Tom Grizzard shot his first two geese in the fall of 1961, one in the morning and the other in the evening, and both from the tip of a slim peninsula bordered by the Emory River to the east and a spring-fed inlet to the west. The morning kill landed on a small island where Tom and his father would forage for arrowheads left by the Cherokee, and the other, the twilight bird, flopped into a shallow pond of gray sludge across the channel.

    When Tom was a boy, back in the '40s, that pond had been a swimming hole, a clean pool notched into the edge of the Emory. But then, in the '50s, the Tennessee Valley Authority built the Kingston Fossil Plant on the spot where the Emory empties into the Clinch and just north of the town, Kingston, for which it was named. It was the largest power station in the world: nine boilers that fed steam into nine turbines that spun 1,400 megawatts of electricity out through miles and miles of wire to the nuclear labs down the road at Oak Ridge and farther still, into the hills and hollows of east Tennessee and Kentucky. The boilers were fired with coal, 14,000 tons a day brought in by trains a hundred cars long, and when the coal burned it left piles of ash that had to be disposed of somewhere, which happened to be on top of Tom's old swimming hole. Bulldozers pushed clay into a low dike surrounding the spot where Tom used to splash and then filled the cavity with fly ash, the finer particles that fluttered up into the flues. The ash was then watered to keep it from blowing all over Roane County, which gave it the consistency and color of hardening cement.

    Tom's dead goose lay in the middle of the pond. It wasn't deep - the Kingston plant had been completed only six years earlier - so he waded in, gray muck sucking at his boots, fetched his bird, and waded back out. He stood at the edge, stamping his feet. Just coal ash, was all, no worse than mud. And what was a little ash on a man's boots, especially after everything the TVA had done for east Tennessee?

    The Grizzards went back six generations in Roane County, and the first five were born into a world without electricity. No lights, no air conditioners, no refrigerators. The TVA changed that. It was a federal agency, a product of the New Deal, created specifically to power the Tennessee Valley. It dammed rivers and flooded fields to feed hydroelectric plants, and it built coal-fired generators in Tennessee and Alabama and Kentucky, until all of poor, forlorn Appalachia was ablaze with light and promise. There was more, too: Those dams and boilers and turbines all had to be built and operated, and transmission towers had to be raised and rail lines laid and cables strung, and the men who did that work had to be fed and housed and entertained. An entire economy blossomed out of the TVA's money. Tom Grizzard's father-in-law helped mortar the bricks for the original smokestacks. Tom spent most of his working life at Oak Ridge, which wouldn't exist without the TVA's electricity. Years later his own boy would open a shop, Accu-Rite Machining, and one of his customers would be the Kingston plant.

    We could hardly do without the TVA, Tom likes to say.

    Not even God's above the TVA, Tom's aunt used to say.

    So Tom never thought much about what had become of his old swimming hole, all things considered. He never minded the soot, either - which back in the day, when the coal smoke vented out of nine short stacks, would settle on houses and cars and etch yellow stains on the arrowheads he'd find on the riverbanks. And anyway, that was a long time ago. In the '70s, the TVA put up two new stacks, each more than 1,000 feet tall, that lifted the smoke into the prevailing winds, which carried it east into the Smoky Mountains and North Carolina. By then the Kingston plant had been there so long it melted into the landscape, no more or less ominous than the interstate loping over the river or the tombstones staring down from the Methodist cemetery on the hill. Birds nested in its evening shadows and deer grazed at its edges and kids swam in the waters creeping past it into the Watts Bar Reservoir, and the fields right next to it were designated, by an official brown-and-white sign, as a wildlife viewing area.

    Meanwhile the Kingston plant was incinerating 5 million tons of coal every year and dumping the ash at the edge of the river. Every so often, bulldozers would sculpt bottom ash, the heavy and coarse material left in the furnaces, and dirt into the dike, raising it a few feet one year and a few feet more another year, then add interior barriers until it was actually several ponds - cells, in the jargon - enclosed by one massive levee. It grew longer and wider and higher, but the sides were always seeded with grass so that after more than fifty years it had come to resemble a well-manicured mesa, standing upwards of sixty feet high on eighty-four acres of riverbank. And if a little ash water seeped out, which it had for decades, or part of the dike blew out, which it did in 2003, the TVA dutifully patched the walls and mopped up the puddles, and nobody fretted about it because nobody paid it much mind. And why would they?

    Electricity has to come from somewhere, and so long as the coal was mined somewhere else and the smoke blew somewhere else, what was the downside? The wildlife sanctuary? The green mountain on the riverbank? The payroll? Ask almost anyone in Roane County what he thought about the Kingston plant and he would have told you the same thing: Good jobs and cheap power. Nothing less and nothing more, and it is difficult to imagine what more there could be.

    "We have a good life here," Tom Grizzard says, five decades after pulling that dead goose from the ash pond. He and his wife, Dolores, raised two sons and a daughter on 140 ancestral acres along Swan Pond Circle, where he hunted deer in the woods and pheasant in the fields and fished crappie and bass from the river. When his children were grown, two of them settled in houses up the road with their own kids, and Tom still hopes his grandchildren will lay claim to a piece of that land someday, too.

