Thursday, January 01, 2009
TVA Manages Easy PR Victory in Kingston Coal Ash Disaster
The Tennessee Valley Authority gets high marks for preventing the Kingston coal ash disaster from cascading into a public relations nightmare.
The massive spill had all of the hallmarks of a public relations catastrophe: a billion gallons of toxic sludge breaks free from a 40-acre retaining pond near the Kingston coal-fired power plant, covering approximately 400 acres of Roane County, Tenn., destroying homes, killing fish and damaging wildlife habitat in its wake.
But with the help of indifferent local, state and federal government officials, as well as a complacent local and national news media, TVA’s crisis management team succeeded in keeping the disaster off the front pages of newspapers and generally out of the public consciousness. In particular, Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen helped to downplay the incident by staying clear of the site and letting TVA control the message.
Bredesen waited nine days after the Dec. 22 spill to make his first visit to the disaster site. If the Democratic governor had toured the site in the hours after the spill and informed the public about the initial steps his administration planned to take in response to the disaster, he would have certainly drawn greater media attention to the incident. His appearance at the site would have forced news media outlets to allocate additional reporters and staffers to cover the disaster.
Instead, TVA officials and spokespeople were the primary points of contact for reporters. Also, in the first days after the spill, TVA was doing all of the testing of local water sources to determine levels of contamination from the coal ash.
When asked during a Dec. 31 press briefing why it took him nine days to visit the site, Bredesen said he wanted to stay out of the way of emergency personnel. “Look, let the first responders, let the people that are doing this kind of stuff deal with it. In this particular case there was not a loss of life and no injuries. I just wanted it to move along pretty far so we could have an intelligent conversation with TVA,” he said.
The U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee has scheduled a Jan. 8 hearing to examine the coal ash spill. The committee has oversight of TVA. During the hearing, some of the committee members may express shock that such an incident could happen. The tone could be angry at times. And TVA CEO Tom Kilgore may face a few tough questions.
But in the end, the committee hearing will likely turn into a one-day news event, with Kilgore telling the senators that TVA plans to take the necessary steps, on a voluntary basis, to ensure such a disaster never happens again at any of the federal power administration’s seven coal-fired power plants.
On the House side, no hearings have been scheduled. U.S. Rep. John J. Duncan Jr., a Knoxville Republican who serves on the House Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment said in a statement, “This has been a terrible tragedy for the people of Roane County whose homes and property were affected. I’m sure TVA will meet its full responsibilities and obligations.” Duncan already is viewing the spill as a “tragedy,” rather than an event that TVA could have prevented and one that it should have prevented if it had been following all of its responsibilities and obligations prior to the spill.
Unlike the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska, it doesn’t appear that anyone associated with TVA will face criminal charges for the coal ash spill. Also, it remains unclear if TVA will face any criminal fines at the state or federal levels.
Greenpeace has called for a criminal investigation into the disaster, while local residents are questioning whether TVA could have been more proactive in preventing the spill.
“I kind of wondered, ‘How high can it go?’” said Jeff Spurgeon, who owns a waterfront house on a cove contaminated by the spill, referring to the pile of ash next to the Kingston power plant. “Accidents happen, but I think this could have been prevented.”
In a Jan. 1 article, Los Angeles Times reporter Richard Fausset noted the disaster carries a hint of irony for longtime residents. “If there was a concern about ecological threats, it came from a few miles south, where the TVA operates a nuclear plant [the Watts Bar nuclear plant]; or a few miles northeast around the Oak Ridge National Laboratories, where a cleanup of nuclear arms production sites has dragged on for years,” Fausett wrote.
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