What are the health risks of working the fly ash spill in Kingston Tennessee? This very important to the workers at Kingston Tn. Thanks?

The two biggest chemical hazards to working with fly ash are heavy metal contamination, and caustic burns. There are many heavy metals, some of which are toxic, present within fly ash including cadmium, mercury, lead, and uranium to name a few. These can leach into ground and surface water causing various contamination issues.

Fly ash can become mildly caustic when wet, as the pH raises to about 10-12, so it may cause skin burns with prolonged exposure. Various physical hazardous exist depending on how the ash is cleaned up, and how it is stored. Due to the presence of heavy metals and silica (risk for silicosis/lung cancer), some type of respirator device should be used.

What type is probably listed by OSHA. I would imagine that anyone working in this environment needs to have some sort of OSHA training, probably at least the 40 hour HazWOPER course. This is the largest fly ash spill in the history of the US.

One of the problems, is that there are probably decades worth of fly ash in this spill, so a variety a fly ash is present with a variety of different contaminants (heavy metals) depending on the coal that was being burned and pollution controls (if any) that were being used.

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