Groundwater Contamination in Tennessee
By: Charlotte India Eagle
This project looks at the effect of coal ash contamination on groundwater in the state of Tennessee. Tennessee relies on coal-power plants for electricity or other processing and has reported a consistent rise in groundwater contamination which could lead to a rise in drinking water contamination by depending on how close the drinking water source is to these wells. The data used in this project comes from the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit watchdog organization. They designed a website called Ashtracker that helps the public stay informed about groundwater contamination in their area by providing open access to industry-reported data surrounding wells at other coal-burning power plants. This visualization uses python to isolate contaminated wells and pull their longitude and latitude in order to plot them in Tableau Public.