good morning the committee will come to order today's hearing will begin about our offering of the committee's heartfelt condolences to the family of larry lacroix of burlington iowa hearing was originally noticed a number of reports have come to light and demand that we look at the collapse as well as the factors that led to it with increased scrutiny i have done so and have come report upon which this testimony is based we can learn the mechanisms of failure that led to the collapse of the kingston storage facility but that is only a part of the story the second issue regarding management outrage that identifies a management culture that in combination with a lack of accountability standards and comes for ols created conditions that resulted in this bill and in my opinion these management failure thrust of this hearing however involves the future can the tennessee valley authority or sure congress and the people of tennessee valley region that its other coal ash disposal facilities are sound in subsequent lack of question that the subcommittee must get answers to even this meeting are and other hearings in the months ahead can t v a provide the public with credible risk assessments regarding the safety of these facilities including coal ash impoundments with the only goal and management in organizational change changes occurring within t v a produce results that address all of them i ceased to pose threats to public safety human help and the environment today's hearing is troubling these recently released reports indicate a management culture at e a that is slow and sometimes resistant to change testimony from eyewitnesses they will have this subcommittee to weather this change mostly and field up on this federal entity it will only be through a thank you very much madam chair today the subcommittee continues its review of coal ash storage specifically the december twenty second two thousand and eight instance at the tennessee valley authority power generating facility in kingston tennessee  public and private use you tell these have safety operated approximately six hundred coal ash sites for decades with only a few documented failures it is important to recognize that this spill directly impacted more than forty property owners were rendered uninhabitable water mines and gas lines had ruptured and nearby neighborhoods had to be evacuated it's my sincere hope that what occurred at the cas isolated incident the witnesses today will discuss the causes of the accident and report on some of their observations about the kingston site in addition these witnesses will address the agency culture within the tennessee valley authority and how this may have contributed to the accident in kingston as george romney wants said nothing is as vulnerable as entrenched success traditionally the tennessee valley authority has been a good steward of the environment most of its employees including some of the witnesses today reside within the tennessee valley and are all directly impacted by the actions taken by the agency additional laws  federal regulations would probably not have presented prevented this terrible accident the laws and regulations will not replace homes family treasures heirlooms or other personal property lost as a result of the kingston spill however this is little comfort for those property owners impacted by the king well have sacrificed a great deal and in some cases have forfeited their homes and other irreplaceable memories to this ac moving forward it's important for the tennessee valley authority its board of directors and its officers to review the agency's existing ash management practices recognize any shortcomings and subsequently ma changes to ensure more appropriate risk management and its facilities due to its proximity to elevated risk however the tennessee valley authority needs to take aggressive steps at its other call as storage facilities to identify and reduce risk to the public and the environment compliance at all levels within the tennessee valley authority will help restore the level of trust that is expected of one of the nation's largest power providers the benefits that sense the value thirty branch the nation are too important to be threatened by poor structures and poor formal written statement but i will say this this spill was not in my district but it is forty miles roughly from knoxville and i sent  a member of my staff very soon after this happened out there and a few days later i went out there and took a helicopter tour and got a briefing and i mentioned before that i met with all kinds of people working for  was in there and all through those years the environmentalists the t v a and at the p a another and sees thought this was just fine and nobody really said anything about it now this is a terrible thing that has happened both to see v a and it's horrible for the people who have been severely damaged but and i've always said that i think everything within reason that could be done should be done and i think it has been done in the progress that's been made has been amazing and in our last hearing it was estimated the t v s cost on this would be about a billion dollars that may be a lowball estimate and not counting the regulatory fines and lawsuits now my feeling is that if you disregard people who have a vested monetary interest in this either because they're connected to some environmental group that wants to get in contributions and make money out of this and if you put aside the contractors and all these are good people but if you put aside the views of the contractors who have a vested or monetary interest in this if you put aside all those people who are not tied then the one of those groups i think ninety five or ninety eight percent of the people who took a look at this would say that dva has done and is doing everything humanly possible to get this area cleaned up the progress has been tremendous and i think in the end this is this area is going to be cleaner than a lot of other areas around the nation and so you  can never satisfy the extremists or the kooks in any situation there be some people that we will never says fine no matter if we spent the