Posted On 07-31-2009 :: TVA Spending Thousands To Woo Customers
When you pay your electric bill you probably don't think your paying for people to attend baseball games and concerts. A NewsChannel 5 investigation has uncovered some surprising entertainment expenses at the TVA.
The expenses uncovered in our exclusive investigation include: golf at private clubs, stays at hotel casinos and tickets to pro sporting events. They have nothing to do with providing electricity, but you're paying for all those things every time you pay your utility bill.
NewsChannel 5 Investigates has learned that in 2008, the TVA wined and dined everyone from power distributors, business prospect, and their own employees at events such as a Kenny Chesney Concert at Ford Field in Detroit. The total cost was nearly $6,000.
A New York Yankees baseball game in the Bronx cost more than $4,500. Rounds of golf at private courses cost nearly $25,000.
Last November, NewsChannel 5 Investigates filed a Freedom of Information Request with TVA asking for its entertainment expenses for the first ten months of 2008. Seven months later, TVA responded with four pages of expenses totaling more than $120,000.
Just one month before TVA's board voted to raise rates last year because of rising costs, the agency spent more than $2,000 at a Chicago Cubs game.
Ratepayers like Lori Lormand in Gallatin seemed shocked.
"It's not right that they're able to blow money like that. That's what I would consider blowing money," said Lormand.
She just received a $207 electric bill for the month. Lormand has cut her family's entertainment to pay her utilities and other bills.
"I think that's wrong because their entertainment should go somewhere to cut my electric bill down," said Lormand.
TVA's senior vice president of government and Valley relations, Emily Reynolds, defended the baseball games and concert saying they involve business prospects and help create jobs.
"With some of these expenses we are remaining true to TVA's core mission and that is economic development," said Reynolds.
She listed some job growth in the Tennessee Valley over the last two years.
"41,000 jobs in 2007, 42,000 jobs in 2008," said Reynolds.
Investigative reporter Ben Hall asked, "Do you believe that's because of a baseball game or a Kenny Chesney concert?"
"I think it's a broad brush stroke, we have to educate folks outside of the Valley about the quality
of life here," responded Reynolds.
Some expenses appear to violate TVA's own policies including a $355 membership fee to a country club in Mississippi. TVA's policy prohibits individual country club memberships.
"Does that violate TVA's policy?" asked Hall.
"That was a corporate membership and we no longer maintain that membership," responded
Reynolds.
NewsChannel 5 showed the list of expenses to Congressman Bart Gordon.
"After Channel 5 brought this to our attention we went to them and said, you know, 'explain this'
and they really couldn't," said Gordon, D-Murfreesboro.
"Look at all this," said Gordon as he reviewed the expenses. "You see this one for $107 for Ye Ol'
Pipe Shop in Jackson Tennessee, stakeholder gifts and tobacco products?"
The biggest cost was for something called Customer Appreciation Events. The total was $37,000.
One of the many events was at Mississippi Hotel and Casino.
The customers getting appreciated were power distributors - even though distributors don't have
many options about where they get their power.
"Is it worth $37,000 on customer appreciation events?" asked Hall.
"I think in terms of cultivating relationships it's an important part of what we do," responded
Reynolds.
Reynolds said TVA has temporarily stopped its spending on sporting events, concerts and even
on customer appreciation events.
"We have ceased these kinds of expenses for the foreseeable future because we recognize that it
is a tough economic climate," said Reynolds.
Lori Lormand is glad the TVA understands what so many rate payers are experiencing.
"Bills keep getting higher not lower. Where's my entertainment?" asked Lormand.
Congressman Bart Gordon is calling on the TVA's Office of Inspector General to investigate the expenses. TVA says it has cut that kind of spending.
If you want to take a stand on TVA spending you can call Senators Lamar Alexander or Bob
Corker. The U.S. Senate is responsible for approving four new members to TVA's board.
Posted On 07-31-2009 :: Emphysema Severity Directly Linked To Coal Dust Ex
ScienceDaily (July 24, 2009) — Coal dust exposure is directly linked to severity of emphysema in smokers and nonsmokers alike, according to new research from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).
