Tivos For The TVA: The Latest From The Clowns Who Brought Us Kingston
Posted March 6, 2009 in Curbing Pollution, Health and the Environment, Solving Global Warming
There's some encouraging news this week that the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) may swear off wet fly ash storage at coal-fired power plants, but who knows if we can trust them to do so when the heat is off months from now.
Then again, maybe the heat never will come off the TVA, which seems to be lurching in recent months from one disaster to another. Consider the new Office of the Inspector General (OIG) audit report out this week on the financial abuse and fraud at the TVA. As our friends at Facing South put it:
The Tennessee Valley Authority, already caught in a legal quagmire following December's disastrous spill of a billion gallons of coal ash from its Kingston power plant, is in trouble yet again -- this time for out-of-control credit card spending by its employees. A two-year review by TVA's Inspector General found that spending as part of a program created in 1995 for minor business-related expenses had ballooned to more than $75 million annually ...
The OIG report prompted this scathing report from the Associated Press:
Televisions, X-Boxes, alcohol, Internet software and tuition are just some of the questionable purchases made by Tennessee Valley Authority employees on their government charge cards, according to auditors in TVA's inspector general's office. A two-year review of the card program, created by the nation's largest public utility in 1995 for small business-related expenses, found spending has swelled to more than $75 million annually, the audit said. Nearly a third of the purchases in fiscal 2007 were for more than $5,000 and many apparently were rubber-stamped by administrators. One unidentified cardholder had more than $5.9 million in charges on six cards over two years.
This from the same Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight that bungled the Kingston wet-ash storage site and also is in charge of other such sites across the Southeast U.S.
How did the TVA respond to the findings of $75 million of abuse and apparent fraud?
It turns out that Tennessee Valley Authority President and Chief Executive Tom Kilgore leapt into action by sending out an email to his employees encouraging them to use their credit card properly. Ouch! Zing! Talk about your 40 lashes with a wet noodle!
The problems at the TVA aren't going to away on their own. We have to agree with this blogger at the Shelbyville (TN) Times Gazette:
I bumped into this story this morning about fraud, waste, and abuse of TVA issued expense credit cards and I must say that I am disturbed by it. In the military, expense cards of this nature were common, but fraud was not. Why? Accountability. If a purchase was made on the expense card, the user had to document every single purchase with supporting documents. These people at TVA have been on a spending spree and many of the people charged with ensuring that the purchases were necessary have been negligent. These people should be relieved of their duties in my opinion. The report states that televisions, video games, college tuition, and alcohol were charged during 2008. I read parts of the official TVA report and I could not believe the level of negligence that has been going on at this agency.
It is this kind of sloppy organization that leads to careless situations like the Kingston eco-disaster. And that is not a situation that Mr. Kilgore can just sweep under the rug by sending some email or doling out some other light slap on the wrist. As the AP has reported in recent days:
A third of the people living near the toxic coal ash spill from a TVA power plant in East Tennessee are reporting respiratory problems, and about half have experienced increased stress and anxiety, according to a Tennessee Department of Health survey. Public health staff interviewed 368 residents during January visits to homes within one and a half miles of the Kingston Fossil Plant facility in Roane County. A coal ash pond at the plant burst Dec. 22, spilling 1 billion gallons of coal ash sludge onto nearby land and into the Emory River. No one was killed or seriously injured, but environmental groups said the accident was proof of the danger of lax regulation of coal ash storage.
Look up "lax" in the dictionary. If the top management team of the Tennessee Valley Authority isn't listed there by name, it should be.
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Comments
Johanne — Mar 8 2009 01:44 PM
Now, I'm Canadian, and don't know all US laws, and call me naive, but I think a lot of people in Roane County, Tennesse are having their civil and human rights taken away from them.
I've been following the tragedy of the Kingston coal plant disaster from afar, and have been made aware of bad stuff happening over there, and don't see much objections to the behavior of the Tennessee Valley Authority police.
Now I understand that TVA is a federal agency who's job is to make electricity. Knowing that, I could consider TVA police like security guards whose mission is to keep an eye on TVA's property.
Since the fly ash pond breach of December 22d, 2008, it has come to my attention that TVA police seem to have a lot of power over the lives of the Kingston plant's neighbors, and everybody seems to think that their behavior is perfectly normal.
For example, my country consider rivers to be in the public domain, so I don't understand how the TVA police, in the next few days after the breach, decided to close part of the Emory River, and intercepted people in crafts and told them to leave. I'm referring here to volunteers who were taking water samples in order to have them analyzed to be able to compare their results with those of TVA and the EPA. Who gave TVA police the authority to limit access to the river and to keep people away?
Also, I understand that TVA police have been putting up road blocks on public roads in still inhabited neighborhoods. If I got this right, TVA is issuing "tags" to the residents and force them to stop at these road blocks to identify themselves. Are they not innocent victims of an environmental disaster? How come TVA police can control their comings and goings like this? Who gave TVA police the authority to block public roads, keep tabs on free citizens, giving and controlling "tags" to whomever they want? And most of all, how come people let themselves be controlled in such a way?
It has come to my attention that TVA police are accosting people on private property, asking for ID, inspecting the insides of private vehicles, asking for and reading private contracts between private citizens on private property, and seeing that scientific equipement is not installed on private land. What is wrong with this picture?
In my country, unless there is a very legitimate reason to do so, REGULAR police cannot approach a citizen and force that citizen to show some ID. I thought it was the same in the USA!
I think the people of Roane County, Tennesse, are either very patient, tolerant people, or they are so terrified of the TVA police that nobody seems to want to object to the intolerable behavior of these goons.
P.S.: in honor of the TVA March in March in Knoxville, my Earth Day flag will be flying on my property on March 14th. It is not shameful to stand up for your rights.