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?

Did Alcoa really benefit Milam County?

I just finished reading Cameron Mayor David Barkemeyer's effusive praise of Alcoa in the Oct. 23 issue of The Cameron Herald. I mean no disrespect to the mayor or to his opinion of Alcoa's impact on Milam County because, in may ways, he's absolutely correct.

However, not everything that company did was beneficial. Defining a company's legacy in strictly economic terms often overlooks less tangible costs.

Yes. Many Milam County residents earned good money working in the smelter and a lot of locals owe their moderately comfortable retirement checks to Alcoa. But, an unusually high percentage of them were exposed to toxic levels of asbestos and other poisons, and many of those have contracted fatal lung cancer — despite the fact that Alcoa knew in the early 1950s that asbestos exposure could have all sorts of ugly side effects.

I'll also grant that the presence of Alcoa had a positive impact on our tax base and, without that tax revenue, some of our governments will have trouble providing essential services. On the other hand, for the vast majority of those 50 years in Milam County, Alcoa polluted our land, our water and our air. Our children will pay those environmental costs, whatever they turn out to be.

And, sure ... Alcoa spent a lot of money on parks, grants, athletic fields, schools and what have you. By some standards, they poured a small fortune into Milam County. But, they also made a lot of money. Make no mistake, the money they handed out (and paid out in the form of salaries and taxes) was a pittance compared to the amount of money they made off their Rockdale operations.

In the end, Alcoa showed its true nature — as big companies like this will do. Under the cover of a spat with Luminant (the company they sold their generating capacity to) and a national economy in flames, they simply abandoned a community that had been its faithful partner for over 50 years.

I wonder who got the best of that deal? I'll lay odds that it wasn't us.