Widows Creek Fossil Plant has 7 groundwater monitoring wells, 6 of which have been polluted above federal advisory levels based on samples collected between March 01, 2011 and November 04, 2015. Groundwater at this site contains unsafe levels of manganese, sulfate, boron, cobalt, beryllium and lead.
Site descriptionWidows Creek Fossil Plant is located on the Tennessee River in Stevenson, Alabama. Widows Creek itself is a partially re-channeled stream that flows through the site. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) built Units 1 through 6 in the 1950s. Two more units, Units 7 and 8, came online in 1964. As of October, 2015 all eight units will be retired.
Widows Creek has had a series of large and small structural issues over its lifetime, including erosion and sloughing along the southern perimeter of the bottom ash stack within Ash Pond A, seepage around Main Ash Pond A and the Old Scrubber Sludge Pond, and a large spill of gypsum from the active Gypsum Stack into the stilling pond and Widows Creek in January of 2009.
This facility is among the U.S. EPA's list of potential damage cases, indicating that it has potentially polluted groundwater or surface water at levels which threaten human health and the environment. Read EIP's report TVA's Toxic Legacy and visit SoutheastCoalAsh.org for more information about Widows Creek Fossil Plant.