entire federal budget on this problem but we have to be reasonable and we have to have a little balance and common sense in this situation and i think that t v a should be commended for all that they're doing and have done and all they will do in regard to this situation thank you very much the emory river and three hundred acres of land being filled with floods and in some places up to six feet deep this spill cost extensive this for options to the neighboring communities with evacuations and the loss of power and gas not to mention the houses that were destroyed in the tidal wave of ash and water it is a miracle that no lives were lost at the time of the spill however we do recognize the one life that was lost during the cleanup earlier this month as the representative of the second congressional congressional district i have great empathy for the communities that were directly affected by this unexpected and unprecedented event i'm also well aware of the effect of failures in protective structures can have on surrounding communities the damage to orleans and just some parishes four years ago wasn't because of hurricane katrina made a direct hit on new orleans instead it was because the strength of the storm surge cause catastrophic failures and levees and floodwalls throughout the city especially in north east and the lake area on the border with matter right that damage to the damage from these breaches included flooding in eighty percent of the city damage to eighty percent of the building and damage to forty percent of our housing stock because of these failures the city remains under water for days and in some places weeks but like the concerns bill the environment the environmental hazards work great we all remember the images of the waters through which my constituent had to wait to get food and water these were commonly referred to as a toxic soup because they will fill with sewage gasoline and oil to say nothing of bacteria and disease like you madam chairwoman in the media aftermath of the catastrophic failures that occurred as the result of hurricane katrina i sought accountability and assurances from the federal government especially the army corps of engineers that repairs could be made to ensure such catastrophic failures never happened again through my work on this committee and the subcommittee i'm closely overseeing the work  to ensure they are rebuilding our infrastructure to their former strength and beyond one of my priorities is ensuring the complete rebuilding of the seventeenth street and london avenue canal i have c sponsored legislation which states this and continue to work with the army corps of my delegation to ensure this protection is the chief or my constituents just like the community affected by the contents bill my district cannot afford another disaster again madam chair thank you for holding this important hearing and i look forward to work with you as you continue your oversight of this important matter thank you very much thank you will be able to answer any questions you may have regarding the region for us efforts related to the kingston spill response i will summarize my testimony but i ask that my entire statement be submitted for the hearing record as you know madame chairwoman t v s kingston facility suffered a catastrophic failure releasing an estimated five point four million cubic yards of coal ash to the emery and clinch rivers and surrounding areas shortly after issued an order to t v a to develop a corrective action plan to address the spill and conduct a root cause analysis to determine the cause of the dike failure over time lead federal agency designation transition authority under the comprehensive environment a response compensation and liability act or circles under which t v a will continue to perform their response action with the oversight the e c with t v a does not replace the tennessee department of environment order which remains in effect e p a s working relationship with the state of tennessee has been exceptional and we will continue that partnership minimize the potential for flooding and downstream migration of the coal ash under the tennessee department of environment order and the e p a a o c t v a was required to perform a detailed analysis of offsite disposal options for coal ash removed from the emory river that effort resulted in the selection of the arrowhead landfill in perry county alabama as the best off site facility to receive the coal as generated from the time critical removal action the landfill is fully aligned and meets all technical requirements specified by state and federal regulations another important factor in the selection was the preference for rail transportation rail transportation greatly reduce the potential for vehicle accidents of ois local traffic burdens and is approximately three times more fuel efficient than truck transportation after a thorough review e approved the selection of the arrowhead landfill as stated in previous testimony provided to the subcommittee the failure of the ash empowerment m t v s kingston plan highlight of the issue of empowerment stability e p a is currently overall the assessment responses are from more than two hundred purcell a days which have identified more than five hundred management units we expect to post that information on the e p a website within the next six to eight weeks in the meantime staff and contractors are in the field conducting onsite visits and inspections of those management units reported as being high or significant a high has a potential while also reviewing any current dam safety reports available from state or the facilities our goal is a complete all of the assessments for dams of high and significant hazard potential ratings this year as to t v s root cause analysis of the kinks and for syllabi failure e p a staff have reviewed the currently released analysis report which identify some of the factors that could have contributed to the kinks in facility structural failure e p a contractors are looking for  structural stability factors in our ongoing empowerment and management unit assessment efforts some of the factors being looked for include