I had just finished reading Jared Sullivan’s excellent legal thriller on the Kingston coal-ash disaster when, in April, I attended the legislative hearing on HB809, a proposed bill to provide legal immunity to pesticides manufacturers.¹ The bill would have stripped injured Tennesseans of the right to file so-called “failure to warn” claims related to the harms caused by pesticides.² As I listened to the arguments, I thought of the Kingston coal-ash clean-up workers and their struggle for justice — the subject of Sullivan’s Valley So Low: One Lawyer’s Fight for Justice in the Wake of America’s Great Coal Catastrophe.

The subtitle is a bit imprecise — the book tells a much broader story beyond “one lawyer,” including, in particular, the story of clean-up worker Ansol Clark and his wife Janie, whom we follow from their early days of courtship in Knoxville in the early 1970s to Ansol’s gut-wrenching demise in May 2021, following his exposure to toxic coal-ash in the aftermath of the Kingston disaster. But in many ways, Valley So Low tells a different kind of tragic story: the near-total failure of the American tort system to hold powerful corporations to account when their wrongdoing devastates the environment and destroys people’s lives.

To appreciate that systemic failure, we need to comprehend the scale of the Kingston coal-ash disaster. To set the scene, Sullivan juxtaposes the ancient natural landscape of East Tennessee with the modern industrial environment of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s coal burning power plants. Describing the Tennessee River’s path through the Smoky Mountains, Sullivan emphasizes the pre-human history of the setting: “cold streams drain these weather-worn mountains, which are older than the rings of Saturn, and race through deep, wild gorges, cut away over the course of some three hundred million years.”³

Contrasted against these mountains and their prehistoric ancestry, the Kingston coal plant “was, at the time of its completion in 1954, the world’s largest coal-fired power station,” burning “fourteen thousand tons of coal a day, enough to fill one hundred and forty train cars and to power some seven hundred thousand homes.”⁴ And the incongruous Kingston Fossil Plant, with its “twin thousand-foot-high smokestacks,” “[towers] over the forested countryside.”⁵ The Kingston plant’s massive coal consumption meant that it produced fly ash, a toxic byproduct from burning coal, at a staggering scale. When the coal-ash dike at the Kingston plant collapsed in 2008, “more than a billion gallons of coal-ash slurry — about fifteen hundred times the volume of liquid that flows over Niagara Falls each second — broke forth.”⁶ At the time, the NBC Nightly News explained to viewers that the amount of coal-ash released in the spill was “enough to fill more than thirteen hundred Olympic-size swimming pools.”⁷  The Kingston coal-ash spill “would prove to be nearly a hundred times larger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, and it would rank as the single largest industrial disaster in U.S. history in terms of volume.” ⁸

Someone had to clean up the mess. Describing the 900 or so workers called to the task, Sullivan writes: “they loathed wearing a suit. They liked to hunt and fish, and almost all the locals rooted for the University of Tennessee Volunteers in football. They were family men, fathers, sons.”⁹ Sullivan narrates the clean-up project in large part through the perspective of Ansol Clark. The book opens with a 6 a.m. phone call from Ansol’s supervisor telling him to “get to Kingston,” and we see Ansol literally covered in the toxic ash: “he had coal-ash on his face and in his ears and up his nose; it caked his work shirt and his vest. He would arrive home equally filthy every workday onward. He thought little of it.”¹⁰

But not to worry. According to Tom Bock, a top safety officer for Jacobs Engineering, the company hired by TVA to do the clean-up, the ash was perfectly safe: workers like Ansol could “eat a pound of fly ash” “each day and be fine.”¹¹ (Bock would later admit at trial to making this statement, but stated “it was an analogy.”)¹² For a while, the workers believed Bock, and even if they didn’t, they needed the work. But then there were troubling signs: workers suffered dizzy spells, shortness of breath — some “coughed up a strange, black jelly.”¹³ Workers who complained or asked for accommodations, such as respirators or dusk masks, were fired.¹⁴ And if the fly ash was safe, even safe enough to eat, why was Jacobs instructing workers to spray down the air monitors with water cannons, skewing the readings, and making it seem as though there was less fly ash on the site than there really was?¹⁵

The simple answer is the profit motive. “Fly ash was big business. Each year, power companies generated about one hundred million tons of it and other coal wastes, more than half of which ended up not in holding ponds but in concrete, drywall, roof tiles, road base and structural fill.”¹⁶ And to ensure that TVA would realize these profits, TVA created contractual incentives for Jacobs to avoid safety-related work stoppages.¹⁷

But Valley So Low resists simplification as merely a case of profit-driven negligence; instead, Sullivan weaves the coal-ash disaster into a broader tapestry of historical memory, tracing the toxic legacy of environmental upheaval that has shaped the region for decades. In Don DeLillo’s award-winning 1997 novel Underworld, the author’s title refers to radioactive nuclear waste buried deep beneath the earth’s surface. The title also takes on a metaphorical meaning, calling to mind the hidden, subterranean aspects of American society — its secrets and suppressed histories. (Another reading of the Underworld title centers on Pluto, the Roman god of death and the afterlife.) Much of history, the title implies, happens out of sight, beneath the surface of official narratives. Valley So Low documents a moment when that suppressed history escapes from the depths and rises to the surface. In a scene reminiscent of a Ridley Scott film, Sullivan describes a harrowing episode when Kingston clean-up workers dredge radioactive waste from the river: “one night early in the cleanup, a voice broke over the radio: A dredger hit hot stuff. Stop the boats, stop the excavators, stop everything!”¹⁸ The “hot stuff” — radioactive material from the various nuclear activities in nearby Oak Ridge — was a secret of its own. In 1945, Oak Ridge had been the site of uranium enrichment to help build the atomic bomb that would ultimately be dropped on the people of Japan.¹⁹ The K-25 Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Oak Ridge was, “at the time of its completion in 1945, the largest building in the United States.”²⁰ Oak Ridge was a remarkable feat of military engineering, growing into the “the fifth largest city in Tennessee, with a peak population of eighty thousand people.” It was also a testament to secrecy — even the governor didn’t know it existed.²¹

