Stephanie Smith
CNN Medical Producer
photos:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/07/13/coal.ash.illnesses/index.html?iref=mpstoryview#cnnSTCPhotoHARRIMAN, Tennessee (CNN) -- Pamela Hampton stands at the kitchen sink, her gaze trained out of the window of her family's small hillside home. The disaster site is not visible from where she stands, but she knows it is there, down the hill, around a short stretch of highway, less than a mile away.
On December 22,
1.1 billion gallons of coal ash sludge smothered 300 acres in East Tennessee.
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Six months after the largest industrial spill in U.S. history, Hampton, her husband, Charles, and their three young children say they still do not feel comfortable going outside. "Everything here is changed," Hampton said, her eyes glistening. "
reminds me of what you see on the moon. It breaks my heart." A few hours before dawn on December 22, the walls of a dam holding back billions of gallons of coal ash waste trembled and, finally, crumbled. The waste, a toxic soup containing ash left over from burning coal, which is then mixed with water, was stored at the Tennessee Valley Authority coal power plant in neighboring Kingston, Tennessee.
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"It makes you want to cry, knowing what has been lost," McCoin said. "I want my life back." Residents are afraid of the chemicals that were released into the environment: arsenic, selenium, lead and radioactive materials including chromium and barium. "It's like dumping the periodic table into everyone's drinking water," said Anna George, a scientist with the Tennessee Aquarium Research Institute who has for months been testing the waters and fish near the spill site.
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"I walked outside and said, 'Where did the lakes go?' " McCoin said. The lakes, she added, had been the heart of this once-beautiful community. "The mental agony alone is enough to put people here over the edge."
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First, 11-year-old Monica started complaining about headaches. Then, all three children -- Monica, 6-year-old Noah and 3-year-old Joshua -- began to experience upper-respiratory problems, fevers, ear infections, runny noses and red eyes. "You're taking your child to the doctor yet again, or two children, and then in a week, the next child is sick," Hampton said. "After about the third or fourth time, that's when I started realizing that this is not a coincidence. It's like being sucker-punched." Noah Hampton's ear infections were so persistent, his ears so inflamed, Pamela Hampton says, the family's doctor said it looked like he had growths in his ears resembling small grapes. The doctors' visits over the past six months have been frequent, expensive and inconclusive. "We're stuck. We're stuck. For however long, we don't know," Pamela Hampton said. "And what's going to happen with the future symptoms? Is this stuff going to cause permanent DNA damage to our children? Death? Cancer?"
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