the size age and location of the structures signs of damage or die practices at coal fired power plants to determine if these facilities are in compliance with existing federal environmental laws and we will take enforcement action where appropriate to address serious violations madame appreciate the committee's overside madam chairwoman we appreciate your visit to the side we're working hard to rebuild public trust we know that that's going to be a difficult task and we're marketing to make sure that nothing like this happens again when the event happened and knew we had to do many things i'm here today to talk about what we did on root cause and to sure that our other facilities were site i knew we needed technical answers about locking some happen but even more additionally we needed to find out about our other sites to get those answers we commissioned to internationally recognized and respected engineering firms a e commerce brought in to conduct the root cause analysis of management system factors that contributed to that we carefully study the ecology report and accept mr walton star on well documented assessment as a u conn was conducting its work in kingston stand back was busy at s other sides with their technical evaluations starting in january stand began to inspect testing my recommendations on our other facilities we've worked aggressively over the last six months to implement the recommended changes also wanted us to take a self critical approach in looking at the hazard classifications of the storage impoundments we were not among those forty four that were originally listed and i recognize that and we move to correct that although we don't have any indication of the structures being in danger of failing we have reclassified impoundments at four of our sides as high as their potential and we're prioritizing our efforts at those sites in order to fully understand what happened  kingston we needed also an analysis of t v s organization and culture the dva board of directors commissioned an independent investigation to examine and identify possible management organizational factors that may have contributed to the kingston spill shortcomings and missed opportunities in our organizational effectiveness and our accountability at the board's direction we are already moving quickly to remedy the shortcomings i have initiated an agency wide organizational effect in this plan focused on culture change and improving our systems our standards our control in our countability i'm pleased that m r i report recognize that we're making some significant remedial progress to prevent any future upon spills but i also want to tell you the hard the water of caution that a comprehensive directive needed to provide assurance that best practices would be sustained across t v a owned by senior management and under the board's oversight last week i described the results of the m l a investigation to our employees it's tough medicine it's hard to take the tough medicine will mike us better today we had the benefit of the report on the office of inspector general and mr moore with test that shortly forward both to strengthen the integrity of our facilities and forge a culture of accountability a t v madam chairman already written testimony to submitted to the committee provides more details while we have much more to do with the chairs permission i would like to give you some idea of the progress we're making we've got a long way to go but i would like to show some photographs i've got this is the picture of the asheville as it removed about a half a million cubic yards of that material and continuing to work this is what the railroad in the rail looks a lot the day after the event we have that restored and that road is open to the public one of the sluice nearby this is a modern slew back that we can church lou and you can see that it was filled with ash and this is an example of what we have to do for the rest of the side as i said we've got a lot of work to do we're not finished by a long shot and we look forward to continuing to work with the committee as we move forward good morning madam chairwoman and distinguished members of the committee i appreciate the opportunity to share with you the results of our five month investigation of the root causes of the kingston failure on the morning of december twenty second two thousand and eight a massive flow slide occurred and within one hour it inundated the watts bar reservoir several slews and spilled over on to private properties there were no witnesses to the failure because it was night time and no one knew where it started or how it happened our assignment was to answer these questions and to determine the jet technical causes of failure we have conducted a thorough and comprehensive forensic investigation and root cause analysis presented in ten volumes with more than fifty four hundred pages this r c a process involved frequent and put from teac the t v a o i g the consultants the u s e p a bureau reclamation the insurers your technical engineer and the independent peer review or dr gonzalo castro and elected member of the national academy of engineering we did this to ensure that they would all be fully informed of our discoveries testimony offers lessons learned that can be applied to other wet ash disposal facilities i will show you several slides from the testimony that i have submitted what illustrates the failure sequence and the controlling factors due to the time allotment i will go through these slides briskly however i invite your questions on any information that we have shared to you this is a photograph from april of two thousand and eight the come arnold is a sion the dredge sells the ash collection pond within six months the judge ic and catastrophic failure occurred discharging more than two thirds of the contents of of the ash collection pond i will show you our opinion on the causation we're looking from northwest to southeast and we believe failure began in the northwest corner originating as a deep seated failure internal to the exterior confinement where like a pipe coming out of a pie plate this material heaved out almost within a very