This secrecy extended to the handling, or mishandling, of nuclear waste. The Oak Ridge facility “released an estimated two hundred and eighty thousand pounds of depleted uranium into two creeks, Bear and East Fork Poplar.”²² In the early 1990s, the federal government released a report finding that these rivers had so much radioactive waste and posed such a threat to public health that “they forbade any activity that would disturb the river bottom, such as building a dock, without a special permit.”²³ (The author of the report? Jacobs Engineering.) The coal-ash spill, then, as terrible as it would have been on its own, became positively radioactive when the huge volume of ash effectively dredged the river. “Fly ash from the river had been sucked to shore and set out to dry, then become airborne.”²⁴ For the workers, cleansing themselves of the toxic ash seemed as impossible as escaping the forces of history: “even if they cleaned up and washed their hands, ash clung to their boots, their clothes, their hair; it got in their sandwiches.”²⁵ Tom Bock’s “analogy” had become literal. Like modern-day sin-eaters, the workers consumed the radioactive fly ash — the embodiment of TVA’s historical transgressions — with their daily bread.

In the inevitable litigation that followed, the clean-up workers sought compensation. But what is it worth to have your health taken from you? To be deprived of your future? In Tennessee, with its cap on non-economic damages, the answer is clear: $750,000.²⁶ Punitive damages are also capped, even for reckless or intentional misconduct.²⁷ There was simply no way under Tennessee law to hold Jacobs Engineering accountable for its wrongdoing, a fact that Jacobs openly circulated to its shareholders. In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Jacobs stated “it did not expect that resolving the workers’ lawsuits would have ‘a material adverse effect’ on its business, financial condition or cash flows.”²⁸ During the liability phase of the trial (Judge Thomas Varlan in the Eastern District had bifurcated the trial), the workers won, which “marked a first in the history of American civil litigation: no plaintiffs had ever convinced a federal jury that coal-ash could sicken them.”²⁹ That victory earned the workers a Hobson’s choice: accept a low settlement offer, or proceed to trial, where Jacobs had the benefit of the caps and its worst day in court was pre-ordained by the legislature.

In the end, the workers took the deal. Jacobs reached a tentative settlement to pay $77.5 million to 221 workers.³⁰ After about $26 million in attorney fees and expenses, each worker would receive roughly $222,000. But the workers had to repay their insurers for medical costs from their share, so those with the highest medical bills would likely receive little cash. This was no David versus Goliath ending: “the settlement was shit, in many of the workers’ opinion,” Sullivan writes. “It was just less shitty than Jacobs’s previous offers.”³¹

As I sat in the hearing room in April, listening to the lobbyists for the pesticides manufacturers argue for legal immunity, even if they knew their products caused cancer and failed to warn Tennesseans about that risk, I thought of the Kingston workers and their survivors, and how Tennessee law already put justice out of reach for so many. Why did these large companies need immunity when the tort system already ensured that no jury verdict could ever put a dent in their cash flows? (Even the highly publicized $5 billion punitive damages verdict against Exxon Valdez was ultimately reduced to $500 million — “the plaintiffs waited nearly twenty years for punitive damages, and each received, on average, about $30,000.”³²) And I thought of Janie Clark, after the ink had dried on the settlement, who told Sullivan, on what would have been her and Ansol’s 51st wedding anniversary, that “the lawyers had disappointed her. For all their pride and relief in the settlement, they operated in a dirty system, and this system had forced them to make an unjust compromise.³³

HB809 did not pass that day. The sponsor decided to try again next year.³⁴ |||

 

NOTES

1. Available at wapp.capitol.tn.gov/apps/BillInfo/default.aspx?BillNumber=HB0809&GA=114, last visited April 29, 2025.

2. Id.

3. Jared Sullivan, Valley So Low: One Lawyer’s Fight for Justice in the Wake of America’s Great Coal Catastrophe 27 (2024).

4. Id. at 4.

5. Id. at 6.

6. Id. at 5-6.

7. Id. at 19.

8. Id. at 9.

9. Id. at 15.

10. Id. at 17.

11 Id. at 30.

12. Id. at 242.

13. Id. at 48.

14. Id. at 58.

15. Id. at 60.

16. Id. at 129.

17. Id. at 168.

18. Id. at 106.

19. Id. at 210.

20. Id. at 213.

21. Id. at 212.

22. Id. at 214.

23. Id. at 215.

24. Id. at 281.

25. Id. at 59.

26. Id. at 257.

27. Id.

28. Id.

29. Id. at 254.

30. Id. at 278.

31. Id. at 279.

32. Id. at 369.

33. Id. at 282.

34. Sam Stockard, “Tennessee lawmakers postpone pesticide bill until 2026,” Tennessee Lookout, tennesseelookout.com/2025/04/09/tennessee-lawmakers-postpone-pesticide-bill-until-2026/, last visited May 6, 2025.