    Over the years, more people came, because this part of Tennessee truly is beautiful; it was a good life on the banks of the Emory in the shadow of the steam plant. The peninsula was sold off and subdivided for small houses that perched on the edge of the river or at the top of wide lawns that sloped down to the inlet. Rick Cantrell's sister rented a trailer on the inlet side, and there was a dock with a slide for the kids and a spot for Rick to sit out all night catching catfish and watching deer totter down from the ridge across the still water. Once the trees leafed out, he couldn't see the Kingston plant at all. "In the summertime," Rick says, "there was nothing but beautiful water."

    Up the road, between Tom's land and the peninsula, streets were paved for developments called Swan Harbour and Emory Cove, where half-acre lots, $300,000 and up on the water, were cleared for half-million-dollar homes. Larry Allen came west from Knoxville with his wife and kids and built the first house in Emory Cove, in June 2007, then the second, and once the market picked up again he figured he'd spend the rest of his working life there, framing houses on all the other lots, too. More homes were going up on the back side of Swan Pond Circle, over where Terry Gupton had his spread, 245 acres where he grazed a hundred head of beef cattle he watered from a spring. If the weather was dry and the winds were gusty, he might see riffles of gray dust skittering off the top of the ash pond in the distance, but he never worried about it. The TVA had taken good care of east Tennessee, and there was no reason to fear it wouldn't still.

    Sarah McCoin always wanted a piece of that good life, too. She is Tom Grizzard's cousin, and though she grew up on Air Force bases and had settled in St. Louis for thirty years, Swan Pond Circle was home, where the family's roots grew deep. Last year, after her father, a lieutenant colonel who retired to Knoxville, came down with a rare form of leukemia from breathing benzene on the flight line, she moved into her grandmother's ranch house on the property next to Tom's. There were pastures where she could raise Irish sport horses, and there was hay from Terry Gupton's fields to feed them, and one of these days she hoped to open a therapeutic riding school for disabled kids, right down the road from the giant coal plant and its giant ash pond. "My whole life," she says, "we drove past there and just, I don't know, assumed. Like when you turn on your faucet. You just assume."

    In June 2008, Sarah packed her grandmother into the car for an assisted-living facility. They turned left onto Swan Pond Circle, followed it up toward the plant and onto Swan Pond Road. Grandma stared at the great, green slope of the ash pit. "Sarah," she said, "how high do you suppose they're gonna make that mountain?"

    "I don't know, Grandma," Sarah said, and she kept driving, not even thinking about the question, let alone the answer.

    Which was: sixty feet above the waterline. And then it fell down.

    Late December was rainy and cold in east Tennessee, the temperature ricocheting from freezing to mild, and maybe that had something to do with it. Maybe the rain saturated all that ash, and tiny rivulets bore into the dike and then froze in the cold and expanded and thawed and froze and expanded again. Or maybe the weight of the wet ash, the downward force of it, was more than the lateral force the dike could withstand and overrode the friction that held the walls in place.

    The dike was not merely breached. It did not spring a leak. It collapsed, most of the northern and western walls disintegrating into mud and mush just before one o'clock in the morning on December 22. When it fell away, the wet ash behind it - more than a billion gallons of gray slurry, a hundred times more than the oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez - gushed out with the fury of a reservoir bursting through a dam, which, really, was exactly what it was.

    "You know how people always say a tornado sounds like a freight train?" says Travis Cantrell, who lived in the trailer above the dock where his uncle Rick sat out all night fishing. "That's what it sounded like."

    The sound lasted less than a minute, ash thundering from the pit, gravity smashing down those billion gallons that had stood in a high, fat column. The ash, moving fast in a solid wall, mangled the rails that carried trainloads of coal into the plant and washed out Swan Pond Road, the connector between Swan Pond Circle and everything beyond. It destroyed one house with blunt and vicious efficiency and tore another from its foundation, lifting it up and carrying it like a leaf in a rushing stream, then setting it down. It roared into the channel, almost forty feet deep, where the inlet meets the Emory, and filled it - the ash thicker and heavier than water, plowing to the bottom - throwing fish onto the banks and into backyards. It charged up the inlet, too, ripping Rick Cantrell's dock and all the other ones from their footings, crumpling a steel-beamed boathouse like so much foil, wrapping around thick-trunked trees and pulling them from the earth, their roots exposed and dangling like innards. It swept around the ridge into a second inlet, yanking out more trees and tossing bass and catfish and gar onto the edge of Terry Gupton's fields, where they flopped and gasped until they died in the cold.

    And then it was quiet. The ash covered more than 300 acres, but not level and smooth like an oil slick or a flood. Solid blocks of it were scattered like boulders the size of cars and small trucks. In the channel and the inlet, odd stalagmites ten and fifteen and twenty feet tall poked up from what had been the surface of the water, which wasn't water at all anymore but an enormous gray puddle.

    In the summertime, there was nothing but beautiful water.

    It was gone. All of it, everything buried and gray and poisoned.