short timeframe surcharged the perimeter containment system causing a overload on the out on the outboard containment causing that outboard to containment to breach and then causing the release of the liquid contents making  liquid contents liquefy and flow out from a three to one slope this flowed out to an angle of repose less than one half degree i'll show you a few historic photographs to see the progression of this site nine hundred forty nine this was a lake and here again i'll show you in green the distance that ash from the plant would have to travel from waters to ruby release back to the reservoir over fifty two hundred feet a mile this ash would collect from the courses drains on the south to the walls fine grains on the north as we progress with time this eventual ash pond was eventually filled in and the material was stacked in one thousand nine hundred four in an effort to provide more material and within the confines this containment system a dried cell super elevated above the ash pond was created to store more material as the plant operated by nine hundred ninety six engineer plans were done to expand the facility vertically by two thousand and five this photograph shows you the three cell system that was collecting it was now down to two the footprint of the disposal is getting smaller but the structure we're getting higher i noticed in red is the two thousand and three slide event where seepage and piping occurred we looked at twelve failure modes at this particular site early identified in our work scope in early to judge for in early january we then evolved to four controlling factors it's too hard to read all these but these are a part of the testimony that are included in the slides point of fact is that this structure on its way to be built to do the year two thousand and fourteen did not make it to its ultimate height the redline denmark's its failure the underneath foundation is shown to be a material of the finest grains that had traveled the fir this early on in the progression of this particular disposal facility is a slime a mining term meaning a material that travels the furthest that drops out at the last being the finest lucis materials accumulating on the bottom those lines were found in the upper portion the northernmost analyze the stability of those sections that failed on the north as well as those sections it did not fail to the east or were consequential to failure on the west thank you very quickly through the progression of failure and cross section as you would look west the early portion would fail like the pa i explained that material was surcharge over to the initial containment dike causing it to be overstressed and breach notice the issue on the left on the right side the floodway from this  forty seven foot flood wave above the operating pool clearly a very dramatic failure in a very short period of time resulting in the release of the materials what leads us to the conclusion of four controlling factors a failure modes that led to this the load the ever increasing height the constants the force of ash the containment system being as it was discontinuous and separated the fact that it laid on a foundation the foundation serves as the footing for the building or a home or whatever the foundation is important if those three elements are weak and you contain a loose wet liquefy of a lash and lose your containment it then can be released in a very dramatic manner five point four million yards thank you very much thank been appointed to this position by the president in may of two thousand and three prior to becoming the first inspector general appointed by president t v i i was a federal prosecutor in the southern district of alabama for approximately eighteen years it is a pleasure to be able to testify here today about the office of inspector general's review of the colas bill a t v s kingston fossil fuel plant in december of two thousand and eight i believe you have a copy of our report which as you mentioned is becoming public today the kingston spill has brought intense scrutiny upon t v as well known and with it a call for more oversight of the agency the conditions at t v a that led to the disaster of december twenty second two thousand and eight have existed for decades and it is unfortunate that it has taken this kind of incident to prompt changes with t v a culture fossil plants relegated ash to the status of garbage at a landfill rather than treating it as a potential hazard to the public and to the environment we believe this culture resulted in management  which contributed to the kingston spill our report points out a number of issues that i would summarize into basically three categories first the warnings and red flags those warning and red flags were raised by outside consultants and internal staff that were simply not addressed number two there was an inadequate system of management controls as evidenced by fragmented organizational structures a lack of policies and procedures and inadequate training for dike inspectors and number three there was poor management or poor management practices that included a lack of maintenance of dikes and overall poor communication between organizations our report provides a more detailed discussion of each of these items madam chairwoman you have said that the kingston spill was caused by regulatory neglect a lack of government oversight and irresponsible coal ash practices are reports that we make public today supports your site t v a management knew for example that number one consultants had been hired by them and had urged them to perform a much needed analysis and to take specific corrective actions t v a management knew that say that they had failed to follow the engineers recommendations and they had failed to perform the analysis or take the corrective action c v a management also knew that it had a history of poor maintenance of its ash ponds and that it had experience or breaches in the past and finally d management knew that there were no policies or procedures for as for the management of coal ash documents supporting what i have just said are a matter of public record have been made available