By Caine O’Rear
This article is from the forthcoming winter 2024 edition of Mobile Baykeeper’s print quarterly, CURRENTS. The magazine is mailed to active members who have given more than $50 in the past year. To get on the magazine’s mailing list, donate here.
The 2008 coal-ash spill at TVA’s Kingston Fossil Plant in east Tennessee — the worst industrial disaster by volume in U.S. history — likely led to the death of dozens of cleanup workers and cost more than $1 billion in remediation efforts. Jared Sullivan’s new book on the subject, Low in the Valley, is a searing account of deliberate corporate wrongdoing that offers lessons for anyone concerned about coal-ash storage and its potential threats. We recently spoke with the author about the book, which was published by Knopf on October 15.
When did you first become aware of the Kingston spill?
Well, I grew up in Franklin, Tennessee, south of Nashville, and I was a senior in high school when the dike collapsed. I remember watching news coverage on TV. And like a lot of people, I clearly remember when TVA came out and said this coal-ash stuff does not pose a real public-health hazard. Basically, they said, “Don’t sweat it, don’t worry about it. This is all fine.” I remember thinking, “Wow, what luck.” Well, jump ahead 10 years, and I was an editor in New York City for Men’s Journal, and part of my job was finding stories. I kept a close eye on news from the South, because there’s not a ton of Southerners in New York newsrooms. I read some courtroom dispatches about the trial in the Knoxville News-Sentinel, which detailed how the cleanup workers were almost undoubtedly sickened by their exposures to coal ash on the job site.
I began to think about how to tell this in a narrative where it would keep people reading, and not in the way of daily newspaper coverage. And it became clear the best way to do that was to follow the workers’ lawyers, and one lawyer in particular, named Jim Scott from Knoxville. He was not a big, hot-shot corporate attorney, but he had the brass to take on TVA. So I felt like he could drive the narrative forward and readers would connect with him. Readers love characters above all: people don’t remember the chemical that affected all those people in California, but they remember Erin Brockovich. Jim’s not a perfect attorney, but he has good intentions. So I wrote a 7,000-word magazine story about the case in 2019, but I left so much on the cutting floor that I knew I could expand the story into a book.
You got to know some of these clean-up victims pretty well, like Ansol Clark and his wife Janie.
That’s right. I think you could argue that Janie, the wife of a Kingston truck driver, is really the main character of the book. I got to know her very well, as well as Ansol before his death. [Ansol succumbed to a rare blood cancer in 2021 that was linked to fly-ash exposure]. I visited their house on multiple occasions, and we had an endless number of phone calls. Janie almost reminds me of Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird. She would never want to do harm to anyone, and she had a lot of courage. She was someone who never expected to become an activist, or go to public meetings and wag her finger at TVA. She wasn’t involved in any environmental issues at all until Ansol got sick. But she stepped up and has been a voice for the Kingston workers. That’s been really neat — to see someone past middle age have such a radical change of trajectory in their lives. So it’s been a treat to get to know her. She’s amazing. I got to know many other workers too. I did hundreds of interviews for the book, compiling hundreds and hundreds of hours of tape that I drew on when writing the book.
These workers trusted TVA when they were told the coal ash was not harmful and that you’d “have to eat a pound of it a day” to see any detrimental effects. People were allegedly fired for asking for a dust mask. There was an institutional trust, and that faded over time.
TVA has made many missteps over the decades. As I illustrate in the book, in the 1970s, TVA tried to make the shift to nuclear and get away from coal, but it just couldn’t, because it had cost overruns and safety concerns at their nuclear power plants that derailed its efforts to build more plants..
Still, TVA has a lot of institutional goodwill, because of what it did during the New Deal by illuminating the rural South. In the 1930s, at the height of the Great Depression, Get this: when TVA was created in 1933, the people in this region made about 40 percent of the national median household income, which works out to about $6,000 a year when adjusted for inflation. But TVA — which operates in parts of seven states — quickly changed the entire region’s economic fortunes by building dozens of hydroelectric dams that spurred industry. Also, to this day, TVA employs about 10,000 people in the region, so that also helps explain a lot of the goodwill people have for it. So, during the Kingston cleanup, when some of TVA’s contractors came out and said, in effect, “coal ash is not hazardous,” the cleanup workers really took them at their word.
What was the most striking thing you uncovered about TVA and Jacobs Engineering, TVA’s lead safety contractor at Kingston, in the course of writing this book?
Well, I think it was troubling that the dangers of coal ash have been effectively kept under wraps for decades. I was able to obtain some TVA documents from the National Archives in Atlanta, and in this memo from 1964, TVA’s Director of Health informs TVA’s general manager that coal ash is flying out of its Paradise Fossil Plant in Paradise, Kentucky,and landing on employees’ cars and peeling off the paint. Not only that, whenever the coal ash flew into the gardens of people who lived in Paradise, it was eating away at their vegetables. And, again, this memo was from 1964, but this information never appeared in any newspaper at the time.
In the same memo, TVA’s health director tells TVA’s general manager that coal ash has “definite corrosive tendencies,” which almost certainly suggests that it’s not safe for someone to inhale or consume in any way. So that, to me, was like, “Oh my gosh, they’ve had a very strong idea since the ’60s that this stuff is a hazard, and it was never made public.”