    No one died and no one was seriously injured, which was a fortunate fluke of timing. If a coal train had been trundling in or out and cars had been backed up at the railroad crossing, that would have been bad, and if the pond had collapsed on a bright afternoon in July, with people boating and swimming in the river and grilling on the banks, that would have been catastrophic. "If this had happened in summer," Rick Cantrell says, "there would've been a body count." But it happened in the wee hours of a cold December morning, so there was only a colossal mess.

    At daylight, TVA workers surveyed the wreckage. They guessed at how much ash had covered how much land. They drew water samples from the Emory, Clinch, and Tennessee rivers, which supplies the drinking water for the city of Kingston and, farther downstream, much of the mid-South. And the next day, some flacks in the TVA's press office wrote a talking-points memo about the spill and the local water quality that some other flacks then rewrote (and which someone else later mistakenly sent to the Associated Press). After the editing, the spill was no longer catastrophic but merely sudden and accidental, and it did not dump 2.6 million cubic yards (which was off by more than half, anyway) but 1,600 acre-feet, which employs both a smaller number and a unit of measurement few people can readily visualize. The toxic metals in the ash - lead, mercury, arsenic, thallium, selenium, the list goes on - were now merely contaminants, and there were only minute quantities of those, which, relative to a billion gallons of slurry, is not technically inaccurate. All the water tests, meanwhile, indicated that the contamination was below state limits set to protect fish and aquatic life, though the more ominous phrase from acute effects was deleted, and of course, there was no mention of the fish and aquatic life already dead from the force of the sudden, accidental release of this large amount of material.

    A few days later, on a tree next to that metal boathouse that had been twisted and mangled by the ash that surrounded it for hundreds of acres, someone hung a square of white cardboard on which was written, in black marker, a shorter memo, a single, simple talking point: clean coal?

    The term clean coal entered the lexicon in its current faux-eco-activist incarnation - with the implication that coal can be a source of nonpolluting fuel, that it can be scrubbed of its toxins and its carbon dioxide rendered harmless - with stunning speed, largely in the past two years through the expensive efforts of two groups: the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a lobbying group for coal-burning industries, and the Hawthorn Group, a marketing firm hired by ACCCE.

    They are quite proud of their success, too. In December, about the time of the Kingston disaster, Hawthorn posted a newsletter on its Web site extolling the "highlights of a recent grassroots campaign Hawthorn created and managed" for ACCCE. Leaving aside the fact that grassroots campaigns typically are not created and managed by hired flacks, Hawthorn did have much glad news to report. Throughout the presidential campaign, it had focused on "finding creative ways to increase the visibility of the issue and ... demonstrating strong voter support," which is marketing-speak for littering crowds with fresh-faced human props in shirts and hats screened with clean coal. Do that with enough "branded teams," as Hawthorn calls them, at enough rallies; buy enough TV spots; plead your case to enough reporters, and eventually the idea spreads that coal is downright pristine - that it can even, as Hawthorn puts it, "be part of the solution to climate change." It was genius, and extremely effective. By the fall of 2008, President-elect Obama and Senator McCain, their running mates and their surrogates adopted our language and included it as part of their stump speeches. ACCCE shaped the debate by finding supporters of the candidates and turning them into clean coal advocates.

    Obama still talks about it, and he gets cheers every time. Because the public now believes in clean coal. Hawthorn polled what the firm considered "public opinion leaders" in September 2007 and again at the end of 2008 on, among other things, whether they favored burning coal to generate electricity. The first go-round was a split: 46 percent in favor, 50 percent opposed. But after a year of Hawthorn bleating "clean coal" over and over, support rose to 72 percent - and opposition nose-dived to 22 percent.

    Results such as these would be impressive no matter what the issue. Yet they are especially so in this instance, because the idea Hawthorn is selling - Coal is clean! - is complete horseshit.

    Now, ACCCE obviously will dispute that characterization, and it will do so in several semantically nimble ways. For instance, Joe Lucas, ACCCE's vice president for communications, explains that "clean coal," the tagline tacked onto the end of $17 million worth of commercials, is not a statement of precise fact but, rather, shorthand for "clean-coal technologies," which encompasses efficient furnaces and particulate scrubbers and the like. While that is not inaccurate - energy geeks have used the truncated version for years - Lucas suggests that this linguistic curiosity is widely known by the average American, so no clear-thinking person could possibly presume clean coal means that coal is, in fact, clean. "We use the term because it's a stated term of art, an accepted term of art," Lucas says. "And it's an evolving term."

    As is, apparently, the word clean itself. Who says, Lucas wants to know, that the environmentalists get to define the word? He rightly points out that the amount of coal Americans burn to generate electricity has tripled in the past forty years, yet toxic emissions, particularly sulfur dioxide (the chemical that makes acid rain) and nitrogen oxides (ingredients in ozone and smog), have been reduced by upwards of 90 percent in newer plants. "What would you call that," he asks, "if not clean?"

    Cleaner, maybe. Or not as dirty as it used to be. But not clean.

    Yes, coal has its advantages. It is plentiful and cheap, which is why Americans for more than a century now have enjoyed a plentiful and cheap supply of electricity. If the megawatts generated by coal - roughly half the entire grid - were suddenly taken off-line, the economy would collapse and we'd all be burning oil lamps in the dark. We are, for the immediate future, stuck with the stuff.