by t these facts are widely known the t v a board appears to clearly understand the gravity of the situation and recently they have taken both steps to address the problems that we have identified in our report also although t v management was slow to publicly discuss management failures as we point out in our report i am pleased to say that they have made great strides in starting a long process to not only rebuild the ash management program but to attempt to rebuild the trust and respect of congress the american people and t v s many stakeholders this will not happen without continued oversight by this subcommittee and other oversight authorities including that of the office of the inspector general we are method to devoting resources to monitor t v s new commitment to transparency and accountability and we welcome your support in that endeavor in addition to the recommendations in our report the office of inspector general recommends that congress whole regular oversight hearings to determine number one whether t v s coal ash facilities have either been close properly or modified to an appropriate safety level number two to determine whether t v s culture has in fact been changed to become more transparent and more accountable and finally to determine whether t v a has  fulfilled its responsibilities to the citizens of wrong county to clean up their community and to make them home madam chairwoman this concludes my opening remarks and i look forward to answering any questions that you or the committee might have geotechnical engineering for marshall miller and associates i'm a licensed professional engineer with a bachelor of science and a master of science degree and civil engineer technical engineering and i have worked in the field as a consulting engineer for nearly twenty years i was the lead project manager on a peer review of the study commissioned by t v a to the term and the root cause of the december twenty second two thousand and nine  ashville at t v s kingston fossil plant i appreciate this opportunity to testify before you were guarding the results of that peer review and other observations about ash management practices at t v a we prepared this work for the t v a office of inspector general and the details of it are incorporated into their report that is being made public today i will now summarize the results of our work focusing on three important topics first marshall miller's conclusions regarding the root cause analysis second our general conclusions and observations of ash management practices and  our recommendations for moving forward our first conclusion regarding the root cause analysis in marshall miller's opinion the four probable root causes identified by a com are technically plausible reasonably supported by the data and all soft foundation layer which has been as been called the slimes layer or sense of silt layer as one of the most probable root causes the significance of the field geometry and lose w ash in other words hydraulically placed or sluice dash indicate these factors also as probable root causes of equal or greater significance to the soft foundation soles factor and they should be equally emphasized in marshall miller's opinion the failure is not strictly associated with a thin weak sensitive silk slimes foundation layer and more associated with the ass like geometry and relatively low other similar similarly constructed t v am comments with or without the the slimes layer could be at risk of failure and should also be investigated when out i'll focus on our general conclusions and observations concerning ash management as early as one thousand nine hundred eighty five in transit problems related to the stability of dikes see which of the original dike were  an internal memorandum which is included in our report indicated that the calculated factor of safety for stability was less than a minimal or minimum except the value of one point five and close monitoring was recommended at that time to detect any potential signs of failure in lieu of changing t v a policies and procedures that would require that the ash farm be designed to a higher dam safety standard no specific action by t v appears to have been taken to improve the stability of the earth and bike scene banquet in marshall miller's opinion if t v a had included its ash ponds and a dam safety program as discussed and they december hundred eighty eight memorandum when t v eight decided against this policy the probability of identifying denin find some or all of the conditions that led to the failure would have increased significantly the construction of successive upstream stages to elevation a twenty which is the approximate failure elevation above the original containment dike may have contributed to an additional decrease in the factor of safety of the containment  system in essence at the time of failure this increase in constructive height was approximately seventy foot higher than the original crust elevation of dixie the design of the kingston should have included a thorough engineering evaluation of all potential failure modes or recommendations for moving forward since in our opinion the kingston ash fun failure is not strictly associated with a stand weak sensitive and more associated with the ash site or fill geometry and relatively low strength of the sluice what ash other similarly constructed ash from comets could be at risk of failure and should be properly investigated t v a and the power generation industry as a whole should strongly consider all the factors evaluated by a com as probable root causes of the kinks and failure when assessing the condition and structural integrity of wet ash disposal civilities is not prudent to us to presume that of slimes are not observed in the failed section of that kingston does not exist at any other sites there is adequate civility of these structures on the contrary the information developed from the extensive studies conducted by stan tech and they come in the case there is reasonable risk of other dikes failures if changes are not made in the design construction oversight and operation of these facilities lastly sound engineering practice is