The sludge flood is of course a local catastrophe, especially for the four homes that were destroyed, but the NPR article agrees with the majority of other reports that the testing done thus far shows that it's not "immediately toxic."

Clean up of the site will be a massive, and difficult, job. The material is essentially "fly-ash" that will be about like cleaning out a fireplace that's been in regular use. (Much of the ash goes straight through ordinary vacuum cleaner bags.)

The prinicpal contaminants that could pose a danger to the more widespread environment, especially to the water system in the area and downstream, would be heavy metal residues from the coal. Even in fine particulate matter like this sludge, these migrate slowly, if at all; so if one believes in the "dilution theory" even if some gets away into the ecosystem its effect should be "small" - if an effective cleanup of the local spill is properly done.

The worse environmental damage has been done by Bush with a pencil.

The Congressional mandate to EPA called for progressively lowering limits on contamination, and both the law and advice from technically competent comments required a lowering of allowed airborne particulates "across the board" at this time.

At Bush direction, the EPA has rushed through a rule to retain the previous limits on "average airborne particulates" although it did slightly lower limits on "intermittent emissions." This locks in the current limits on sources that run continuously (such as coal-fired generating plants) although it applies heavy fines to places like Anchorage Alaska where the start of the snow-blower season intermittently "spikes" the emissions.

Additionally, despite a Supreme Court decision that the Congressional mandate requires the EPA to regulate CO₂ emissions, Bush has ordered a revision of the EPA regulation on power plants that includes a prohibition preventing consideration of CO₂ emissions in licensing for new coal-fired plants.

An additional new EPA regulation permits mines (coal mines are principal offenders) to dump mine tailings directly into streams as long as they "promise that they don't think it will hurt anything" and if they promise that "once the mine is no longer profitable they'll clean it up" (as part of the bankruptcy settlement for the mine when they abandon it?). This new regulation effectively prohibits the EPA even from inspecting what the mines are doing, as long as the mine operators say "trust us, we're good guys."

John