By BILL THEOBALD, Gannett Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON - Forty-four potentially dangerous coal ash impoundment sites around the country - similar to where a massive spill occurred last December in East Tennessee - have been identified by the Environmental Protection Agency, an agency official testified Thursday.

Barry Breen, an acting assistant administrator for the EPA, said at a House subcommittee hearing that a breach at any of the impoundment sites could cause damage downhill.

Next month, the EPA will begin sending inspectors to those and all of the approximately 400 sites where wet coal ash is stored. Those sites have been identified through a survey sent out to utility companies and other facilities by the agency in early March, Breen said.

He said the 44 sites are deemed potentially hazardous based on their location, not because of any information about the status of the structures. EPA officials declined to release a list of those sites.

An EPA spokeswoman said after the hearing that the designation ``high hazard potential'' is based on standards used for the National Inventory of Dams and means that failure would probably cause death and significant property damage.

The hearing of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee`s subcommittee on water resources and environment was the most recent prompted by the Dec. 28 failure of a retaining wall at the Tennessee Valley Authority`s Kingston coal-fired utility plant.

The collapse unleashed more than 5.4 million cubic yards of damp and dry coal ash into the adjacent Emory River and across 300 nearby acres, destroying several homes. TVA, state, federal and private groups have been testing water in the area to see whether it contains high levels of the dangerous substances, such as arsenic, found in coal ash.

Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Texas, chairwoman of the subcommittee, said the Kingston spill was ``the predictable result of regulatory neglect.''``How many other Kingstons are out there?'' she said.

EPA officials aim to propose new regulations for the management of coal waste by the end of the year.

A key issue will be whether to designate coal ash as a hazardous waste under federal law. In 2000, the EPA determined that coal ash was not hazardous, but the agency also was supposed to write regulations governing its disposal as a non-hazardous waste.

Those regulations have never been completed, prompting Johnson to press Breen for an explanation of the delay. ``It just takes time,'' Breen said.About 131 million tons of coal ash were produced in 2007. The wet coal ash impoundments are among 1,300 coal waste storage sites around the country.

David Goss, former executive director of the American Coal Ash Association, testified that 400 million tons of coal waste had been recycled for use in concrete and other products since 2000.

Designating the material as a hazardous waste would stigmatize it and could ruin the recycling industry, Goss said.