A Report from Ground Zero of the Coal Ash Spill

Swan Pond Road: The Kingston Coal Disaster from SRmanitou on Vimeo.

After the flurry of national news coverage died down, model and international green maven Summer Rayne Oakes travelled to the site of last month’s catastrophic coal ash spill in Kingston, Tennessee, to get a better understanding of how the local people and ecology were affected. What I saw underlines the need to enact regulations governing the storage of this toxic sludge. There are 1,300 containment ponds nationwide like the one that broke in Kingston.

Summer Rayne Oakes is a sustainability strategist, model-activist, and correspondent for Discovery Planet Green. She writes on environmental issues and solutions for HuffingtonPost, Treehugger, Grist, and will be a regular contributor to The Infrastructurist. She has authored her first book Style, Naturally.