"In this study we have shown that coal mine dust exposure is a significant predictor of emphysema severity," said Eileen Kuempel, Ph.D., a senior scientist at NIOSH and lead author of the study.
The findings, which were reported in the August 1 issue of the American Thoracic Society's American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine (AJRCCM), highlight a health problem related to a growing industry. In the past 25 years, coal production has nearly doubled worldwide.
Dr. Kuempel and colleagues compared lung autopsy results from 722 individuals, including 616 coal miners from West Virginia and 106 non-miners from West Virginia and Vermont. Those from West Virginia were collected from consecutive autopsies from 1957 and 1973 at the Beckley Southern Appalachian Regional Hospital as part of a black lung study. Those from Vermont were taken from consecutive autopsies performed at the University of Vermont between 1972 and 1978. Age at death, race, miner/non-miner status and smoking history were established where possible, and individual exposure to coal dust was estimated using work history data and job-specific dust exposure estimates.
Pathologists Francis Green, M.D., and Val Vallyathan, Ph.D., two of the coauthors on this study, examined sections of the lungs to determine the presence and extent of emphysema. A smaller subset of the study group had their lung tissue analyzed for dust content. Emphysema was graded for type and severity.
The researchers found that cumulative exposure to respirable coal mine dust was a highly significant predictor of emphysema severity after accounting for cigarette smoking, age at death, and race. Miners tended to be older at death than non-miners due to a higher proportion of accidental or other sudden deaths among the non-miners. Miners also smoked less on average, though differences were nonsignificant. However, emphysema in miners was significantly more severe than in non-miners among both smokers and never-smokers. Unsurprisingly, emphysema was also more severe among smokers than never smokers in both miners and non-miners. Coal mine dust exposure and cigarette smoking had similar, additive effects on emphysema severity in this study.
The lung tissue analysis corroborated these findings; the greater the concentration of coal dust in the lungs, the more severe the emphysema.
While the data were collected on miners who worked in the mines before the enforcement of the federal standard limiting legal coal dust concentrations to 2mg/m3 imposed in 1972, the study does have immediate relevance to current occupational safety standards. Even at the current federal standard, a full working lifetime's exposure would produce a cumulative exposure similar to the levels found in the autopsied miners.
"Based on our findings, exposure to respirable coal mine dust for a full working lifetime at the current 2 mg/m3 standard would increase the emphysema severity index by 99 points on average. This provides additional evidence of the need to reduce dust exposures to 1 mg/m3 or less as NIOSH has recommended." said Dr. Kuempel. "Furthermore, miners in developing countries may be faced with exposure levels in excess of those reported here. Thus, the effects of dust that we report are relevant to current conditions in many countries, including the U.S."
A 99-point increase on the 1000-point emphysema severity index scale is equivalent to an approximately 10 percent increase in diseased lung tissue. Previous studies have shown that a 99-point increase in emphysema severity could mean the difference between "normal" and "abnormal" lung function or the worsening of existing lung function.
Coal mine dust exposure is now generally accepted as a cause of COPD, but this study will provide the basis for improved recognition of dust-induced COPD, its relationship to cigarette smoking, and may enhance efforts at prevention, diagnosis and medical management of occupational dust-related lung diseases, according to Dr. Kuempel.
"Coal employs over 7 million people worldwide, 90 percent of whom are in developing countries. Coal production has almost doubled in the past 25 years," notes Benoit Nemery, M.D., Ph.D., in an editorial in the same issue of the AJRCCM. "The environmental and climatic impacts of burning coal are, quite rightly, a source of concern. However, the direct consequences of extracting coal on the health of millions of coal miners must be an equal concern."
"Improving disease surveillance and awareness among healthcare professionals about the occupational components of COPD including emphysema can increase the effective detection and management of these diseases," said Dr. Kuempel.
