The Tennessean is reporting in a front page story:
The Tennessee Valley Authority intentionally and improperly steered an outside investigation into the cause of the massive spill of coal ash at its Kingston, Tenn., plant to protect the TVA from lawsuits instead of seeking the full truth, the agency’s inspector general believes.
The report details that the agency had been warned in the past of the potential for such a spill, and the continuing risk at other TVA power plants.
As one of the first bloggers to discuss the spill here, I have consistently tried to give TVA the benefit of the doubt, and to downplay the danger of the ash itself as basically nasty mud, but not dangerously radioactive or poisonous. Obviously where I defended TVA I was wrong. I apologize for the error!
The Inspector General Richard Moore is damning of TVA's actions after the spill:
"it was not foreseeable that, in fact, TVA would not review what management practices may have contributed to the failure, but would instead tightly circumscribe the scope of review to intentionally avoid revealing evidence that would suggest culpability on the part of TVA...."
"It appears TVA management made a conscious decision to present to the public only facts that supported an absence of liability for TVA for the Kingston spill,"
TVA itself has accepted a report that tends to blame individual agency managers at TVA: "'necessary systems, controls, standards and culture were not in place.'" Oddly enough, TVA released this report even while it had a draft of the Inspector General's report, so there is suspicion that their findings were released early in an attempt to steal the IG's thunder.
The IG report goes on to illustrate the actions TVA did in an attempt to reduce their culpability. Hopefully this will get more congressional overview in the near future.