Widows Creek Gypsum Pond

Recovery efforts at Widows Creek Fossil Plant continue

Updated Monday, January 19, 2009, 2:00 pm

TVA on Thursday, Jan. 15, completed filling the 36-inch pipe in the gypsum pond at Widows Creek Fossil Plant where the leak occurred. Crews used a camera to inspect the pipe before using 120 cubic yards of grout to fill the pipe.

Work to reinforce the dike between the two gypsum ponds is complete. Crews used more than 6,900 tons of sand and about 4,300 tons of gravel to complete the dike.

TVA’s continues to assess the entire pond system at Widows Creek to ensure safety and environmental compliance.

TVA is also working to remove the gypsum slurry, including cenospheres, from Widows Creek. The material has been boomed and vacuum trucks are removing it from the surface of the water and placing it back onto TVA property.

Cenospheres are inert, hollow balls of sand-like material created in a coal-fired boiler when molten silica in fly ash solidifies around a bubble of flue gas to form a hollow sphere. The gas bubble allows cenospheres to be so lightweight that the particles float on water and are typically collected by skimming the surface of an ash pond.

As of Monday morning, TVA has collected 120 truck loads of gypsum slurry material, which is an estimated 1,065 cubic yards of material and 16 tons of material from soil outside of the stilling pond.

TVA has also placed a 200-foot turbidity curtain (a boom with a skirt) at the release location on the settling pond to prevent additional material from being released into Widows Creek.

TVA’s recovery plan includes collecting the released material and returning it to the holding ponds. TVA, EPA, and ADEM continue to analyze data from the area to compute how much solid material remains in the settling pond and how much was discharged from the settling pond.

TVA, EPA, and the Alabama Department of Environmental Management estimate that less than 5,000 cubic yards of material was in the water that came out of the stilling pond at Widows Creek Fossil Plant.

The water and material were inadvertently released into Widows Creek and into a slough on the Tennessee River that is on the fossil plant site. Some of this material appears to have made its way to the Tennessee River last week.

This estimate of the release is higher than any of the analyses indicate may have occurred. The agencies chose to take a conservative approach in their estimation since an exact amount is undeterminable.

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