Kingston Coal Ash Spill: The Disaster Nobody Saw Coming

Just before dawn on December twenty-second, two thousand eight, a dike holding a coal ash pond at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston Fossil Plant gave way. What poured out was not water. It was one point one billion gallons of coal fly ash slurry, a thick gray sludge laced with arsenic, lead, cadmium, chromium, and radioactive particles that coal combustion concentrates over decades. The wave crossed the Emory River, buried up to three hundred acres of surrounding land, and pushed into the Emory, Clinch, and Tennessee Rivers in a lumpy gray tide. It was the largest industrial spill in American history, nearly ten times the volume that would flow from the Deepwater Horizon two years later.

The TVA hired a contractor called Jacobs Engineering to manage the cleanup, which would cost more than a billion dollars and employ hundreds of workers from the surrounding region. Workers later said supervisors told them the ash was safe as dirt. Many had no respirators. Air monitoring equipment was allegedly tampered with. For years, the workers shoveled and hauled and breathed.

Then they started getting sick. Cancers. Lung disease. Neurological disorders. Skin conditions that would not heal. More than fifty cleanup workers have died. Hundreds more filed lawsuits. In two thousand eighteen, a federal jury found that Jacobs Engineering had failed to protect the workers and that their exposure to the toxic ash could explain their illnesses. In May two thousand twenty-three, Jacobs settled.

The Kingston spill forced a national reckoning with coal ash, which had long been classified as non-hazardous waste and stored in unlined ponds at hundreds of power plants across the country. Regulations tightened in the years that followed, but the communities along this stretch of the Clinch and Emory rivers had already paid the price. The men who shoveled the ash were told they were safe. The evidence says otherwise.