My Story by Diana Anderson

December 22, 2008, changed my life and this is the story I want to tell:

I have lived in my house at 364 Emory River Rd, Harriman, TN, for 32 years and had also lived with my parents in a summer house we had in the Tri County Sportsman Club for 9 years, which is about one half mile up river. I had been in the entertainment business for the first 22 years with my daughters. We were members of the group, The Moonshine Cloggers and The Dew Drops. We were cloggers on the TV show "Hee Haw". We preformed as part of the traveling Hee Haw Road Show. We traveled all the time performing on cruise ships, at fairs and conventions, and were really not home a lot.

When my daughters grew up and were in high school, I knew they wanted to go to college, so I knew that the entertainment was coming to an end. I got a job at K-25, a DOE Plant in Oak Ridge, TN. I was a Radiological Control Technologist. I gained a lot of experience over the next 15 years in controlling airborne hazardous radioactive material. I worked with the worst contamination, plutonium, at the Rocky Flatts Plant in Denver, Colorado.

After I started working at the DOE site in Oak Ridge, I started getting sick. Of course we stayed at home and did not travel doing shows any longer. I became fatigued, and my blood pressure got high. I started coughing, and became congested constantly. I could not get rid of the cough or the congestion. I started getting burn spots on my hands. I went to medical at the K-25 Site, and they said they had never seen anything like it before and suggested that I go to my family doctor. No one knew what the skin problem was, as they had never seen it before.

I started having some anxiety and cried a lot. Little did I know that by staying home, I was breathing the coal fly ash which blew from the top of the ponds of the Kingston Coal Fire Plant. I did see black dust and tiny pieces of black dirt on my car, deck, beach, and on the sand bar in front of my house. I got so fatigued that I could not walk to the top of my stairs without breathing so hard I thought that I was going to pass out.

I went to the Family Clinic in Oak Ridge and asked Dr. Daniel Lenior to run heavy metal testing on me and handed him a paper with the metals I had worked around. He slowly went to the trash can and let the paper slide into it and never mentioned it to me again. I could not believe that he would let me continue to be so terribly sick and not run the heavy metal testing on me or suggest somewhere else to go for the testing.

I went to Troutsdale, Virginia, to a clinic called Mt Rogers Clinic, where I paid $1000.00 for a physical out of my own pocket and found out that I had mercury poisoning. I had worked in some buildings at the plant that had had mercury in them. I had about 15 chelation therapy treatments at $120.00 each, which involves the removal of heavy metals. I started getting better and especially less fatigued.

I still continued to have the constant congestion, high blood pressure, anxiety, headaches, burn blisters on my hands, but the fatigue problems was much better. How could I have known that I was still breathing in the toxic coal fly ash from the Kingston Coal Fire Plant? I just could not get totally better no matter what medicine a doctor would prescribe for me.

After the disaster happened on December 22, TVA representatives came to my house and asked me what would make me happy. I thought they were crazy. They told me that the coal fly ash was inert. It is used in bowling balls, concrete, pavement, etc. They made it sound like it was harmless. In two more days they came back and again asked me what would it take to make me happy. I still thought they were crazy, and it made me think that I should research this coal fly ash because of how they acted. I got on the computer, researched the coal fly ash and started getting sick to my stomach when I found what was in it.

We had a neighborhood meeting with the TVA representatives and at that meeting I handed out a report on the coal fly ash that it was not inert. The fly ash has uranium attached to it after the combustion process, is dumped into the ash pond, dries, and some of it blows in the air. The TVA representatives never came to my house again.

TVA started covering the toxic fly ash with straw by helicopter and planted grass seed on it. I cannot imagine what would grow on fly ash. Anyway, it did not work. There was a wind storm and the straw and grass seed which did not grow, blew away. TVA started painting it with acrylic paint. What a joke. Anyway, it broke apart with another storm and blew away. When the wind is blowing the fly ash looks like clouds in the area and blows everywhere. We all breathe it. TVA does not even care about the health hazard they have created and how it has hurt us since 1955 when the plant was built. TVA is spending one million dollars a day and still making a bigger mess of the disaster.

TVA took over the ball park and soccer field behind the plant and are now filling it up with toxic coal fly ash. They move it from one side of the plant to the other side of the plant and to the ball field. So now there is more toxic fly ash laying there getting dry and blowing into the environment. The people who live in the vicinity of the plant by the ball field are getting heavy doses of the toxic fly ash.

I studied the coal fly ash on the computer more and more and found a group called United Mountain Defense. I contacted them, and liked what they do. I also joined a local group online where we emailed our concerns. United Mountain Defense gathered grant money to pay for 29 people to have heavy metal testing done and I jumped on that. It was free and I knew that I needed to have it done.

