How Appalachia Became The Site Of The Largest Industrial Spill In U.S. History — And What Happened Next

This interview originally aired in the April 13, 2025 episode of Inside Appalachia.

The December 2008 coal ash spill at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston Fossil Plant was the largest industrial spill in United States history — and it marked just the start of a protracted saga that played out for years afterward.

The coal ash spill and the labor justice fight that ensued are the subject of a recent book. It’s titled, Valley So Low: One Lawyer’s Fight for Justice in the Wake of America’s Great Coal Catastrophe. 

Inside Appalachia Host Mason Adams spoke with its author, Jared Sullivan. 

Adams: Your book, Valley So Low, begins in 2008 with a coal-fired power plant outside Knoxville, Tennessee. What happened there?

Sullivan: TVA built what at the time was one of the world’s largest coal-fired power plants outside of Knoxville. After decades of burning coal to produce electricity, they had this huge mound of what’s called coal ash, which is basically what’s left over after you burn coal. It reminds me of after you have a charcoal barbecue, the stuff that’s left over afterwards — that silty, sooty stuff. This mound that TVA had outside of Knoxville was six stories tall and 84 acres around, almost like a little mountain. 

In the middle of the night, this mound collapses, and a billion gallons of coal ash sludge covered 300 acres of countryside [and] damaged almost 30 homes. One home in particular got totally shoved off its foundation and thrust against this embankment. People had to be rescued from their homes. A car was upturned. It was a huge, huge mess — something like 100 times larger than the Exxon Valdez oil spill, just in terms of the material release, the sheer volume of this material.

Adams: The Tennessee Valley Authority is an important player in this book — arguably the antagonist in a lot of ways. It’s a utility that operates at the power plant, but it’s different than other utilities. I’m interested in hearing more about the Tennessee Valley Authority and its background before this disaster.

Sullivan: TVA was set up to do three things. It was (1) to control the Tennessee River, which is I think the fifth-largest river system in the country. (2) To improve agriculture. There were millions of acres of eroded farmland here in the Tennessee Valley. And the other (3) was to produce electricity, and that was a huge, huge part, because electricity allows you to develop factories, to develop your economy and all that good stuff. 

The TVA’s board of directors quickly hired an army of 40,000 men in the middle of the Great Depression, and started throwing up hydroelectric dams throughout this whole region. They ended up building 39 hydroelectric dams in all, and over the next few decades, incomes here rose — hugely because of that, we all of a sudden could have factories. 

It was a huge, huge boon to this region. TVA is a power company owned by the federal government, and it did great, great work on behalf of the people. We here in the Tennessee Valley owe a lot to TVA. I’ll say that: We owe a tremendous amount.

Adams: So, the Kingston coal ash spill is the largest industrial disaster in U.S. history by volume, but the spill itself was really just the first part of the story that makes up your book. What happened next?

Sullivan: The spill was an utter disaster. Fortunately, no one died. It damaged almost 30 homes. But the real tragedy is, after this disaster, these union reps start calling blue-collar workers from across the country, saying, “We have this huge, billion-gallon mess down here. We need people to start cleaning this up fast.” So 900 men and women from across the country descend on Kingston, Tennessee, to get to work. 

Remember, this is 2008. The economy is on its knees. The housing market and the stock market have just collapsed. These blue-collar workers are grateful to get these phone calls about coming to Kingston, and it’s really a godsend. I quote one worker’s wife in my book describing it as a “godsend.” It really was. It was a chance for her husband — his name is Ansol Clark — to work a lot of overtime over the next coming years, and that would allow them to save for retirement. Finally, they bought a new lawnmower, which they desperately needed. 

The workers knew it was bad for the environment. This spill caused all sorts of havoc. The tragedy is that once they got to work, this coal ash stuff is everywhere, and for the first year or so, the coal ash was mucky. It rained a lot. It got into the river, so this stuff was packed on the ground. But after a year or so, it started to bake under the Tennessee sun, and this coal ash stuff started to whip around the job site, and the workers started to inhale it. They started to get bloody noses. They started to pass out on the trucks. They started to get dizzy, and they went to their foreman — also one of TVA’s contractors, Jacobs Engineering — and asked for dust masks and respirators. And they were routinely told no. They said they were told that there’s nothing in the coal ash that could make them sick or harm them, that their symptoms were probably because of allergies or pollen or whatever. The workers shrugged it off for as long as they could, and also, the workers were pulling 14-hour shifts in many cases. So for a long time, they told themselves, “Well, I just feel bad because I’m working so hard.” 