    But it's still filthy. Getting it out of the ground, depending on the method used, is at best dirty and dangerous and at worst ecologically ruinous. Washing it - literally cleaning it - is a grimy process that often involves filling valleys and hollows with lakes of poisonous black water held back by dikes not unlike the one that collapsed at Kingston. Burning it releases an assortment of toxins that, according to one study, kill an estimated 24,000 people each year - people who, on average, die fourteen years before they otherwise would have. The Kingston plant, for instance, primarily uses a low-sulfur coal and has scrubbers to capture nitrogen oxides, yet in 2007 its stacks still vented approximately 50,000 tons of sulfur dioxide, 12,000 tons of nitrogen oxides, 1,700 tons of hydrochloric acid, 329 tons of sulfuric acid, and ten tons of ammonia, as well as lesser (though not insignificant) amounts of arsenic, barium, chromium, cobalt, copper, lead, mercury, nickel, selenium, vanadium, and zinc - all of which, in case that sounds like a multivitamin, are not things anyone should be breathing. That's the inventory from only nine furnaces in east Tennessee; there are 1,470 more incinerating coal in 616 other power plants across the country - roughly a third of which have no pollution controls at all. Finally, there is carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that is helping steam the planet to perhaps catastrophic temperatures; coal burned in the United States each year releases about 2 billion tons of CO2, a full third of the nation's entire output of that particular gas.

    In a sense, then, our appetite for coal - our want and need for lights and televisions and toasters - is a slow-motion suicide pact, no different really from that of a two-pack-a-day smoker: It's all very pleasant and satisfying in the moment, but sooner or later....

    When it speaks of clean coal, ACCCE is focusing only on the process of burning it, the midpoint of the coal cycle. Its premise, its promise, is that the marvels of science can strip most of the toxins from the smoke, and that carbon dioxide can be captured and safely stored deep underground. "There's never been an environmental issue facing this industry that hasn't been met by technology," Lucas says.

    Technological innovations have, in fact, reduced overall air pollution by about half since the '70s, though those innovations have almost always been the result of legislation, regulation, or lawsuits. And yes, carbon dioxide can be captured and stored, but in the same way that we can establish a colony on the moon: The science exists and has been proven to work in small experiments, but the process is years, perhaps decades, away from being viable on any kind of significant scale. And it may never work everywhere: Duke Energy, the country's third-largest CO2 emitter, says the geology beneath its planned $2.3 billion Cliffside Unit 6 plant outside Charlotte, North Carolina, isn't suitable for holding in place the 6 million tons of that gas the stacks are expected to release.

    As for scrubbing out the poisons in the smoke, there have been great advances in that area. Here's the rub, though: Even if the toxins were removed - which won't happen anyway, since most older plants sidestep environmental standards through grandfather clauses, but let's pretend - where would they go?

    Into the ash pile.

    Coal plants will create 130 million tons, ballpark, of ash each year. Some of it will be sold off - gypsum for wallboard, tiny globules called cenospheres for industrial filler, some more for asphalt and cement and soil conditioners - but the rest of it, most of it, will have to be stored. There is no standard method for its disposal, or even an accurate count of disposal sites, because the federal government does not consider coal ash to be hazardous waste requiring regulation, and state rules vary from lousy to middling. So some of it will be dumped into dry landfills, yet over time, rain and gravity will pull the heavy metals to the bottom; even if the pit is lined with clay or plastic, the liner will eventually fail and those poisons will leach into the ground. And some 7 million tons a year will be shoveled into abandoned mine shafts, where, just as with the landfills, the heavy metals will quite likely seep into the water table. The rest - 27 million tons - will be dumped into containment ponds.

    Like the one in Kingston, where the coal came from somewhere else and the smoke went somewhere else and it seemed, for a time, that coal really was clean.

    The night before New Year's Eve, eight days after a billion gallons of ash buried 300 acres in Roane County, Penny Dodson's grandson, Evyn, got sick. He started coughing, hard and racking, shaking his tiny body. His nose ran, and his eyes watered and itched so badly that he rubbed small bruises around them.

    Penny had been worried the ash might make Evyn sick, especially Evyn, because he was so vulnerable. He'd been born eighteen months earlier with cerebral palsy and weak lungs, and Penny stopped working as a nurse to take care of him, to feed and bathe him, monitor his breathing, make sure he was on the floor every day for exercise and therapy. The two of them, Penny and Evyn, lived in a trailer they rented from Tom Grizzard at the end of a lane off Swan Pond Circle that sloped down to a cove on the Emory. Penny always wanted to live on the water. "I'm originally from Joliet, Illinois," she says. "We don't have this kind of beauty up there."

    On the day of the collapse, Penny, fretting about Evyn's lungs, called his pulmonologist. He told her to call the TVA and find out the particulate count - the amount of ash particles floating in the air. Which she did. She was told, "It's wet. Don't worry about it."

    That was the sum total of the TVA's immediate response plan: keep the ash damp so it wouldn't dry out and blow all over the county. To even call it a plan, though, is generous, because there was not, in fact, any document filed away detailing what should be done if the dike holding back fifty years of ash were to collapse. It was more of a reflex reaction, and a weak and impractical one at that: How, precisely, were 300 acres of ash supposed to be kept perpetually moist, particularly once the weather turned bright and breezy?