Adapted from materials provided by American Thoracic Society, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
Posted On 04-28-2009 :: DIRTY COAL CARTOONS
Posted On 04-24-2009 ::
Posted On 04-17-2009 :: ZERO POINT ENERGY. IT IS FREE. NO MORE ELECTRIC BI
Posted On 04-17-2009 :: TIRED OF TVA? CHECK OUT ZERO POINT ENERGY!
Posted On 03-21-2009 :: IG Audit: $75M charged to TVA cards for items such
On March 5 2008 two grandmothers from Swan Pond asked UMD volunteer Matt for a ride home cause they didn't drive. Matt agreed and dropped the last one off at her home when TVA police came onto her property to arrest Matt. In the video the officer first tells Matt that he warned him that he had to have a resident with him when he drove on the public road. When the resident came out and Matt explained that he DID have a resident with him the officer changed the rules and arrested him for something else. Matt was polite, was not breaking any traffic law--he was simply giving to Swan Pond Grandmothers a ride home--one who is half blind. The officer knew who Matt was--this is part of the pattern of non stop harassment of UMD volunteers.
Posted On 03-21-2009 :: United Mountain Defense member arrested at the TVA
On Thursday, March 5 United Mountain Defense member Matt Landon was arrested by TVA police while giving a ride home to an elderly disabled Swan Pond resident, Eva Hewitt. The two were returning from the Tennessee Environmental and Conservation public meeting held earlier that day where Eva was one of several community members who spoke at a citizen’s press conference about health concerns relating to the TVA disaster. Eva is blind in one eye and does not drive so Matt was returning her to her home on South Swan Pond Road. There continues to be a TVA check point on this road even after the citizens of Roane County were promised that the road blocks would be removed more than a month prior to this event. As Matt and Eva slowed down at the TVA check point Matt saw the TVA officer sitting in his patrol car “it looked like he was waving us through just as they have done many times in the past” said Matt Landon. Eva said “when we slowed down at the road block there was no officer at the guard booth, so Matt drove on to take me home”. Once in Eva’s drive way, two TVA police pulled in and at that time searched and arrested Matt. Video documentation shows the TVA cops telling Matt he was being arrested for running the stop sign at the TVA check point. Matt was taken to the Roane County jail and is being charged with trespass by motor vehicle, violation of restricted access, and obedience to traffic control advice. Eva said “It’s a shame they arrested him when he was just trying to help me out and give me a ride home.” “I feel that arresting me today is just a continuation of the ongoing harassment I have experienced from the TVA police. TVA has tried to prevent United Mountain Defense from conducting independent water testing, deploying independent air monitoring, delivering bottled water to locals and working with the community of Roane County and they have consistently harassed me while doing this work. The citizens of Roane County deserve more from TVA and I do not plan on abandoning them in this time of need. ” said Landon.
Posted On 03-21-2009 :: Info on TVA checkpoints and air monitoring.
Dear folks,
The TVA police don't care if you are with the media or not. One of the last times I traveled through the checkpoint with the Reader's Digest reporter the TVA police pulled us over and confiscated my red pass. The reporter identified himself and was informed by the TVA police that he shouldn't be associating with me because I was dangerous and doing illegal activities, which is untrue. We just deployed an air monitor at Eva's Hewitt's house on Swan Pond Rd on March 3, 2009 at 4pm. Here is a video of what happened after legally putting up the non permament air monitor with Eva's permission. Tom Swinford is an electrical journeyman and trained professional and he was supervising the hanging of the air monitor. Here is a Youtube video of the event. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frr-e8C5k6Y TVA police were part of the caravan of 9 patrol vehicles that responded to the legal air monitoring station. TVA police questioned UMD volunteer Tom Swinford and instructed him that he would not be allowed to enter the area even though UMD volunteers have invitations from local residents to come out anytime. United Mountain Defense has officially chosen to keep our focus on the main issue of concern to us, the health of local residents and the proper and safe cleanup of TVA's coal ash disaster. We have videotaped every interaction with the TVA police. The fact is that during one of the community meetings Tom Kilgore listened to citizen concerns and promised to remove 'the roadblocks' meaing the Swan Pond Circle roadblock only. I have him on videotape making this statement. Unfortunately the Swan Pond residents have not had the same treatment. Why? United Mountain Defense will continue to do independent air monitoring. If you want to have an air monitor placed on your property for 24 hours please contact me at this email address, mattlandon2001@yahoo.com and put 'AIR MONITORING' in the subject line. We will be testing sites up to 2 miles away at first and then may expand out from there. We will be testing for PM 2.5 and testing for 7 different heavy metals. TDEC is only testing for 3 metals. Why?
