By Sean Flynn - GQ Magazine

Just days before Christmas last year, an environmental disaster one hundred times the size of the Exxon Valdez (yes, you read that right) unfolded on a riverbank in eastern Tennessee. A wave of poisonous sludge buried a town…along with the myth of clean coal.

Late december was rainy and cold in east Tennessee, the temperature ricocheting from freezing to mild, and maybe that had something to do with it. Maybe the rain saturated all that ash, and tiny rivulets bore into the dike and then froze in the cold and expanded and thawed and froze and expanded again. Or maybe the weight of the wet ash, the downward force of it, was more than the lateral force the dike could withstand and overrode the friction that held the walls in place.

The dike was not merely breached. It did not spring a leak. It collapsed, most of the northern and western walls disintegrating into mud and mush just before one o’clock in the morning on December 22. When it fell away, the wet ash behind it—more than a billion gallons of gray slurry, a hundred times more than the oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez—gushed out with the fury of a reservoir bursting through a dam, which, really, was exactly what it was.

“You know how people always say a tornado sounds like a freight train?” says Travis Cantrell, who lived in the trailer above the dock where his uncle Rick sat out all night fishing. “That’s what it sounded like.”

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