According to a press release, members of the Tennessee Senate Environment, Conservation & Tourism Committee will visit Kyle's Ford on the Clinch River on Friday, April 20 to examine the effect that pollution from Virginia coal mines is having on the Tennessee waterway.

The committee has has heard testimony that Virginia mining...

...presents "a serious threat to the Clinch River" from officials with the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency. "It’s important that we be pro-active and take action now," Senator Tommy Kilby (D-Oakdale) said. "If we wait until we see biological damage in the river, we will be at least a decade too late to do anything about it."

Field staff and biologists from TWRA and the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation will oversee the members' visit.

While they're over there, they ought to head down to White Oak Creek with their Geiger counters. But they might not want to go near the water:

The Melton Valley Watershed occupies about 1,000 acres of land south of and downstream of the Bethel Valley Watershed. Haw Ridge separates Melton Valley from Bethel Valley, and the Clinch River borders Melton Valley on the west.

Melton Valley contains many acres of burial grounds, seepage pits, contaminated floodplains, and hydrofracture wastes, but most disposal activities involved the use of shallow land burial. The wastes located in this watershed originated not only from local operations, but from other sites as well. Beginning in the mid-1950s, the Atomic Energy Commission designated ORNL’s solid waste storage areas as the Southern Regional Burial Grounds. From 1955 to 1963, various off-site installations sent about 10 million cubic feet of solid waste containing radioactive and hazardous substances to be disposed in this area.

The Melton Valley Watershed has many problem contaminants, some of which are discharging into the Clinch River via White Oak Creek. These include cesium-137, cobalt-60, strontium-90, tritium, other radionuclides, TRU elements, and volatile organic compounds.

I wonder if they tell all this to buyers of those million-dollar lakefront gated-community homes on Melton Hill.