You beat me to it, Sarah, with the "clean coal" comment. The first thing I said to myself when I heard about this was "so much for 'clean coal'".

Speaking of hearing about this, I didn't see any serious story done on this in the MSM, though, to be fair, I try and watch as little TV news as I can, anymore. In fact, I didn't hear about this until Christmas Day, and guess where I saw the story? Wikipedia. The day I count of Wiki for news is when I know I've been failed by my "free press".

I'm looking forward to hearing about details from tnjen.

Environmental Spill Disaster Devastates Tennessee; 48 Times the Size of Exxon Valdez --

An environmental disaster of epic proportions has occurred in Tennessee. Monday night, 2.6 million cubic yards (the equivalent of 525.2 million gallons, 48 times more than the Exxon Valdez spill by volume) of coal ash sludge broke through a dike of a 40-acre holding pond at TVA's Kingston coal-fired power plant covering 400 acres up to six feet deep, damaging 12 homes and wrecking a train.

According to the EPA the cleanup will take at least several weeks, but could take years. Officials also said that the magnitude of this spill is such that the entire area could be declared a federal superfund site.

Toxic Sludge Got Into Tributary of Chattanooga Water Supply

Apart from the immediate physical damage, the issue is what toxic substances are in that sludge: Mercury, arsenic, lead, beryllium, cadmium. Though officials said the amounts of these poisons in the sludge could not be determined on Monday, they could (at the mild end) irritate skin or trigger allergies or (longer term) cause cancer or neurological problems.

This toxic sludge got into the Emory River, a tributary of the Clinch and Tennessee Rivers: The water supply for Chattanooga, Tennessee as well as millions of people living downstream in Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky. ...

Thankfully, we're not downstream from this catastrophe and far enough away in the right direction but a lot of population centers are downstream including Chattanooga. Roane Co. (where it happened) is a very poor county and I'm worried that those in the immediate vicinity whose homes are not among the 15 declared uninhabitable will not be able to move. It's also a county that has been struggling with a great deal of local corruption including a corrupt judge.

The real story behind the story is how badly the local media handled this starting out. The first two days, they produced incredible images but we were told that it was basically a harmless mudslide and that it was just water and harmless ash. There was absolutely no sounding of any kind of safety alarm for the people that live there. Everything was downplayed to the point where if you listened to local media, you could easily come to the conclusion that nothing worth worrying about had happened. Once the national media started to pick up the story things got a bit better and the environmental and human safety concerns started to come out. Local media is doing a much better job now but their initial coverage may have cost people dearly.

TVA will likely buy out all the people who were directly impacted immediately and without a fight so that's one good thing. But they are also trying to limit things and I don't trust them or the EPA to do what's right by those who didn't have their homes leveled because they are using W's strict definitions of what is 'toxic' and what is a 'concern.' They're also not being honest about the impact this is going to have on water supplies downstream -- the impact below the site is going to be enormous. When the local media showed dead fish along the riverbanks both TVA and the EPA said they hadn't seen any.

Thank God, the coal train that got caught up in this didn't topple over and add insult to injury. There is a worry about those tracks getting cleared soon though because that plant supplies power to several hundreds of thousands of homes.

Oh and one more thing, Appalachian coal contains levels of different heavy metals and toxins that are much higher than both Anthracite (PA coal) and Western coal. The fly ash that is produced from it can be three to five times more dangerous than it would be from other sources.

as coal ash contains thallium and another element I can't remember the name of.
Nobody's monitoring that, apparently, but an environmental coalition is tracking the groundwater foulment.