After the testing came back, I found that I had high levels of aluminum, antimony, nickel, tin, and a disease called Protoporphyria. I was amazed. I did not know what Protoporphyria was. I began to research it and found that it was either hereditary of caused from being in a toxic environment, or eating toxic food. Neither of my parents had this problem, so I believe this is of course from the toxic environment that I live in. I later found out that there were seven other people in the community who also had the same Porphyrin disease and are not kin to each other. This made me very suspicious that this is an epidemic.

On Monday, February 23, I picked up a 16 year old girl from our community and took her to the ER at Childrens Hospital, Knoxville, TN. She complained of chest pains, stomach pains, and her left leg getting numb. She handed the on call doctor her heavy metal testing report and it showed that she had very toxic levels of mercury in her body and she had no fillings in her teeth from which the mercury could have come from. The doctor was very concerned and referred her to a Neurologist. She also has the Porphyrin disease. The disease can effect the person neurologically causing the person to become a quadrapalegic and can even be fatal. I am really worried about this 16 year old, because she is to young to be dealing with this.

This toxic heavy metal environment we live in is espcially dangerous to children and babies. I could be linked to autism in babies. I would not have a baby live in this environment. I would not be surprised if all the 32 other Coal Plants in the United States have the same environment as we do. They could possibly be causing an epidemic of Porphria all over the United States. This disease has no cure and is inherited by the children. So it is passed on and on making it a serious epidemic.

I contacted Internal Balance in Brentwood, TN, next to Nashville, and found that this Porphyrin disease is either inherited or acquired. She said that we would have to undergo further testing. I decided to leave my home and move in with my daughter in Nashville, TN. I was getting so sick that I could not walk up my stairs again without breathing hard and feeling like I was going to pass out. I need help or I feel that I am going to die. The burn places are now breaking out on my stomach, my leg and on top of my foot. They are painful and I have to get away from the toxic coal fly ash.

The ash was in my house, on my lawn chairs, on my hot tub, on my car, on my central heating and air filters. I was eating and breathing the fly ash. I couldn't take it any longer. I will come back to this story and edit it as the story goes on. Right now at least I am away from the fly ash and my friends are still back there which is depressing to me. Dear God they need help.

My Story by Penny Dodson

This is how the disaster impacted our lives.....

I am a resident of the Swan Pond Community that has been directly affected by the disaster that left billions of gallons of coal waste in our community.

My grandson Evyn and I live just outside of the debris area. Evyn is 18 months old and is a Special Needs Child. Evyn was born prematurely and at birth he endured 25 minutes of CPR and other life saving measures. His team of doctors gave him no real chance of survival at that point. Evyn spent 6 weeks on a ventilator, and overcame the doctor's odds.

I was able to bring Evyn home to Swan Pond to live with me in September of 2007. Evyn has Cerebral Palsy, a Seizure disorder, asthma, allergies, digestive problems as well as other health issues.

On December 21, 2008 my family celebrated Christmas at my home that evening. I remember as each of my children and thier family left I told them to be careful & that I loved them.

My oldest son and his wife left my home about 11:45pm. They traveled down Swan Pond Circle, passing the Ash pond apparently just minutes before it failed, breaking apart and sending a 50 foot wave of water and chunks of ash and debris over the road, down the river and onto the land.

This event could have been more tragic. It could have taken lives. It could have taken my family.

On December 31, 2008 my grandson became very sick. He did not want to eat, sleep or play. His eyes were red and irritated and they watered almost continuosly. He coughed & sneezed. With each breath he wheezed more and more. As a nurse, I knew that I had done all I could and at the advise of his physician we went immediatly to East Tennessee Children's Hospital.

Once at the hospital, I explained to the practioners where we lived, what had happened at TVA and gave them all the information that I had gathered regarding Coal Waste/Fly Ash.

After a battery of tests, it was determined that Evyn was suffering the effects of the airborn fly ash. I was heartbroken. There were so many times that I was told we were safe, that there was no danger. I was mislead.

We have since been relocated to another area, but I still take every precaution to keep Evyn's exposure to the outside very limited. I still worry that he may become sick again.

Many other once healthy people in our community are also suffering from health problems including innocent children.

I strongly believe that Coal Waste/Fly Ash should be considered a hazardous waste and regulated. The components of the coal waste do contain heavy metals and when the Fly Ash dries it becomes a particulate/pollutant that is already heavily regulated by the EPA and is considered to have serious health impacts.

My goal in asking for regulation;
I don't want anyone else to have to experience this type of disaster in thier community, be misled into a false sence of security or fall victim to the health risks that coal waste/fly ash is currently imposing on our community.