My family owns and operates Sail Away Homes and Land in Kingston.

For three years now we have tried to maintain and grow our business while the Watts Bar Lake properties recover slowly from the negative impact of the December 22, 2008 Ash Spill. Our business income dropped over 85% from 2008 to 2009...we have recovered a little each year....about 6 months ago we even bought a new coffee pot for our office...yeeehah!!

We will continue to stay here...we love Watts Bar Lake, Roane County and East Tennessee...we are making progress. We believe Watts Bar's lake properties are a great value and we advertise our enthusiasm to the world everyday with wide ranging internet activities.

Like some other businesses that were uniquely tied to Watts Bar Lake, we felt we had economic losses that TVA should be required to compensate. In fact, our studies of the lake property market clearly show that Watts Bar Lake was enjoying a consistent market share growth from 2004 up through 2008. In 2008 Watts Bar attracted well over 25% of all Lake Front property buyers who were looking to purchase in East TN's lake "Corridor"...this market share had increased consistently every year from below 10% in 2004 to over 25% in 2008.

This trend changed immediately and abruptly as of the Ash Spill event...now dropping consistently every year since the spill....in three years, by 2011 it had dropped to 12.9% and if trends continue we will see year 2012 drop below the 10% level. In other words, today Watts Bar lake's Real Estate popularity has been cut in half....this occurring at a time when the baby boomer retirement floodgates were just opening.

Roane County is suffering a huge and increasing economic loss. These missing buyers....50% of them are now not here, would have paid property transaction taxes, they would have brought money to our local banks, they would have eaten in our restaurants, bought boats from our dealerships, supported our retailers, they would have used our new hospital, and because they are usually retirees, they have no requirement for schools or jobs...they quite simply would have brought their money and enjoyed living here and spending it...now they are missing. They would have had friends visit them all through the year and these visitor's would have added to Roane's economic income...visitor dollars circulating among Roane County businesses.

This morning we received word that a Federal Judge has ruled that businesses like ours that have purely economic losses can not recover these economic losses from TVA. TVA has always promised to make us "whole again", I wonder why they asked a judge to rule that they don;t have to do that ???

" … it's not a contaminant cause nobody's died of it yet."
Cumberland Co. commission approves plan for spilled coal ash
Posted: June 16, 2009 06:31 AM PDT
(link...)
(Someone hasn't heard of the "Six Cities" study.)

Is TVA minimizing the truth again?

First, I want to openly thank the EPA On Site (or Scene) Coordinator (OSC) Leo Francendese and his team, for making significant data available on the Kingston TVA Plant fly ash release. (link...)
This past week, TVA was scheduled to release the bathymetry of Emory from before and after the May 4th "flood" event. What they did was to say that a "few feet" of sediment was deposited in the mouth of the Emory River where it empties into the Clinch. To me, a "few feet" means four plus or minus.
From the maps on the EPA OSC's site, (link...) and (link...) it appears that at the centerline of Emory's mouth, the post flood bathymetry shows the elevation of the riverbed of is about 725-730, and of the centerline of the pre spill channel is about 740. That's shallow, since the elevation of the surface is normally only about 741 feet. The pre flood bathymetry at the centerline of the river is about 700, or about 40 feet deeper that after the "Flood". That is much more than a "few" feet in my book.
Again, many thanks to EPA OSC Leo Francendese and his team for posting the maps. I won't even go into the "Gain and Loss" map where the area of the greatest ash (sorry, I mean "sediment") gain was grayed out.
Respectfully,
Charlie Smith

Maybe it's time to remove all the bad stuff from the Emory Clinch confluence.
Before doing this, I would want to build a screen over the hazardous stuff.
I would need some way to immobilize the top of the ash under water.
Before I did that, I would drive a suction pipe to the bottom of the stuff.
I would also put out an array of short pipes with plugs in the top of the ash.
Then use whatever to immobilize the top of the ash underwater.
Then start to suck the stuff from the bottom, opening the plugs in a way to control the flow of river water down into the stuff.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~-||~~~~~~~~||~~~~~~~~||~~~~~~~||~~~~~~~~||~~~
~~~~~~~~~~\~~~||~~~~~~~~/~~~~~~~~/
~~~~~~~~~~~\~~||~~~~~~~V~~Ash~~V
~~~~~~~~~~~~\~||~~~~~~~/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~\||~<~~~<-/~Bad~Stuff

Ok, ok, the dormouse will now go back to sleep

Marked with " New! "
(link...)
…funny how the "Gain and loss" doesn't highlight the shallows at the mouth of the Emory, or at the "low dam" in the Clinch. Looks like summer's cool bottom waters from the Clinch will be flowing downstream, not up the Emory to KIF. Expect TVA to want to dredge right away.

(Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry)
(link...)
(WC's blog entry (link...) )

Almost every day new photos are added. Some days the collection gets edited down. Today they are helicopter shots of the "new and better" Swan Pond interim storm drainage (the plans are only on the TDEC website) and I don't know what pile of ash in the X lakeshore baylet.

Link

WBIR has the story: (link...)

-- OneTahiti

TWRA, at the request of TVA, has established

"a temporary “no wake zone” on the Emory River in Roane County. The zone will include the area where dredging has begun for the Kingston ash spill operations."

"The zone will protect recreational boaters from submerged hazards, staged TVA equipment and will minimize the impact to water turbidity from disturbed ash during the dredging operations." Source: (link...), (link...), (link...)

Dear folks,
Here is another video of the TN state regulators, TDEC doing a less than fine job of keeping TN's environment safe from coal fly ash.

(link...)

Thanks, matt landon full time volunteer staff United Mountain Defense and dedicated Roane County Volunteer

TVA's toxicity tests fall short
UTILITY'S METHODS OF ANALYZING ASH ARE TOO BROAD, CRITICS SAY
By Anne Paine • THE TENNESSEAN • January 19, 2009

The method TVA and others are using to test and analyze the toxicity of the coal ash splayed through a neighborhood, fields and streams beside TVA's Kingston power plant can't adequately determine the potential risk, experts say.

Link to the full article.