to design such facilities with features that provide a reasonable degree of redundancy or a second line of defense in the event that one or more of these systems become inoperable it is important that this design philosophy be applied to all of t v s ash disposal facilities this concludes my statement i look forward to answering any questions you may have thank you very area to the same standard in the same condition demonstrated as possible in the church yes ma'am we've made a commitment that we were going up the river first as the e p a s testified and the move to the embodiment then we have to move to the failed soil itself and fix that so we have really three areas and we are committed to fix all three of those areas thank you now you've seen this and i don't know how long it took for the build up to come but have you determined how often you might need to move this out to keep accumulating to that point again often we need to move this i have yes yes ma'am forward with that news on an implementor drop collection system i anticipate all the will be transported outside and i understand your movie and now to alabama we are responses to that we selected the site we did because after we tentatively looked at that i sent to my senior executives down to look at it talk to the community and make sure that they were ready to receive it th fired power plants to determine if these facilities are in compliance with the environmental law would you provide us a summary of these findings and please also speak to the l certainly provide that to the committee and yourself ok now let me just one last question here and your view from both storage and water quality perspective  making it has been identified as a rest of the impact to ground water and water quality and that is something we're taking a hard look at in terms of our rule making which will be completed by the end of this year ok now do you plan to local leader of that and we are working with t dac in terms of us all beside and we are in the field in terms of overseeing the removal of the coal ash from the river and will be that throughout the kalash yes i mean and general but i also would like to say too that until a p a really got involved according to the people in the area they didn't see much change  what kind of oversight will be provided for those persons that have a responsibility well the e p a is on the site every day overseeing the work and they are now yes permit it is a landfill there is a question about how adequate that regulation was there is also a question and i believe mr walsh so who regulating up already and the question would be whether there should be other regular regulators on these types of facilities and certainly if they were regulated as down structures as i believe both mr walton  traumas would recommend there would have been more strenuous examination if that had been done in this case i am or loudly told by mr ramos from marshall miller that it is possible that the kingston spill the lack of regulation with it was it lack of regulation or just a failure to enforce the current regulations and i think that's important and i'm not i don't know i mean i really i mean that's why we're asking these questions you know my observations are would be that even stricter regulation of a landfill when you have the combined seal technical forces that were at work here would not have been sufficient very good  mr kilgore what steps is t b i taking to ensure that this doesn't happen at the other call the storage facilities in particular i know t v utilizes what is other side some of which are no longer in operation while tavia is proposing to close the five operational wet coal ash disposal sides what's t v i proposing to do with those sites that are no longer in operation we have one of those sites are lots of our fossil plant we have contained the other five sods that are wet storage besides kingston we're moving forward with a plan to take all of those to drop tons of rock to shore up various places we cleaned out vegetation so that the inspectors can see better but i think the most important thing is we've got a lot more intrusive and other words to do in visual investigation if we drilled  going on the root cause were you just asked to do the technical aspects of it or did you get into the corporate culture and things like that were you asked to do both  seventy five a year before seventeen seventy six dr parcival potts described coal combustion causing cancer in chimney sweeps we have known for that many years that these workers agents that we were producing and we have noted that all through and in two thousand and nine i report was issued but it had been ongoing for two thousand and two within within your agency and it demonstrated that the increased risk of cancer around these coal ash deposits was significant and my question is do you believe that had you told mr kilgore about those findings do you think that there would have been a heightened responsibility on the part of t v a to make sure that this particular dump in particular was online and was leaking into the groundwater and respect to knowing when we're done i mean that's frankly our job you know and that we look we have historically remediated riverside sad and we will ensure that everything is removed from the river and out of the mine but if you want to add to that i would only add to that congressman that fortunately or unfortunately depending on your point of view that a fair amount of most material actually stayed in some sanity at the site and our highest priority on the cleanup has been to get the material out of the main stem of the emory river to make sure that more didn't go down still downstream especially during the spring flood period and that's why we've been pushing to accelerate the removal of the material from the river so that we could try to get most of the main stem before next spring so we have we've been making accelerated progress on that with t v a over the last couple of months and expect to continue that thank you in addition this really is not changing gears a little bit this is really not about clean strongs i think you are probably not surprised