Earthbytes

Take Action to Keep Excess Selenium Out of TN Streams

If you live in Tennessee or have enjoyed Tennessee's resources as a visitor, we need your help to kill HB 1204 and SB 1331!

Action Alert from Save Our Cumberland Mountains (SOCM):

A very dangerous bill to change standards for selenium in Tennessee's waters was introduced this session in both the Tennessee House and Senate. HB 1204 and SB 1331 relate directly to mountaintop removal mining, a practice that often results in toxic levels of selenium in water runoff.

This is an attempt by the mining industry (they helped write the bill!) to deregulate toxic levels of selenium, such as those discovered last year at the Zeb Mountain mountaintop removal site in Campbell County. Citizen complaints and a lawsuit by the Sierra Club, SOCM and the Tennessee Clean Water Network have focused on toxic levels of selenium runoff at that site.

The selenium criteria proposed in these bills are deeply flawed, and have not been validated or adopted by the EPA. If adopted in Tennessee, they will not protect the state's aquatic life. Selenium pollution is not just a concern of coal mining but is also a problem with fly ash storage and disposal.

Toxic effects of selenium for aquatic life and those species that depend on aquatic life as food sources include gill damage, liver, kidney and heart damage. Excessive selenium exposure also affects development and reproductive functions of these species, and is known to cause spine, gill and eye deformities, ovary damage and complete reproductive failure.

In large amounts, selenium is toxic to humans.

Here is some contact information for the TN Senate and House committee members hearing this bill next Tuesday, April 7th. Please let them know that you oppose this bill:

Senate Environment, Conservation and Tourism Committee

Senator Steve Southerland, Chair sen.steve.southerland@capitol.tn.gov

Senator Ken Yager, Vice-Chair sen.ken.yager@capitol.tn.gov

House Conservation and Environment Committee

Rep. Joe McCord, Chair rep.joe.mccord@capitol.tn.gov

Rep. Mike McDonald, Member rep.michael.mcdonald@capitol.tn.gov

 

Links to the bill, current TN and EPA selenium standards, and scientific articles on selenium criteria and pollution.

HB 1204 / SB 1331

EPA Draft Selenium Criteria cited in the TN bill

Technical review of EPA's draft selenium criteria

Tennessee's current Water Quality Criteria

Aquatic Selenium Pollution Is a Global Environmental Safety Issue, A.D. Lemly

Continued Bombing of Appalachia Is Not Okay

As I sat watching yet another video of a West Virginia mountain being pulverized, I found myself thinking of the final scenes of V for Vendetta...

In particular, I thought of the scene in which thousands of people in identical masks surround the headquarters of government corruption from all directions. As fireworks erupt over the city, they take their masks off. And who is revealed? Terrorists with wild and crazy looks in their eyes? Nope. Women, men, old people, kids...just ordinary folks like you and me. I'm wondering if it will take something like this to end the insanity of the ongoing war against communities of Appalachia.

Massey Energy blasts another chunk off of Cherry Pond Mountain in West Virginia (Bo Webb photo).

I feel compelled to replay the images, to look again through the flying boulders and swirling dust, to listen around the edges of Bo's voice.

Dust -- miniscule flakes of silica, really, with arsenic, selenium, mercury and any other element that happens to live in the rocks up there -- drifts down through the hollow. You can hear Bo start to clear his throat and cough. That's what people do when they breathe in pulverized glass.

Here's something I don't get: How come Massey Energy's (or any other mining company's) detonations aren't considered a criminal act? Every time they set these things off, a microcrystalline death cloud spreads out from the charge's epicenter and into living, breathing communities of people and wildlife.

Coalfield residents (including miners and their families!) all across the United States are breathing this stuff. So are the people near ground zero of TVA's coal ash disaster. And who knows how many others?

Toxic silca dust from a dynamite blast on Cherry Pond Mountain settles on Clay's Fork and Peachtree communities in West Virginia. (Bo Webb photo)

This is genocide, and it's not okay. If anything needs to be killed off, it's the practice of mountaintop removal coal mining.