    Yet at the same time, TVA officials insisted the ash was basically harmless. Its main component, they said, was silica, which is the same sort of technical parsing that allows tobacco companies to maintain that their products consist primarily of dried leaves. (Though breathing a cloud of silica is awfully hard on the respiratory system, too.) Sure, they'd made an unfortunate mess, the TVA seemed to say, but nothing to panic about. The cleanup would take only four to six weeks - honest, four to six weeks - and in the meantime, just don't let your kids play in it. Or your dogs romp in it. Or drink from the sludgy puddles. And just to be extra cautious, take your shoes off and wash the dog's paws before you go in the house.

    On New Year's Eve, with Evyn coughing harder, Penny called the number the TVA had given out for residents who had any concerns, left a message, said she was taking her grandson to the emergency room. In the ER, she says, a doctor told her the ash had most likely irritated Evyn's lungs and eyes and nasal passages.

    The doctor also told her not to go home. "I'd tracked the ash in the house, and Evyn plays on the floor," she says. "The doctor said we'd contaminated all the floors in the house." And she was told to leave everything - the boxes for her eBay business, Evyn's bouncy seats and walkers, and the electronic Elmo covered in red fur that he found under the tree Christmas morning - that couldn't be washed. TVA workers called her back three times that night and immediately booked her into a Holiday Inn Express. It was the same hotel where some of the men working the initial cleanup were staying, clomping into the lobby and through the hallways in their dusty boots. Penny and Evyn stayed there nineteen days, until the TVA leased her a small house in Harriman, upwind from the plant. "I still wonder if I'm far enough away, though," she says. "The wind can blow this way, too."

    Evyn wasn't the only one getting sick. Travis Cantrell, Rick's asthmatic nephew who lived not a hundred yards from the edge of the muck, was evacuated by the TVA a few weeks after the disaster. "Travis had to bother them so much until they just moved him out to get him to shut up," Rick says. As for Rick, who kept coming up to stand in front of his old dock and talk to reporters, he came down with a sinus infection that three courses of antibiotics haven't purged. Volunteers for United Mountain Defense, a Knoxville advocacy group that lugged clean water and fact sheets to residents beginning only hours after the spill because, well, someone had to do it, at first wore cheap dust masks. But then Matt Landon got wheezy enough that he shaved his unruly beard so a proper respirator would seal around his face.

    The TVA maintains that every air-quality sample it has collected shows the particulate levels to be within acceptable limits. Yet whether the ash is directly responsible for making people sick is almost beside the point. Some people fear the ash, and the stress of that alone can make a person sick. And there is little, if anything, the TVA can do to dissipate that fear, because the spill was more than an environmental disaster. It was also a breach of the public's trust, a violation of the unwritten compact between a seemingly omnipotent agency and the people it serves.

    We could hardly do without the TVA, Tom Grizzard likes to say.

    Not even God's above the TVA, Tom's aunt used to say.

    My whole life, we drove past there and just, I don't know, assumed, Tom's cousin says.

    You assumed, when you live next to one of the largest coal-fired plants in the world, that it would not harm you, and that is not as irrational as it might first appear. You assumed that coal was at least relatively clean because you've been told that it is, and the air is clear and the water, nothing but beautiful water, is clean and there is a wildlife sanctuary in the big plant's shadows. You assumed that a green levee engineered by federal employees would not fall down. You assumed that the place you always wanted to live because it was so much prettier than anywhere else you'd ever lived wouldn't, in an instant, turn gray and poisoned.

    And when you discover all of those assumptions were false, what more are you willing to believe? What more should you believe?

    Fifty miles north of Knoxville, a stream is trickling down the side of what used to be a mountain but is now merely boulders shoved into a shape that roughly resembles a mountain. The water is splashing out of a pipe poking from the hillside and flowing through a narrow channel across a rutted road before continuing down to a small pool.

    The stream is bright orange. The pool is a neon shade of green. Neither is a natural color, and neither the stream nor the pool is a natural formation. And they are all, the stream and the pool and the colors, symptoms of the first, and perhaps worst, damage that coal inflicts. It - or rather, the cheap and sloppy way coal is carved out of mountains - is wreaking havoc on watersheds, which is to say our water supplies, clogging them with silt and soil and poisons. "That orange is from iron pyrite," says a man named Chris Irwin, who found the rogue stream in the Tackett Creek watershed in Claiborne County. "Rust, basically. That'll give you brain damage. Or kill you."

    Irwin, who is 42, is a self-proclaimed tree hugger, the co-founder and staff attorney of United Mountain Defense (though he actually practices criminal defense, not environmental law). Before December 22, the UMD focused on monitoring mining and its effects in the Tennessee mountains, which is also a disaster, albeit one that is so visibly remote that few people ever notice. "The cost of coal, really, for me, is the water," Irwin says. He's a sixth-generation Appalachian, the grandson of a TVA accountant, and as a younger man he worked on watershed preservation and restoration as a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa. So he's got some perspective on what's happening to the mountains around him. "My grandmother used to say Appalachia is the Fourth World," he says. "Because we allow things here that we would never tolerate in the Third World."