that the spill after being an engineer inspecting and i don't think anyone is is following anyone on the cleanup but we're concerned with is the multitude of areas in the country that are very similar to kingston i know that you've had that experience and our we've had that experience in pennsylvania and we do know that this is as carcinogenic as nuclear waste we know that arsenic so lenny i'm boron those chemicals that we're finding and we know have been there are now in the drinking water in many communities what is it and how can we reassure our constituents since the tennessee river runs through my district how can we reassure our constituents that  doing an assessment of all facilities for the highest in that we can hire and that will be done by the end of this year and we will also take a look at all of the facilities to assess whether there's any risk of failure and prevent that  t also if there are any violations we plan to do enforcement action those are the short term actions we are simultaneously looking at the risk and the need to develop some rules to prevent any  the responsibility to a state agency that apparently has has failed us in this area is for as inspections in your our organization and i know you're new to the do the job essentially and inherited a great deal of this but the culture in t v or heads rolling are you getting anybody's attention there you know t v a is a like turning around the queen mary i mean it's will take a while what can we look forward to there well we have to change and if that means heads up the role or people have to leave and so be it you would find a you go back to one until now that about two thirds of the se management has changed and about ninety percent of the plant managers have recently been rotated are in some cases new plant manager so that we have new eyes on this problem if i've learned one lesson about this it is to be intrusive to be intrusive and to be self critical about things we don't know about and that means that occasion we need fresh eyes on the subject and that we don't let these waivers if you will from looking at things beyond it's the memo that was mentioned earlier not the ninety five said the safety factor was not what it should be but further down it said the remedy is a daily inspection that's not good enough and one what we know now is not good enough that the remedy was a daily inspection it's got a safety factor has to be increased and we're the first line of defense on that and we have to do that one last thing madam chair over time but  i'm concerned that we might be allowing you to grade your own paper and you know in an agency that big i know that you can't sit there and watch him take the test so my concern is  your own paper is a great danger to us should we have random independent these inspections of facilities outside of the t v a organization and an outside law firm that the board employed i've got four people looking over my shoulder we've put over twenty thousand pages of documents on the website so and everybody else can see that some of those very painful for me and i both saddened and and frankly a little bit mad that i walked into this but it's my responsibility now that we've found it to clean it up and the chinese the culture thank you must go thank you madam chair thank you very much mr ha to pay particular attention to the four major contributing causes of the kinks in nashville to ensure that combination does not exist at any other site to date nothing has been found that indicates that this combination exists at viable threat of collapse at these other facilities and i was wondering do you share that same plain reading interpretation i do not share than car production and thank you for asking that question we obviously since those four factors were done if us to cut a slot in the old dock at kingston so that they could see what what was really down there so we're asking they stand back and they've already started doing that they've completed quite a bit but those instruments down there so the implication that if these four factors don't exist elsewhere we're home free is not an implication that i agree with we have to treat each one of those as its own individual structure in your testimony to you stating quoting there's no evidence of imminent failure at these facilities stan tac is unable to render opinions relative to overall structural integrity so these two statements seem to you know to be very wildly inconsistent so in fact in fact in light of the findings by the mccann and the all what i understand from that and talking to them another of my staff is that when they looked at our drawings they indeed found this culture problem that we had the drawings of how the dials were supposed to be built but they didn't have as belts so we didn't know what was jane just and we didn't know it they were built according to those drawings that's why we asked them to go be intrusive to drill to find out everything they could about that as built condition and so yes they can't give me an equivocal this is not in danger of failing what we're doing is following their boss letter by letter and trying to go frankly a little overboard with some of it in terms of our clearing and our progress to drawing it out as i said earlier today i will not be confortable until we have the knowledge of what's on the ground on all of the and a few months you have to work on this and to complete their work and even then i think we still have to be self critical and intrusive and just one last question maybe for the panel because then i apologize because because i came in late what was the total cost of this cleanup to the american taxpayers what was the total costs that were and then we think it stays there unless we have an incident like this so our greatest need is to get all of this out of the river and back on to dry land so it can dry out another area of concern of course away from web disposal techniques to dry stacking one i'd like to ask if you can provide the subcommittee with copies of that analysis that went into formulating these concerns about water nine hundred eighty eight twenty one years ago and secondly in the