KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (WVLT) -- Three days before Christmas, a holding pond dumped enough coal ash to cover four hundred acres of private land, and rivers in Roane County -- damaging more than two dozen homes and running up a clean-up bill that could top a billion dollars!

Seven months later, the Tennessee Valley Authority's own Inspector General concludes that TVA could have prevented it, had
managers heededwarnings than began more than two decades earlier!

"The coal ash was seen as sort of backyard, back end of operations," Inspector General Richard Moore tells Volunteer TV News.

He makes a more specific comparison in his report to TVA and to Congress: landfill trash.

By as far back as 1985, TVA's own employees and engineers were warning that the the coal-ash holding ponds were weak--at its Kingston Fossil Fuel Plant in Harriman.

Outside engineers echoed those concerns in 2004 and 2005.
Outside engineers echoed it more than years ago.

"There were also some recommendations for some corrective
actions," Moore says.

"TVA could not answer the question of why that was not done."

Tuesday, TVA's Chief Executive Officer Tom Kilgore told the House Subcommittee on Water Resources and the Environment that all of this
occurred before he was hired.

"About two thirds of the senior management has changed, and about ninety percent of the plant managers have been rotated," Kilgore says.

Nevertheless, Moore says, TVA's management culture
has affected and infected it's handling of the ash flood -- including the outside geo-specialists it hired to determine its cause.

That firm, AECOM, concluded that four factors led to the ash pond's failure, chief among them a buildup of coal ash beneath the pond structure.

The Inspector General's Report concludes that finding is suspect, in that it minimizing TVA's managers' liabilty because the slime layer was difficult to find.

"Management doesn't have to do anything differently, since no fault was found...in either design or operations" the report concludes, which
spares TVA "culpability, liability, or adverse implications."

"There was no coverup, there was no effort to be deceptive," Moore says.

"They (AECOM) weren't doing anything improper, They were doing what they were called upon to do. It's more of a problem of appearance, rather than some type of deliberate act."

Moore also says he's found no direct evidence TVA's scrimped on maintenance.

But one Congressman asked Kilgore whether, in accepting
the I-G's conclusions, TVA was being allowed to 'grade its own paper.'

"I've got four people looking over my shoulder," Kilgore replies.

Those four include the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and
Tennessee's Department of Environmental Conservation.

Unfortunately, the steps we didn't take in the past will now fall on and ratepayers," Kilgore says.

"And we will have to pay for that through our electric bills."

Kilgore says the TVA will spread those costs over several years.

Moore says the Office of the Inspector General, will follow up with
oversight into TVA's cleanup in Harriman, and into its investigation of ash storage and disposal at its ten coal-fired power plants.

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UNDATED (WVLT/AP) -- TVA Inspector General Richard Moore is in Washington, D.C., presenting the findings of his office's review of the cause of the December 2008 ash slide at the TVA Kingston Fossil Plant in Roane County to the U.S House Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment.

A report from TVA's inspector general concludes the federal utility failed for more than 20 years to heed warnings that might have prevented a massive coal ash spill in East Tennessee.

According to Moore's report, TVA ignored "red flags" that and did not take corrective action that could have avoided the ash spill all together.

The report released Tuesday also said the utility allowed its lawyers to a $3 million study into the December disaster's cause to limit its legal liability.

Moore's report says, "Litigation strategy seems to have prevailed over transparency and accountability.Bill Walton of AECOM (the company TVA used for its own root cause analysis) was discouraged from disclosing information to the public that was relevant and necessary for the analysis of the safety of the remaining Kingston ash ponds and other TVA ash ponds."

“The inspector general's report raises major concerns which must be taken seriously and which I will discuss with TVA management," Sen. Lamar Alexander said in a written statement issued after the release of Moore's report. "TVA needs to learn from the report so it can take every reasonable step to ensure that such a coal ash spill never happens again.”

You can read the entire 111-page report HERE.