    The Appalachians are the oldest mountains on the planet. They are also one of the most diverse ecosystems in the world, with more species of trees in the Smoky Mountains than in all of Northern Europe. And for eons, those hills and valleys were a spectacularly abundant watershed. It is impossible to overestimate the value, the necessity, of maintaining it as such, too.

    "The Appalachians are the Saudi Arabia of clean drinking water," Irwin says, "and they're blowing it up for a couple of years' worth of coal. It'd be like the Saudis blowing up their oil fields to get at the gravel underneath." He shakes his head. "A hundred years from now they're going to look back and say, 'Those damn fools.' "

    Probably. And here's why they will say that, and why, on a gloomy February day, there is an orange stream dribbling into a neon pond.

    Woven into the western Appalachians, from Alabama north through Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, and into Pennsylvania, is a broad seam of bituminous coal, the remnant of swamps that, 300 million years ago or so, decayed into peat. As the mountains grew and shifted, tremendous heat and pressure transformed that rotting vegetation, first into lignite and finally into coal. At the same time, the surface of those mountains developed into a complicated filtration system. Rain would soak the ground and meander through roots and underbrush into streams, where insects and macroinvertebrates and rocks would clean out the organic matter and the particulates and feed clean water into creeks and rivers and lakes and so on. Occasionally, a rock riddled with mercury or arsenic or some other heavy metal might rise to the surface, where it would be gradually eroded over thousands or tens of thousands of years, releasing infinitesimal amounts of those elements into the water supply, so dilute as to be harmless.

    Fast-forward to the present day. Miners want the coal. The easiest way to get it is to simply blow off the layers of mountain above the coal, then scrape it out, a process known as mountain-top-removal mining, or MTR. The rubble - called spoil - is dumped into neighboring valleys, obliterating them and any streams and creeks within, and the mountain itself is left flat and bare. There are swaths of West Virginia, where MTR is most rampantly practiced, that have been leveled into deserts.

    In Tennessee the preferred method is cross-ridge mining. Rather than coming down from the top, miners blast away the sides of mountains at the level where the coal is. To do that, the miners first must clear-cut where they plan to gouge the mountain, and that is also where the degradation of the watershed begins: With no trees to hold the topsoil in place, it washes into the streams and rivers, smothering the ecosystem.

    Then the spoil is removed and the coal carved out, miles of it, leaving long, deep cuts ribboning around the mountains. When the coal has been depleted, the mountains are then "restored": The rubble is bulldozed back against the exposed cliff, compacted into a shape reminiscent of the original, and then planted with grass or long-needle pines where once stood hardwood forest. Instead of functioning streams - which are extremely difficult to re-create - the miners install "wet-weather conveyances," which are basically rocks piled into gutters to steer rainwater down the hill. They also build containment ponds, theoretically designed to last forever, to catch any heavy runoff.

    That orange stream is not flowing through a wet-weather conveyance, even though there are two nearby, one on either side. Rather, it's doing what water does, which is take the path of least resistance. "It's just the water lottery," Irwin says, crouching over the rusty stream. "This water came through a bad part of the spoil and blew across the road, and this is what you get."

    He ponders that for a moment, traces the orange stream down to the green pond. The amount of toxin in the water is magnitudes greater than what would naturally occur, for the simple reason that it was exposed in an unnatural quantity. Left undisturbed, that pyrite would have worked its way to the surface through erosion, and it would have been washed away over thousands of years in minute traces. But because the mountain has been jumbled and water has found that pocket of exposed metal, a century's worth of runoff is washing away on a Saturday.

    "At least iron pyrite's a convenient metal," Irwin says. "It turns bright orange. You can see it. The others, the arsenic and selenium and mercury and manganese, you can't see."

    Irwin is halfway through a six-hour drive through strip-mined mountains, a continuous slog through brown and gray slopes flecked with neon ponds and yellowing pines struggling for purchase in a mix of mud and shale. "Lipstick on a corpse," he mutters. "It's just a giant experiment on the most valuable resource we have."

    Farther along he gets out of the car and hikes down a slope, reclaimed and planted with thick grasses but still crumbly, his footing unsure, then a mile or so along a trail to a spot he calls Mega Slide Alpha. It's on a site that was long ago mined and filled in with sculpted rubble, and for a while maybe it approximated the look of a genuine mountainside. But then it fell down. Most likely, water from the top undercut the fill, and then all those busted-up rocks avalanched down the slope. All that's left is a gaping gash at the top, maybe 200 yards across, and at the bottom, a valley floor filled with debris.

    This is not an uncommon occurrence. Irwin likens the basic physics to removing the top of an Oreo cookie, smashing it, then piling the crumbs back on top. Everything is back where it was, more or less, but it's hardly a proper Oreo.

    Just as these are no longer proper mountains. "There's just no ecologically sound way of blowing up mountains," he says. "It's just the cheapest, sloppiest way to get the coal. And of course it's cheap. They're passing all the costs along to the future."

    Four weeks passed after the Kingston ash pond collapsed, then eight, winter giving way to the first buds of a Tennessee spring.