twenty years since that analysis twenty one years was presented to tb management what specific action or actions have been taken to alleviate own concerns about groundwater contamination or misuse we need to clean it up and i am concerned that any of this might have leaked into our contaminated the reservoir next to you i don't know what he's done about it in making sure that this does not carry out to where it's being pumped out ass freshwater well i'm concerned about the water too because i live there and you know occasionally go boating so i share your concern we do have wells in the area we're monitoring looked at four hundred wells around the around the area and found no groundwater contamination that's not a reason for us to rest up take your concerns seriously and we are going to continue to look at that would you provide this committee then with the  has a way into formulating that concern in eighty eight i will let me just admit that what the inspector general found was there was not proper action on some of those older things so i will admit that to you right now that's what i have to said groundwater contamination from these types of facilities has been a concern whether or not groundwater contamination occurs in part depends on the geological structures underlays and we have done pretty extensive sampling along with the tennessee department vitamin conservation at this particular site and it appears that in this case we have been fortunate that there has not been migration of contaminants through a groundwater pathway in any of the samples that we detect with that we've taken so far how often do you test those areas  yet found any movement through into any of the wells are tested but it is not a regular sample it's been a sample on request and demand i have a great concern to the cross the general taxpayer number one number two is the health and safety of those areas and then of course number three is whether or not it becomes an issue then then comes back to the federal government to clean up i have a contaminated site that's been maybe twenty years in the cleanup and millions upon millions of dollars to clean it up and the taxpayers paying for it because it prevents potential responsible parties are long gone and i'm certain that we don't want to face anything and maybe in the other areas where you may have the same facilities and the steps are taken to unfortunately you know the steps that we didn't take in the past will now fall on our right payers and we will have to pay for that through our electric bills we intend to try to stretch that out this problem didn't occur over not  so we're going to try to amortize that out i were several years it's still as you indicate somebody has to pay for it over sides in the past and as i said my job is to make sure it doesn't happen again thank you m heard among other things testimony from dr brant to stance professor from stanford university and c e o of calera corporation talks about potential future solution to this kind of problem i'm just curious corals when they make their external skeleton capturing c o two emissions and storing it in a stable mineral form which can be used to replace supplement traditional portland cement offsetting emissions that would otherwise  result it could be used as aggregate as well the estimated current market demand for cement and aggregate is over three billion tons per year in the united states alone and over thirty billion tons per year worldwide the process as a potential to provide a positive use of the overwhelming majority of us quote fired emissions including including  problem we need to deal with the existing old technologies but this seems to me like maybe you're promising road for t v a look at sorry i'm not prepared to answer that today but i will i would like to have my research and development folks give me an answer  for the record i will say that is climate change t v i had approved about a year ago a goal to how to get us to less than fifty percent carbon based generation by the early two thousand and twenty so we are cognizant of the issue and this sounds like something that i'd very much like our engineers to look into it all make sure you get a copy of it because it's we got all excited in the other hearing when you heard the stuff i wanted to ask about specifically what actions  these facilities are implicated with the contamination of water what exactly has happened what steps if you've taken and what are you looking forward to doing to deal with these facilities well respect to the three you talked about i don't didn't find any evidence that we've exceeded any groundwater emissions there we still plan on going to drop storage at the ash on those sites so what we're planning on doing is getting rid of the wet stories there that means the water is less the volume  awareness to the containment systems using the upstream methods of construction similar and in the way that mine tailings facilities are done but there have been some lessons learned in regards to the ash does not improve its density with the higher and deeper layers placed on top of it i think that's a placable to be used and studied at other sites and certainly the rate of loading as these sites get higher and higher that's an added weight of gravity that avid would influence of gravity on these structures and lessons learned is you don't have to have slimes you might have a foundation system made of clay s or you may be on the earthquake zone for those facilities near seismic areas there's also the issue of site piping and seepage and water management because these structures are made by hydraulic methods and controlling the waters that that pass through  and are contained so there's a water management seepage management storage containment all of these factors are lessons learned and sort of an awakening and that trained engineers are able to get out there and inspect in the sas and take this program through your guidance and others forward so that this won't happen again thank you very much what i've missed and what i would like to see is some communication between you and some of the other fields and see if you can come up with