Alright good luck, till then, matt landon full time volunteer staff person UMD
Posted On 03-21-2009 :: TVA Submits revised ash spill dredging plan for Em
'When they told us everything that was in that ash, I was shocked,' she says. 'They say the ash has all these toxins, yet the TVA says there's no danger.'
The Tennessee Valley Authority is the federally funded electric utility that produced the ash, mixed it with water and stored it inside a forty-acre holding pond at a plant in Kingston, Tennessee, some forty miles west of Knoxville. On December 22 an earthen dike collapsed, releasing 1.1 billion gallons of the muddy waste, which knocked houses off foundations and poured into the Tennessee River basin, which feeds municipal drinking-water systems. TVA and EPA officials scrambled to test drinking water, quickly assuring residents that all was safe. Since then, TVA surface-water tests have consistently shown little to no threat of contamination downstream. Despite these assurances, the largest industrial spill in American history has become the emblem of an industry run amok, of regulatory failures and of a controversial effort to depict coal as a benign energy source.
'This spill is the argument against 'clean coal,'' says Dan Volz, assistant professor of environmental and occupational health at the University of Pittsburgh. 'There's been a nationwide campaign by the coal industry to promote the use of clean coal. But clean coal is an oxymoron.' Volz says it's true that new technologies can limit atmospheric emissions. 'But the law of conservation of matter means that the toxins that don't go into the air simply get transferred to wastewater and coal ash,' he says. 'If a toxin is in a lump of coal and you burn it, it has to go somewhere.'
Millions of tons of coal ash--laden with toxic substances, including arsenic, selenium and mercury--are produced each year. A large percentage of the dry ash is sold to companies as an industrial ingredient to make products like cement, concrete and mulch. But a lack of federal regulation and the patchwork nature of state laws mean utilities are all but free to decide what to do with the ash. 'Unfortunately, the cheapest way to dispose of coal ash is to mix it with water and dump it into unlined lagoons,' says Ben Dunham, associate legislative director of Earthjustice. There are more than 1,300 dumps across the country like the one that failed in Tennessee. And most, experts say, fall under little or no regulation. Even though the ash contains toxins the EPA has determined are dangerous for drinking water and public health, the agency has twice declined to declare ash a hazardous waste. As a result, there has been no federal regulation of coal ash and little monitoring of groundwater, which studies show can become contaminated through leaching. 'For years, utilities have been largely free to do what they want,' says Kert Davies, a research director at Greenpeace.
The TVA, the nation's largest utility, has become a poster child for the failures of self-regulation. Dave McKinney, chief of the environmental service division of the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency (TWRA), told The Nation that aerial photos show two-thirds of the ash remaining in the failed structure 'has no proper containment.' TVA spokeswoman Barbara Martocci says that some ash lodes remaining inside the lagoon are the same height as the ash that broke away in December. 'But it's not a threat. What's left is just sitting there,' she says. 'Even if parts of it fell off, there's not enough energy behind it to go anywhere.' She says workers were in the process of 'smoothing the pile down so nothing can fall off.' Another problem for the authority is that it is prohibited by environmental regulators from putting the re-collected ash back in the failed pond, and there's no long-term plan for storing it.
