TVA's unanswered question

In the wake of the catastrophic ash spill at the Kingston power plant, TVA has just hired a second senior vice president of communications, for $275,000 a year, to handle growing public relations demands and bring what TVA chairman Mike Duncan described Tuesday as "clarity and transparency" to information about the giant utility's operations. Here's the first question he, or some qualified board member or manager, should answer, because it hasn't been answered yet:

Why should TVA need to pay multiple consultants millions of dollars to ascertain how and why it allowed the Kingston failure when waste ash management goes to the core of its industrial experience and presumed expertise?

The government-owned agency is, after all, the nation's single largest electric utility. It has made coal-fired plants (with their ubiquitous ash-disposal ponds) the backbone of its massive power production for seven decades since it was established as a keystone in FDR's New Deal programs. Shouldn't it already be the single most astute utility expert on coal-ash management?

How did TVA fail?

TVA is now spending millions of dollars on several overlapping consultants' studies in the aftermath of the Kingston spill of 1.2 billion gallons of toxic ash sludge accumulated over more than four decades.

The studies are to determine how and why the flood of ash broke out of containment ponds, and what to do about scores of other decades-old, similarly constructed toxic ash ponds and storage sites at TVA's 11 coal-fired plants.

Some of these studies seem redundant. Some report conflicting views. And some decisions by TVA management -- such as its recent public reclassification to the EPA of just four of its 11 plant ash sites to "high" hazard, leaving the rest of the similar sites rated as "low" hazard on information from an incomplete study -- seem capriciously disingenuous.

Here's a brief overview:

* There's the two-year, $10 million study TVA commissioned Santec Consulting Services to review all 11 ash containment sites. It is this unfinished study that prompted TVA to elevate its hazard warning at four sites, and to suddenly initiate $15 million in what it described as "normal maintenance" to reinforce earth berms and dams at the sites.

* Another is the $3 million, three-year study by Oak Ridge Associated Universities into alternative ways to contain and process coal-combustion ash.

* AECOM USA delivered in June its initial report on a $3 million study for TVA on why the Kingston ash-pond earth-berm ruptured. It found, essentially, that an enormous ash mound piled high above the water-line collapsed, riding a bottom layer of ash slime into the berm wall and rupturing it.

* An engineering expert, Barry Thacker, who evaluated the disaster for his own mining and utility clients, and whose report went also to the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation for its analysis of TVA's epic disaster, said the AECOM report was "smoke and mirrors." Mr. Thacker said the pond was simply too full of liquid and unable to contain the hydraulic pressure of the heavy rains that poured off its ash heaps last December. TVA later said it had reduced the fluid levels of its wet ash ponds to gain a safety "margin."

* This week, the consulting group McKenna, Long and Aldridge LLP of Atlanta, hired by TVA for $2 million, issued a blistering assessment of TVA's coal-ash storage operations. It charged that TVA lacked the "necessary systems, controls and culture" to properly manage its operations at the 11 coal-fired plants.

"There was no comprehensive plan agreed to and executed by all the people that needed to make sure a Kingston spill would not occur," the report said. "Over the years, the risks increased, but they were not addressed. By the time the Kingston spill occurred, there had been decades of neglect."

The report said standard communication between four separate TVA divisions responsible for ash management "was strained and in some instances, nonexistent." It found TVA did not have standard operating procedures for maintenance of wet-ash ponds, nor did it place priority on preventing spills and accidents. It also said the agency missed "red flags" around the country from failures at similar ash storage sites.

This unvarnished, critically unsparing report goes to the heart of our introductory question. How and why did TVA's ash-waste management fail at this point in its history.

* TVA apparently is seeking to remedy whatever fault there is with yet another contract consultant. It plans to hire a consultant, TVA President and CEO Tom Kilgore said Tuesday, to provide an independent organizational review, while TVA provides new administrative "checks and balances."

* TVA's own Inspector General, in a report in June, underscored TVA's faults when he criticized its failure to conduct risk studies and to develop complete emergency plans for coal plant operations similar to its plans for nuclear and hydroelectric plants. He also chided the agency for giving the public "inaccurate and inconsistent information" in the initial days after the spill.

* Weeks earlier, a new Duke University study found that waste ash contains high levels of toxic metals and radiation that can contaminate water or, if left on land to dry, can be easily spread on the wind and cause widespread health hazards.

* Lastly, the spill was cited Friday in a new Newsweek article as No.4 on a list of the top 10 manmade "eco catastrophes" around the world in contemporary history, falling behind eroding coastlines, the Ukraine's Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster in 1986 and Love Canal.

The vast scope of the 1.2 billion-gallon spill, on land and in three Tennessee rivers, appears to validate Newsweek's classification of the Kingston disaster. It is believed to be the largest toxic spill in the nation's history, and cleanup is expected to take three years and cost up to $1 billion. That cost, of course, excludes multiple lawsuits from Kingston residents whose health, homes, farms and property were destroyed or harmed by the tsunami of ash sludge that erupted when the ash lake's earthen dikes ruptured.

The scorching findings reported by McKenna Long & Aldridge LLP, however, may well be the most troubling. It seems hard to imagine how TVA can escape the burden of liability for gross mismanagement and neglect in the operations of its massive wet-ash storage sites, or make amends. Certainly the ramifications of the Kingston spill will remain a critical focus both in national media and in pending hearings before Congress. And TVA has yet to answer what organizational and management breakdowns were responsible.