Blackout: On Swan Pond (2014)

When a retention wall at a coal fired power plant spilled one billion tons of toxic ash into a small community in Southern Appalachia, Americans learned coal ash is a problem that has been ignored for decades. We gained insight into the hidden costs of our twenty pounds a day coal habit. Blackout explores the growing energy crisis by examining one community that was affected by the ever increasing need for electricity. We begin in Swan Pond, a small farming community in East Tennessee, crippled by a coal ash spill days before Christmas in 2008. The Kingston Ash Spill released 1.1 billion gallons of coal waste into the community. That is 100 times more material than the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.