Former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama Richard Moore, appointed to the post by President Donald J. Trump in 2017, blasted Alabama Power for its conduct supporting an archaic coal ash plan, the possible cornerstone of corruption in Alabama.
Alabama Media Group reported:
Moore called out Alabama Power for its decision to keep the toxic byproduct of burning coal in a pit near the Mobile River instead of trucking it away to a far-away site where it could be buried in a lined landfill.
“I am disappointed in the Alabama Power I have known to be a good corporate citizen,” Moore said during a news conference…. “This is the opposite of this. This is a travesty.”
Moore served as former inspector general with the Tennessee Valley Authority. He was appointed to that post in 2003 by President George W. Bush and served in that role at the time of a major coal ash spill occurred in 2008, after a dam breach outside a TVA Kingston, Tennessee, plant. The spill released millions of tons of coal ash slurry into two rivers near Kingston, a city of 5,900 people about 36 miles southwest of Knoxville.
The issue of coal ash pits next to water supplies is what put Alabama Power in a tizzy and now even their closest allies are saying , enough!
As we wrote in January:
[The] North Birmingham [Bribery Scandal] appears to have been a side-show, a distraction to the the real objective: squashing the tiny environmental group GASP before the group could start probing the Miller Steam Plant, one of the biggest greenhouse polluting, coal-burning plants in the nation, according to recent news reports.
We believe that concern could have been what environmental groups like GASP and others have been discussing about for years: ash ponds of coal waste next to water supplies.
Alabama Power’s sister-wife Balch & Bingham has dedicated an entire page on their website justifying and rationalizing the need to keep coal ash ponds next to water supplies, even having the audacity to write this analysis in a separate article:
For an ash pond of 10 million cubic yards, that’s 500,000 truck trips. Five hundred thousand truck trips. If you assume one truck every 10 minutes, 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days, that’s 9.5 years of truck traffic. A more realistic five day schedule would consume more than 13 years. In this scenario, trucks loaded with ash will travel 5 million miles over local roads and highways. That has significant consequences for state and local highway departments.
Alabama Power, Balch and their stooges are truly insensitive, out-of-touch fools!
Think about it!
What is more important, highways or the water supply?
What is worse, 500,000 truck trips or 500,000 sick Americans?
As Moore said, this is a travesty.
