from first energy ends up. little blue run. the company s 976-acre retention pond. this waste is toxic. it contains arsenic, cadmium, and lead. national gypsum doesn t get any of its raw materials from little blue. but that doesn t matter to tyra collins and marcy carpenter who live near little blue. they want the epa to slap a big old hazardous label on everything that comes out of first energy because they say coal waste is dangerous. they told us that the stuff in there is completely harmless. why did we see dead trees? why is everything dead around it? reporter: neighbors fear the stuff is seeping into the ground water and their underground wells. have you noticed anything with your water? every once in a while i notice a smell. but we don t drink the tap water.
officials calling it an ecological disaster. we re live in hungary with the desperate effort to stop it. but first, new e-mails are shedding light on why the department of agriculture threw shirley sherrod under the bus so quickly. she was working for the department of agriculture in georgia when a portion of a speech she gave was posted on a website. ed, looks like initially the department of agriculture wanted to be careful with how they handled this. now that these documents are out, we re getting more of a look at exactly the time line and what happened. reporter: that s right, kiran. we got these documents late last night. we ve been poring through this overnight. this is our first look inside the look of the department of agriculture in those first desperate hours they learned about the speech and were worried, panicked at first this was going to be some sort of a major scandal. but you re right, there are e-mails we ve obtained. we got these through freedom of in