    The ash was all still there, smothering the same land and inlets and river channel that it had claimed in December. The cleanup was costing the TVA more than half a million dollars a day, but despite its early promise to make everything pristine again in four to six weeks, little had actually been cleaned. A sharp channel had been cut through the ash plugging the inlet, allowing the spring to flow out into the Emory, and helicopters had dropped eighty-five tons of grass seed on the mess (the idea being that turf might hold the ash in place) and spread hay on top of that, as if it were any other new lawn. But barely anything sprouted, and the straw covered the ash the way moss dapples a stone, in patches and clumps.

    Mostly, the TVA had been busy building weirs, which are dams below the surface of the water, to prevent more ash from migrating downstream, and a dike that stretches from the site of the collapsed pond clear across the channel to the land on the other side. When it was completed, ash on the eastern side of the new dike - that is, the sludge sitting in the Emory proper - would be dredged and then dumped onto a new spot on the west side. How long all that ash will remain there is unclear. The state and the EPA have to approve any disposal plan, which could include rebuilding the pond on the site of the Kingston plant or hauling it away. Or maybe it will stay forever, 300 acres of ash, forty feet deep in spots, too much to ever be properly cleaned. It could be leveled and sodded and rechristened a ballfield or a park or another wildlife viewing area, and eventually it will have been there so long that it will have melted into the landscape.

    On the other hand, a group of residents have sued to stop the TVA from hauling the ash away, because they don't want it tracked across the county. (Of course, other residents, dozens of them, have sued the TVA, too, for negligence.) Just building the dike and the weirs created a lousy mess. An endless convoy of heavy dump trucks circled from the quarry north of the spill with loads of rock and gravel, fine specks of dust billowing from their tires and chassis and beds. At Anything on Wheels, the used-car lot at the corner of Swan Pond Road and Highway 70 (guaranteed financing! everyone's approved!), David Pittman was paying a guy to hose off the pickups and sedans every other day. "I come down here and everything's normal," he says. "Except there's dust everywhere."

    There was, however, finally a rough consensus about what was in the ash. On January 9, not quite three weeks after the disaster, a professor of geochemistry at Duke University named Avner Vengosh collected samples from the site, took them back to the lab, and analyzed them. At the end of the month, he released the results, which were somewhat reassuring and thoroughly disquieting all at once.

    First, the good news: The river water was not, at that time, badly contaminated. "But we think that's only because of dilution," Vengosh says. Assuming the TVA's air-monitoring samples are accurate, there was also little reason to fear that anyone had inhaled an acute amount of toxins. The immediate risk, in other words, appeared to be low.

    Now the bad news: If the ash dries out and starts to waft about in particles of ten microns or less, people breathing that air are going to suck it deep into their lungs. Depending on which bit of ash is inhaled, the results can be anything from irritation - from, say, silica - to an increased likelihood of dying from cancer. Among the most worrisome elements in the ash, according to Vengosh, are two radium isotopes: 226, which has a half-life of 1,600 years and decays to radon, a gas known to cause lung cancer; and 228, which with a half-life of less than six years decays much more rapidly, releasing a higher rate of radiation. As it breaks down, 228 decays to thoron, which also increases the risk of cancer.

    There is also the litany of other heavy metals in the ash - including, Vengosh found, arsenic at a level twenty times higher than the local soil - but those should be relatively harmless if they don't float around in the air and nobody mucks around in the stuff. But the key word in that premise is "if," and there are more ifs to negate it.

    "First of all," says Vengosh, "if you leave it there, it will become airborne. And the problem is, if you're living next to it, the dog is drinking the water, the kids are playing outside, they're tracking it in the house. And if the ash is part of the mud, then you're bringing those metals into your house."

    As for the river, well, ash sinks. So the water might be fine, but the sediment, where catfish root and bivalves feed, is poisoned with mercury and lead and everything else. "The ecological system," Vengosh says, "is probably going to be severely affected."

    Dredging the ash from the river, as the TVA began doing in the spring, will remove much of it, but at the risk - unless the dredge is manipulated with the precision of a microsurgeon - of stirring up toxins to resettle downstream. Leaving them in place, meanwhile, means they'll eventually work up through the food chain. Already, according to one study, one in six women of childbearing age has an elevated level of mercury in her system, which can cause neurological damage in unborn children (and, obviously, adults). The main cause of mercury poisoning? Eating contaminated fish.

    The main source of mercury pollution?

    Coal-fired power plants.

    Suzanne Burton and her husband bought a beige house with a sweeping front porch on five steep acres above the inlet in 2004. She knew there was a power plant across the channel, of course, but the Realtor had mentioned it only in passing and none of the neighbors seemed worried about it and, well, electricity has to come from somewhere, and it'd been coming from the Kingston plant for so long that surely everyone would have moved away if it'd been noxious or dangerous or even annoying. Except for the black spots she had to power-wash off the siding every few months, she never gave the turbines or the green hill much thought.

    Suzanne's a Jewish girl from Miami Beach, her husband a redneck from Miami Springs, and they'd moved north to find a place as different from Miami as possible, which is about as apt a description of Roane County as any. Her husband could target-shoot into the hillside from the patio, and deer bedded down in the tall grass behind the house, and the view from the deck, all green trees and pale water, was just about the prettiest thing. By the spring of 2008, they'd remodeled the house and owned it outright and debt-free.