But eventually it becomes undeniable that the coal ash is making them sick. They start getting cancer diagnoses, start having heart problems, and that’s when these sick workers approach the protagonist of my book. His name is Jim Scott. He’s a personal injury attorney in Knoxville, Tennessee, and he was really the only person that would listen to them, and he believed them. He did a lot of research and a lot of investigating to make sure that the workers were telling the truth. But now, after he did that, he realized, yeah, these workers should have been given respiratory dust masks. This coal ash stuff is full of arsenic. It’s full of barium. It’s full of silica. It’s full of stuff you absolutely do not want to breathe. So then Jim spent the next 10 years of his life pushing this case through federal court. And it was a brutal, brutal, brutal process for Jim, personally. He wrecked his marriage, basically because of this case. It also has a huge toll on the workers. They had to spend a decade of their lives as they’re increasingly getting sick, wondering if they’re gonna get any money to cover their mounting medical bills. It was a brutal, brutal, brutal process for all involved.

Adams: So how do things stand today with regard to these workers and this case that they brought against the TVA?

Sullivan: After almost 10 years of litigation, the two sides finally reached a settlement. What ended up being about 230 workers settled the case for $77.5 million with one of TVA’s main contractors, Jacobs Engineering — who I should say disputes my reporting, and they deny all wrongdoing, as does TVA. It was a case of too little too late. That’s generally how the workers feel about the settlement. After they paid their attorneys and split up the recovery, they would each get $100,000, maybe $200,000 depending on how sick they were. But after a decade of waiting around to see if they’d get any sort of compensation, that result is not abnormal. 

I talk a lot in my book about the Exxon Valdez oil spill. There’s a lot of parallels between the Kingston disaster and the oil spill, because as a similar thing, where people’s lives have clearly been ruined — blue-collar everyday folks, their lives have been ruined by corporate misdeeds. But then the corporations they’re up against have so much money that they can drag out the cases for years, if not decades. Eventually, the plaintiffs, the sick blue-collar workers, just have to capitulate, and that’s what happened. These workers had gone on for so long that they got so desperate for money because their illnesses were becoming so grave, they just had to basically accept whatever was offered to them at the end. That’s the corporate playbook in situations like this,

Adams: The Kingston coal ash spill and then a subsequent spill by Duke Energy on the Dan River in 2014 led to some changes in federal regulation. What’s the status of those regulations? What’s different? Has anything actually changed?

Sullivan: After the Kingston disaster, the EPA slowly — and I would say reluctantly — began to look into whether coal ash needed to be regulated, and there are 750 coal ash ponds across this country. I say “ponds.” It’s kind of a misnomer in most cases, when power companies burn coal to produce electricity, they just dump the coal ash into big, unlined holes in the ground. Studies have shown that most of these ponds leach contaminants into the groundwater, into American rivers. The Kingston disaster finally forced the EPA to take coal ash seriously and look into it. At first, they made what’s called “active” coal ash ponds — coal ash ponds that were currently receiving coal ash from power plants — to monitor those sites for contamination to clean it up, if they needed to. That was in 2015. 

Jump ahead to 2023. The EPA finally cracked down on what are called “legacy” coal ash ponds. Those were coal ash ponds that were no longer receiving new coal ash shipments from power plants, but they were still, in many cases, contaminating groundwater. So these rules were a great step. They were long overdue, in my view. The trouble is that these rules are self-enforcing, so that means the EPA is not sending people around the country to test these 750 coal ash ponds. It’s up to the power companies to monitor their own ponds and to report if there’s been contamination, and to clean up those sites. You could read my book and decide for yourself whether you trust power companies to be honest about the contamination at their coal ash ponds. I, for one, would prefer if the EPA would test these sites independently and not rely on power companies to do it. 

Adams: I understand the Tennessee Valley Authority has slated the Kingston coal plant for shuttering. Can you give us an update on what’s going on at the plant these days?

Sullivan: Basically, ever since the Kingston disaster in 2008, TVA has gradually — very gradually — begun to phase out its 11 coal-fired power plants. I believe it has three active now. At most of those sites where there used to be a coal-fired power plant, they are building new gas-powered power plants. Many would argue that TVA should be investing more in nuclear and other low- or no-carbon energy sources, and I’m in that camp. The gas plants have about half the emissions rate as a coal fired power plant, so it obviously is better, but TVA is still going to be a huge polluter once all these new gas plants are up and running. 

TVA is a big deal. I think people have written it off and don’t pay attention to it, but I’m rooting for TVA. I want TVA to be great. We need TVA to be great. I believe with the right reforms, with more oversight, it could be great again. And we really, really, really need it to be.