Fly and bottom — toxic coal

For decades, manufacturing companies like Alcoa told us that their process was safe, that workers weren't at risk when they toiled on the potline or that the clothes they wore home -- laden with asbestos dust -- would not harm their families.

And, we trusted them. Right? Of course we did! This was the 1960s and we were urged to pursue plastics and better living through chemistry. Besides, companies like Alcoa virtually kept towns like Rockdale alive.

Later, we found out that, much like many other chemicals and compounds, asbestos was deadly, that the airborne fibers would work their way into our lungs where they would never go away and, in fact, would cause some of us to die particularly gruesome deaths.

Worse, the managers at these companies knew this. They were quite aware that exposure to asbestos (or other carcinogens) had the potential for nasty side effects but, instead of warning their work force or the people who lived around their smelters, they just kept on, hoping that no one would understand or care about the research being developed, research that confirmed just how deadly asbestos really was.

Today, they are telling us that the waste left from burning the coal to make the electricity to run the smelter to refine the aluminum is safe. The stuff is full of oddball contaminants and heavy metals like beryllium and chromium and mercury and lead and selenuium. There's nothing wrong with any of that stuff, right?

Over the decades, Alcoa and TXU dumped all the fly and bottom ash they couldn't sell back into the strip mines the coal originally came from. That's how they reclaimed the acreage, and back filling was accepted land management practice for years, never mind that it merely made it more likely all those heavy metals would seep into the groundwater.

TXU acknowledges it keeps 314,400 tons of coal waste at the Sandow power plant south of Rockdale. It's a toxic brew that includes about 500 tons of heavy metals. Indeed, the Sandow power plant in Rockdale was ranked #31 of the top 100 waste producer coal plants by the Natural Resources Defense Council in 2005.

Further, many researchers contend that the toxic waste from the typical coal-fired power plant is more radioactive than a typical nuclear plant because the toxins are so heavily concentrated and the waste is regarded as simple "solid waste" by regulatory agencies.

So, unlike the poor folks in Tennessee, those of us here in Milam County are not likely to experience rupturing holding ponds that might spew hundreds of thousands of gallons of stuff all over the country side. It's already in our groundwater!

But, no ... it's all perfectly safe. No reason to worry, no reason for more oversight, right?