wave died after less than a minute, but
smaller slides continued for hours. Now,
as Clark surveyed the site, 300 acres lay
buried in coal ash—a foot deep in spots,
six or more in others.
By sunup, helicopters whirled overhead,
as local, state, and federal agencies began
to asses the biblical scope of the breach.
The spill had killed no one, a miracle
by any measure. But at the time, it was
anyone’s guess whether someone was
buried under the coal ash. The cleanup
workers expected to f ind bodies.
Following the spill, Clark worked for
94 days straight, driving a fuel truck in
14- to 16-hour shifts. The other 900 men
and women who took jobs at the cleanup
site all logged similar hours, with the
work continuing day and night, seven
days a week. Some guys slept in their
trucks rather than drive home. The breach
proved to be nearly a hundred times larger
than the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil disaster,
in terms of gallons spilled, and it’s now
considered one of the worst environmen-
tal disasters in United States history. An
inspector general’s report later concluded
that T.V.A. had carelessly stored the coal ash
and ignored warning signs about needed
modif ications to Kingston’s holding pond
that could have prevented the disaster.
All the same, Clark was proud to be
part of the cleanup, and the pay couldn’t
be beat. On a good year, he might clear
$55,000. During the cleanup, he earned
six f igures, as did many others. The spill
had caused serious environmental dam-
age, to be sure. But, for him and Janie, it
was an opportunity of a lifetime. They
could f inally save for retirement; they
even bought a new lawn mower. “The
only way I can describe it is like winning
the lottery,” Janie said.
It proved to be any thing but.PART II—THE LAWYER
One evening, in the late fall of 2012, three
men f iled into Jim Scott’s off ice and told
him that they were sick. Their names were
Ansol Clark, Stan Hill, and Billy Gibson, and
t hey each worked at t he K ingston cleanup
site. Scott is a hyperenergetic 51-year-old
attorney, with a bird’s nest of graying
hair. He didn’t work big cases, at least not
often; his off ice was in a low-slung brick
building next to an Old Time Potter y and
a Burlington Coat Factory, in Knoxville.
Raised in nearby Oak Ridge, Scott was a
generalist—happy to take on D.U.I.s, low-
profile criminal cases, or whatever else
walked through the door. “You name it,”
he said, “and I’ve been hired to do it, if itof wet ash, 60 feet tall, covering 84 acres,
and built at the conf luence of two riv-
ers, the Clinch and the Emory. It was a
precarious setup, one made more so by
the fact that this six-story mountain of
ash was contained by a dike, made not
of concrete or steel but of bottom ash,
the coarse, dense component of coal ash.
Two years earlier, Clark had helped to
repair a minor breach in the dike. When he
walked on the ash mountain, the ground
beneath his feet had jiggled like a water-
bed. He’d once told a co-worker that the
dike would fail one day. “I didn’t think it
would,” he recalled. “I knowed it would.”
Now the day had come.
At first light, Clark and Hill climbed
into a pickup and drove up the backside
of a large wooded hill t hat overlooked t he
coal-ash pond. “As long as I live, I’ll never
forget what that looked like,” Clark said.
The f irst calls to 911 that morning had
described the blowout as a mudslide. Area
residents couldn’t see what had happened
in the dark; they could hear only crash-
ing and popping in the direction of the
Kingston plant. In reality, shortly before
1 a.m., in the quiet of the winter solstice,
the dike’s north section had collapsed.
When it did, more than a billion gallons
of coal-ash slurry—about 1,500 times the
amount of liquid that f lows over Niagara
Falls each second—broke forth. A gigantic
black wave rushed northward, shaking the
earth and booming like thunder. It knocked
out power and gas lines. It covered roads
and twisted railway. It tore a home off its
foundation, and destroyed or damaged 26
houses in all. It downed trees, it buried
deer, and it killed at least one dog. As the
wave roared ahead, 3 million cubic yards of
sludge poured into the Emory River, fill-
ing up two backwater sloughs and hurling
f ish some 40 feet onto t he riverbank. TheClark climbed out of bed and got
dressed: blue jeans, down jacket, hard hat,
Muck boots. Even at 57, he was a bull of a
man, strong from hauling around equip-
ment all day and from spending much of
his free time hunting on the Cumberland
Plateau. He lived with his wife, Janie, on
the outskirts of Knoxville, Tennessee, in
a brick home three miles from the farm
where he’d been born. Within a half hour
of receiving the call, he was pulling his
Chevy S10 pickup out of the driveway and
headed toward the Kingston Fossil Plant.
He made his way by headlights, follow-
ing I-40 west out of town. He knew the
route well. After a decade crisscrossing
North America in a tractor trailer, he’d
joined the Teamsters, in 2000, and had
spent much of the past f ive years working
at t he K ingston Fossil Plant, a coal-f ired
power station 40 miles outside Knoxville.
Built and managed by the Tennessee Val-
ley Authority (T.V.A.), a massive federally
owned power company, the Kingston
facilit y was, at t he time of its completion
in 1954, the largest coal-f ired power plant
in t he world. It burns 14,000 tons of coal a
day, powering 700,000 homes across Ten-
nessee and parts of six neighboring states.
With no traff ic, Clark reached the
plant within 45 minutes. He met Hill in
a parking lot, and a few other Teamsters
and operators showed up soon after. In
a shipping container where they stored
tools, they waited for sunrise, eager to
see what they were up against.
Clark had something of an idea. Each
day, the Kingston plant generated a thou-
sand tons of coal ash, t he soot y by-product
of burning coal to produce electricity.
Much of t his ash ended up in an unlined
hole in the ground, known as a holding
pond. The thing was, Kingston’s “pond”
was not so much a pond but a mountainAT 5 A.M., ON DECEMBER 22, 2008, ANSOL
CLARK WOKE TO A PHONE CALL. HE NEEDED
TO GET UP, THE VOICE TOLD HIM, AND HE
NEEDED TO GET UP RIGHT AWAY. CLARK DROVE
CONSTRUCTION TRUCKS FOR A LIVING,
AND THE MAN ON THE LINE WAS A GENERAL
FOREMAN NAMED STAN HILL, FOR WHOM
CL ARK WORKED. “GET TO KINGSTON,” HILL
SAID. “THEY’VE HAD A BLOWOUT DOWN HERE.”
PART I —THE SPILL007272