The Kingston Coal Ash Spill

At around one in the morning on December twenty-second, two thousand eight, a containment dike at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston Fossil Plant in Roane County failed. What poured out was five point four million cubic yards of coal ash slurry, the solid waste left over from burning coal to generate electricity. It was the largest coal ash spill in United States history. It buried three hundred acres under as much as six feet of sludge, pushed one house entirely off its foundation, damaged dozens of others, and flooded into the Emory River and Clinch River.

The coal ash looked gray and gritty, something between concrete and mud. What it contained was less visible. Coal ash from a power plant is a concentrated residue of the minerals in coal, including arsenic, mercury, lead, cadmium, selenium, and radioactive isotopes. The TVA assured residents and workers that the material was not hazardous. The Environmental Protection Agency's initial characterizations were cautious. The cleanup began.

Hundreds of workers, most of them local men from Roane and surrounding counties, were hired to remove the ash. They worked without respirators or protective suits in many cases. They were told the material was safe. They went home each day covered in it.

In the years that followed, workers began getting sick. By a decade after the spill, more than thirty cleanup workers had died of cancers and other illnesses attributed to coal ash exposure, and hundreds more had been sickened. A federal jury in two thousand eighteen found that Jacobs Engineering, the contractor TVA hired to manage the cleanup, had failed to adequately protect workers. The jury found Jacobs liable. The TVA had indemnified Jacobs in advance for any health claims from workers, a legal shield that kept sick men from recovery for years while the companies sorted out who owed what.

The total cleanup cost exceeded one billion dollars. TVA was the institution that created the spill, hired the contractor, approved the safety procedures, and agreed to the indemnity. The men who did the physical work of removing the ash are the ones who paid with their bodies. The full count of how many are sick, and how many have died, is not established in a single authoritative source. The families who brought lawsuits are still pursuing them.

Twenty miles upstream from downtown Knoxville. Same river. Same TVA.