    Then her husband died, cancer, in June 2008. Suzanne decided to sell, move closer to Knoxville once the market picked up again and she could get $250,000, or at least close to that, the investment they'd made in the house on the hill. She could afford to wait out the real estate slump.

    At dawn on December 22, she walked out on her porch.

    Oh, my God.

    Everything was gray, the landscape now a moonscape.

    Her land was worthless. She knew it. Everyone else knew it, too. The empty lots in Swan Harbour and Emory Cove, the patches of riverbank on the peninsula, the fields on the back side of Swan Pond Circle - millions upon millions of dollars of real estate, none of it worth a bucket of spit. "Look at that," Tom Grizzard was saying a few weeks later, idling in his red pickup in front of an undeveloped parcel on the river in Emory Cove. "I was just flabbergasted: $325,000 for one lot, a half-acre lot. And somebody would have paid it. Up until now. Now you couldn't hardly give it away."

    Nor could you anytime soon. If the ash is all removed, if the river is cleansed and the inlet swept out and there's nothing but beautiful water again, would you swim in it? Would you pay $325,000 for a half-acre lot in the twin shadows of Kingston's smokestacks? Would you retire at the headwaters of the Watts Bar Reservoir? Or five miles downstream? Ten? How far is far enough? And if you won't and no one else will, either, what happens to the tax base, to the tourism dollars, to the city of Kingston and the town of Harriman and the rest of Roane County? And even if the TVA promised there was no lingering danger, would you believe them? Would you trust them?

    Consider what happened in 2003, when the ash pond leaked and the TVA mopped up the mess and nobody paid it much mind. In the aftermath of that breach, the TVA considered eight ways to fix the pond. Three of them, ranging from installing a vibrating beam around the perimeter, for $2.6 million, to converting to a dry-collection system for the ash, for $25 million, would have been global fixes, meaning permanent and thorough. (Another potential plus of the dry-ash idea, according to TVA documents, was "Benefit to marketing???") Instead the TVA chose the cheapest option: building a new cell east of the existing ones for a mere $480,000, which it knew - knew, in black and white in its own analysis - was a "Short Life/Term Fix." Just as it knew - knew, in memos and e-mails and engineering reports going back decades - that the dike was unstable, that the original low wall surrounding Tom's old swimming hole wasn't sturdy enough to support a sixty-foot mound, that seepage and leakage had been recurring concerns since the '60s.

    Would you trust them now?

    Maybe you would. Maybe if you'd lived there long enough and never wanted to leave, if you'd grown up with the TVA and its cheap power and good jobs, even if you were an educated man who understands toxic waste and nature and the interplay between the two, you could forgive. "I'm not against the TVA," Tom Grizzard says. "We gotta have it. We gotta have clean coal. But somewhere along the line, they failed. And now we've just got to work together."

    Or maybe you wouldn't trust but you'd stay anyway, despite the fear and doubt. "I never plan on moving," says Tom's cousin Sarah McCoin, raising her Irish sport horses on the acres next door while her father in Knoxville is dying from breathing all that benzene. "I just hope I live. Because I know that stuff is hazardous. I know how lifestyles can be changed by chemicals, and I know it can take twenty years."

    Or maybe you get out, take the best deal you can get and flee. On the last Saturday in February, two TVA representatives made Suzanne Burton an offer on her house. "They were more than fair, to be honest with you," she says. As part of the deal, she can't say how much she was paid (though by April, the TVA had spent nearly $20 million buying dozens of properties). And there was another catch: She had to agree to release the TVA from all liability, forever, which is a tremendous gamble, especially for Suzanne. After the spill, she volunteered to be tested for heavy-metal poisoning (which the UMD funded with a desperate appeal to environmentalists). Her mercury level is high. "It's not from the spill," she says. "It's from living next to a coal plant for four and a half years. But what am I going to do? Not accept their offer, sit here and keep getting poisoned, put up with all of this in the hope that I might get something in five or ten years? Doesn't that sound kind of nutty?"

    She signed the papers that morning. "I'm taking the best offer I can get," she says, "and getting out of Dodge."

    Terry Gupton, the cattle rancher, wanted out, too. He stood at the edge of his spread in February, dead gars frozen into gray curls on the brown grass where the water and slurry had receded. Dust puffed up from under his boots with each step. He didn't know what his land, his 245 acres under the transmission lines, was worth anymore, only that it was worthless to him. "I wouldn't put a crop in here, once that sludge's been sitting on it," he says. "I would never put a cow out there. Would you want to eat a steak that's been grazing on that?"

    The ash had plugged the spring-fed creek that ran through his property, backed up the water, flooded out the road up to his house. The TVA raised it up once for him, then built it up some more when it flooded again. So it was making an effort, trying to do right. Terry wanted to believe that. "Like I say, they fixed the road, and they say they're gonna settle up with us as best they can," he says.

    But he doesn't sound optimistic, standing in his field at the edge of an endless disaster. He shrugs, turns his head, spits into the grass and the dust.

    "Well," he says, "you know how it is."

    -------

    Sean Flynn is a GQ correspondent.

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