TVA chief says coal ash spill was 'catastrophe'

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. -- Trying to rebuild credibility as well as the site of a huge coal ash spill, the president of the Tennessee Valley Authority acknowledged the massive sludge flood was worse than the agency's public relations staff initially said.

"It was a 'catastrophe,'" Tom Kilgore said, contradicting an internal TVA memo obtained by The Associated Press in which the description of the disaster was changed from "catastrophic" to a "sudden, accidental" release.

"As I have told people, look at the second definition of the word 'catastrophe,'" Kilgore said. "It says, 'A sudden movement of large earth.' That is certainly what this was."

The TVA memo was also edited to remove "risk to public health and risk to the environment" as a reason for measuring water quality and the potential of an "acute threat" to fish.

Kilgore's comments came Thursday after he told the TVA board of directors that cleaning up the 5.4 million cubic yards of ash that surged into a river and neighborhood near the Kingston Fossil Plant in December will take many months and cost up to $825 million, excluding fines and litigation.

Kilgore said he wished some aspects of the agency's response were handled differently.

One was underestimating the size of the spill, corrected five days later. The other was downplaying the significance of the event in initial public comments made by TVA, the nation's largest public utility.

The issue was about more than semantics. Environmental critics say TVA has downplayed the seriousness of the spill and potential health risks to residents and aquatic life.

"We all edit things," Kilgore said, without specifically mentioning the memo obtained by the AP. "I don't apologize for us editing our material. It is just that the first writer was the best writer, in that case."

TVA has hired an outside consultant to lead an investigation into the cause of the breach in an earthen containment wall that led to the spill at Kingston. The agency also is inspecting ash storage areas at its 10 other coal-fired power plants, particularly at the five plants with wet-ash storage systems like Kingston's.

TVA documents have revealed previous leaks at the Kingston ash facility, where the ash pile grew over nearly five decades to cover about 40 acres up to 60 feet high.

Kilgore, a longtime utility executive and engineer who was hired by TVA in 2005 from North Carolina-based Progress Energy Inc., was asked if TVA's fossil group managers failed the agency in not spotting potential problems at Kingston.

"Honestly, we let ourselves down in some ways," Kilgore said. "This is regrettable. I don't like it. I want to see what the failure investigation shows. And I am dismayed that we didn't catch this."