OLD KING COAL
recycled for use in concrete and
other construction materials, are
overstated, and that state rules,
which typically treat coal ash as
non-hazardous “special” waste,
are adequate.
Either way, civil rights activists say the fact that the stuff
was dumped near Gipson and his
neighbors — mostly poor, predominantly black — reflects a broader
national problem: More than two
decades after the rise of the environmental justice movement,
which aspired to protect disenfranchised Americans from the illeffects of pollution, a disproportionate share of the nation’s filth
continues to land on low-income
and minority communities.
The coal ash at Arrowhead is
the result of an accident that occurred four years ago and roughly
300 miles north, in Kingston,
Tenn. An impoundment pond at
a coal-burning power plant near
Kingston broke through a dike and
spilled more than one billion gallons of wet coal ash sludge across
the surrounding land and into
nearby rivers and streams.
It was one of the largest environmental disasters of its kind in
U.S. history, and, as all disasters
do, it set in motion a complex and
troubling chain of events.
At the time of the spill, Uniontown residents had recently lost a
HUFFINGTON
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legal battle to block construction
of a roughly 1,000-acre municipal landfill across from Gipson’s
house. The facility — modern in
design and ready to be put to full
use — was close to rail lines and
authorized to accept municipal,
industrial, commercial, construction and, crucially, “special”
wastes, from states near and far.
Simply put, it was a ripe target
for Kingston’s coal ash, and after
weighing a handful of other proposed sites, federal officials approved a plan to bring the waste
— all 4 million tons of it — to
Uniontown.
Gipson and other local residents were mortified, but local
politicians, including several
black leaders on the Perry County
Commission in Marion, Ala., located 20 miles north of Uniontown, welcomed the business
— not least because it earned
the county, which negotiated a
$1.05-per-ton fee on the ash, a
multi-million dollar windfall.
But as the stuff rolled in over
the course of a year, and the
mountain of ash rose up off the
former prairie, Gipson and other
residents living around the landfill suggest they paid a price for
the lack of stronger federal oversight. Wind and rain would often disperse the ash, they say,
either as a grey-white dust that