Meanwhile, public health concerns are growing. 'The biggest threat by far is that the wet ash will dry to dust and release breathable particles,' says coal ash expert Tom FitzGerald, director of Kentucky Resources Council. The prospect of an emergency deepened on January 28, when Duke University scientists reported that exposure to radium- and arsenic-containing particulates could have severe health implications. 'The levels of radioactivity we measured in the ash are almost twice the level the EPA reports for typical coal ash,' says Duke geochemistry professor Avner Vengosh, who added that the difference results from the type of coal that's burned. 'What we know is that right now the ash is wet. But if it is allowed to dry and become a dust, it will contain particles and could become a public health hazard.' In that situation, Vengosh says, living near the ash dust 'would be the equivalent of living in a house containing radon.'
Officials at the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation say their agency and the EPA are installing air monitors to complement the TVA's air monitoring. TDEC spokeswoman Tisha Calabrese-Benton says the authority is working to prevent 'fugitive dust emissions,' in part by covering ash with straw and planting seeds to grow 'temporary ground cover.' But Chris Irwin, an attorney for United Mountain Defense, accused the TVA of using air-quality monitors that failed to meet TDEC and EPA standards. 'The TVA has no idea what they are doing,' he says. 'Letting it handle the testing and cleanup is like letting the burglar come to the scene of the crime and dust for prints.' Calabrese-Benton says the TVA is operating a high-volume monitor and is adding additional equipment.
Concerns have centered on water contamination. In the immediate aftermath of the spill, the EPA found high levels of arsenic in some spots in the Emory River, but officials assured residents that water-treatment facilities would 'most likely' remove toxins before they reached the tap. According to EPA spokeswoman Dawn Harris-Young, the agency has stopped conducting surface-water tests, instead relying on the state to conduct tests that determine impacts on aquatic ecology rather than on levels of drinking-water contamination. In the weeks since the accident, the TDEC and TVA have consistently reported little to no contamination in highly affected areas downstream from the spill. Yet two private groups told The Nation their data show arsenic levels many times higher than what the TVA has reported. One of them, Appalachian Voices, a local conservation group, claims to have tested on the same day and at the same river mile marker as TVA field scientists. 'But our values from that day are 310-fold over what the TVA reported,' says Donna Lisenby, a river monitor for the group.
Experts suggested that such large differences may be explained by the fact that ash plumes don't spread evenly throughout a river--samples from inside a floating plume will reveal greater contamination than those taken in cleaner water. For Linda Tarwater, whose house was spared, all the assurances in the world don't change the fact that a glass of water from her kitchen sink has a gray film on top. 'Even though they tell us the water is fine,' she says, 'we've stopped drinking it.' She says at least eleven people who live closer to the ash are complaining of breathing problems, burning eyes and itchy throats.
Early on, TVA officials suggested the spill could have been caused by heavy rains and freezing temperatures. But McKinney of the TWRA says the TVA failed to drain water properly from the structure. He also says the authority failed to monitor hydrology inside the containment pond and test its structural integrity after fixing small leaks. 'There were no regulations that forced them to keep track of the hydrology as the ash piled up and put pressure on the failed slope,' he says. 'And no law forced them to use engineering techniques to get a big-picture look at things after they plugged holes.' When asked about the claims, TVA spokeswoman Martocci says the authority has hired independent experts to determine the cause of the spill.
With outrage building, Congress is rushing to regulate. The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works held a hearing in January that led to promises to regulate coal ash. In the House, Representative Nick Rahall has put forward a bill to establish uniform federal standards for disposing of coal combustion products, and newly appointed EPA head Lisa Jackson told the Senate in her confirmation hearing that the coal ash issue would be on the front burner for the agency.
Lobbyists see storm clouds. 'The utility industry recognizes that some sort of regulatory structure or guidance is going to come,' says David Goss, executive director of the American Coal Ash Association. His affiliates are heading to Congress with 'technical information that demonstrates clearly that coal combustion products are not hazardous materials and that their toxicity is similar to comparable products used in everyday settings.' Volz scoffs at this idea. 'Nobody with even a rudimentary understanding of environmental science can ignore the scores of ecological studies that show toxins in coal ash damage aquatic ecology,' he says. 'This spill has exposed the coal industry's dirty little secret, which is that nobody knows what to do with all of this coal waste.'
Posted On 07-31-2009 :: TVA Spending Thousands To Woo Customers 