVA’s Widows Creek Steam Plant today.

TVA officials said the leak from a pipe at one of the coal ash ponds here was repaired this morning, but not before enough water, ash and gypsum had leaked out of a pond to overflow into Widows Creek that flows into the Tennessee River. TVA spokesman John Moulton said the leak was found about 6 a.m. at one of the ponds used to store residue from the air scrubber at the Widows Creek Steam Plant.

TVA spokesman Gil Francis said officials did not know how long the pipe had been leaking, but that employees do walk-throughs to check for problems.

“All these ponds are looked at daily,” Mr. Francis said.

The Widows Creek pond leak today was less than .01 percent as much as the Dec. 22 spill from ash detention pond in Kingston, where nearly 1.1 billion gallons of ash and muck blanketed nearly 300 acres of river and land north of the Kingston Steam Plant. But a spokesman for the Alabama’s environmental regulatory agency said the Widows Creek spill was still the only spill of this type he can remember from one of the ash ponds used to store coal ash at any of Alabama’s nine coal-fired power plants.

“We have dispatched personnel from our Decatur office and we continue to investigate the incident,” said Jerome Hand, public relations director for the Alabama Department of Environmental Management. “Initially, we did not detect any harm to aquatic life or water quality in the area, but we are continuing to monitor the water around the plant.”

Mr. Moulton said the leak did not result in any injuries to plant employees or present any immediate health threats to the community.

“Some material overflowed into Widows Creek, although most of the leakage remained in the settling pond,” he said. “We have notified appropriate state authorities.”

Mr. Moulton said the gypsum pond flows into a nearby settling pond where the gypsum and other coal residue is dewatered.

Gypsum ponds hold limestone spray from TVA’s scrubbers used to remove sulfur dioxide from coal-plant emissions. Gypsum contains calcium sulfate, which is commonly used in drywall, wallboard and other construction materials.

Environmentalists said a second leak at a TVA coal plant in only 18 days raises questions about the integrity of the ash ponds where potentially toxic coal ash is dumped.

“This incident at Widows Creek was obviously much, much smaller than what we saw in Kingston, but the timing for TVA couldn’t have been any worse,” said Stephen Smith, executive director for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. “This spills highlight the dangers of using wet ash disposal systems and we need to phase them out altogether.”