Is there an official tally of how many workers died as a result of exposure? I saw one report that cited 50.
Yeah, there’s a list. It has grown to more than 50 now, according to the Knoxville News Sentinel. What’s hard about these sorts of lawsuits is that it’s really difficult to prove in a court of law that coal ash was the primary cause of someone’s death, but Jim Scott and the other plaintiffs’ lawyers hired some very sharp experts that looked closely at the data and concluded that the cleanup site was, without question, a threat to public health. There are photos of workers just caked in the stuff.
But, again, these cases are very tricky. Through litigation, Jacobs argued that the workers worked at all these different job sites throughout their careers, including some where nuclear weapons are manufactured. So how do you know that these workers died at age 35, or whatever it was, because of coal-ash contamination and not contamination from other jobs? It’s a good argument, and it was one that Jim Scott and his colleagues had to work really had to combat. Fortunately for them, doctors said that coal ash almost certainly caused many of the workers’ deaths or at least exacerbated conditions they had before showing up at the job.
In the book you talk about coal ash not being classified as “hazardous waste” by the EPA. You refer to a report showing effects of coal ash on drinking water that was suppressed during the Bush administration. And there’s a sort of political angle hanging over this whole saga, with the federal courts and the EPA.
That’s my understanding, and I don’t go into much detail about this in the book. I kind of gloss over it because I just felt like it was too much in the weeds.
But, in short, when Congress moved to regulate coal ash and similar coal by-products in the 1970s, Congressman Tom Bevill stepped in and loosened a lot of the proposed rules around coal ash. Why? Well, his district in Alabama was dependent on the coal industry. [Bevill was a Democratic 15-term congressman from Walker County, Alabama, who represented Alabama’s 4th and 7th congressional districts from 1967-1997.] Bevill argued that the coal-ash rules would be overly burdensome for industry, and he won. As a result, to this day, coal ash is still not considered hazardous waste by the EPA, and it has all sorts of ramifications.
The Biden administration finalized some rules earlier this year that require power companies to monitor their legacy coal-ash ponds, like the ones y’all have down there near Mobile Bay, and clean up any contamination. But these are self-regulating rules for the power companies, meaning they monitor their own coal-ash ponds to see if they’re leaching into the groundwater. My understanding is that if coal ash was considered hazardous waste, the EPA would be on site doing independent testing of these coal-ash ponds to see whether they’re contaminating groundwater.
The victims you portray in the book want a sense of justice for themselves and what they had to endure. Do they want their story to be a warning to other people that are exposed to coal ash, or other environmental hazards?
I read a book about TVA where the author argues that if TVA was in a different part of the country, they wouldn’t have managed to get away with some of the stuff they did, just because people in the South aren’t as dialed in to environmental issues as they are in, say, in New York state or California and these other places. Many people that I know don’t realize that the EPA is actually very weak, thanks in large part to court rulings and attacks from the right, and that, as a result, it doesn’t protect workers or everyday citizens like it should.
So, yes, these victims are definitely trying to raise awareness about coal-ash issues and other work-safety issues in the South and in Tennessee, because they don’t want this to happen to other families. For Janie, this isn’t only about her; it’s about protecting other families. So that’s why she and other victims talked to me. They want their story out there, because they want the world to know what happened to them. Yes, they also want to send a warning to senators and other voters that the EPA is not looking after blue-collar workers like it should.
In the late ’90s, Bill Clinton and Congress created this fund for workers at Oak Ridge [National Laboratory, for which TVA supplies power]. And basically, if you come down with one of 20 or so cancers after working at Oak Ridge, it’s just assumed that your exposures [to radiation] at Oak Ridge caused your health problems, and you don’t have to litigate your claims against the federal government. You get what’s known as a white card that says “no co-pay, no deductible” on the front of it. But it’s not an insurance company paying for the bill; it’s the federal government. It would be a big step towards justice if the government would take the steps to create a similar such fund to care for the Kingston workers as a result of their coal-ash exposures.
Any response from TVA to the book?
I have not heard anything from TVA. While my book is very critical of TVA, we need TVA to be great. It needs to be seriously reformed so it can be as innovative and dynamic as it was in the FDR area. We really need it to provide abundant, clean, carbon-free emission. They’d be doing a huge service not just to Tennessee and the South but the whole United States. I hope this book nudges TVA in the right direction. I hope it urges people to pay attention to TVA, because it does affect the whole U.S. It is one of the largest carbon emitters, it supplies power to Oak Ridge, and it powers one of our largest supercomputers.
I’ve heard from TVA employees who have thanked me for the book because they are disheartened by the direction TVA has taken in its refusal to wean itself off of coal, and for going all-in on natural gas, and people see that as a mistake.
For the people down here who are concerned about the coal-ash situation in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, what can they learn from your book?
I wrote it as a straight narrative. I’m not an opinion writer making an argument. I will say the litigation strategy was very effective with the cleanup. I think the kind of stuff y’all are doing with Alabama Power tends to be effective, perhaps more so than trying to beg lawmakers to act, because you think they would but they too often don’t. But in the South we elect reactionaries who are more interested in fighting culture wars than protecting our rivers and health. I hope that’s not the case forever. I hope our politicians in the South see the light.
