Bells Will Be Ringing (The Sad, Sad News)
Well, this really makes me sad. Five hundred million gallons of coal ash were spilled into the Tennessee River system when a containing wall failed. I mean, epic failed. According to this Scientific American article, coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste. And there’s five hundred million gallons of it! That’s 500,000,000 gallons!
But I have a more specific reason for being sad about this. As soon as I heard about this, I remembered reading that the Tennessee Aquarium does conservation work on the lake sturgeon Ascipenser fulvescens. Apparently, all the sturgeon in the Tennessee River system today have the Aquarium to thank! I have a tender place in my heart for large freshwater fish.
The spill happened in Kingston, and the Tennessee Aquarium is in Chattanooga. I looked these cities up on Google maps and found that the Aquarium is about 100 miles downriver from the spill. But the site where they release the fish is near Knoxville, even closer to the spill, though I’m not sure if it’s upstream or downstream.
Either way, this will cause an assload of environmental damage to an already delicate system. Fucking fuck.
P.S. I emailed the Tennessee Aquarium to ask if they knew what kind of impact this might have on the sturgeon, but I got an out of office reply indicating that I might not get a response until after January 5. When I do, I’ll follow up.
Stumble it!
December 29th, 2008 at 9:14 am
[…] email from the Director of Research at the Tennessee Aquarium in response to my question about the coal ash spill. The Aquarium releases the sturgeon upstream from where the spill happened, and in a different […]