Truly amazing.

There is another basic error in that report. October 2009 precedes the disaster, while February 2009 follows it. It should be October 2008.

Scott Barker found the key to this puzzle years ago. In his early reporting on the disaster, he cited an independent analysis that warned TVA that freezing temperatures -- it got down to 21F the night the pile collapsed -- could create a wicking effect, drawing water to the surface of the pile and triggering laminar flow, if the ash were too moist in winter. Like most fine particles, ash is essentially a liquid when dry or when saturated, but with water's natural surface tension it can behave like a solid when moist. You've probably built sand castles obeying this principle.

The team that saw this report and was aware of the risk was transferred to other TVA facilities in early 2008 in a routine shuffling of personnel, erasing institutional memory, and the new managers did not realize they needed to keep the pile drier in winter.

On a breezy, freezing December night, some cheeseball MBA protocol that probably yields innovation in 98% of its applications yielded a catastrophe that turned years of deal-with-it-later austerity into the most costly management blunder since TVA got into nuclear power.

Did attorneys ask Mr. Williams whether the people he reported to got shifted to other jobs in early 2008? I believe they did.

Mr. Williams is not at fault here. I feel bad for the poor guy having to testify. He was an engineer in charge of groundwater monitoring. He collected the data and reported the findings - not directly up the line because he works in a service organization - but to the folks in fossil power.

What they did or didn't do with it was not his fault.

(The guy who deleted contractor data, OTOH, I've got lots of questions for him. Like exactly what date did you do it, did someone tell you to do so, etc.)

I worked 14 years at TVA. It's full of competent technical people who try to do good jobs. It's also full of managers who turn over twice a year so that institutional memory gets lost and a management culture that shuns investment and focuses on short-term results.

And BTW, Rikki "routine shuffling of personnel" means "omg, they hired a new manager and we have to reorg AGAIN."

I have sat in meetings and listened to TVA personnel lie over and over again with me knowing and them knowing I know. It's not the folks on the ground, usually, but the people who rise up and ge promoted tend to be willing to speak the party line even in the face of facts to the contrary. We have videos of ash dust clouds and public statements that they were "fog". We have bottles of ash filled river water but no official data from that date because a TVA official ordered his people to not take samples because it was too dangerous. We have an official stating that there were no instances of excedence in air quality standards minutes after he handed me a disc with numerous points of excedence recorded in TVA's own data. We have TVA stating that they've recovered over 90% of the ash from the spill when in fact they have dredged that amount of material from the Emory river which includes non ash sediment, no testing of percentage of ash content in the dredge was done and the statement, which you will hear repeatedly, is simply and obviously a lie.

One thing I know for certain is that the truth will not be spoken if it makes TVA look bad. I hate that. TVA could be such a force for good. They have thousands of good people working there, but they don't rule the roost.