priority,” since they were “working right
in the ash.” She also admitted that, when
she arrived home each day, she checked
her boots and her vehicle for coal ash, not
wanting to track in the hazardous material.
Documents, f irst obtained by t he Knox-
ville News Sentinel, later showed that top
T.V.A. off icials knew as far back as 1981
t hat coal ash contained high levels of radio-
active material. The E.P.A. also knew of the
dangers. In a 2009 60 Minutes segment,
Leo Francendese, the E.P.A.’s on-scene
Kingston coordinator, told the journalist
Lesley Stahl that coal ash can cause harm.
“Breathing it, that’s dangerous,” he said.
(Neither Ray nor Francendese responded
to interview requests.)
These concerns were not shared with
the workers, who were busy loading the
coal ash onto trains, to be shipped to a
landf ill in Alabama. When they pulled up
for their 5 a.m. shifts, the air would spar-
kle in their truck headlights, owing, they
later learned, to the f ine metal particles
suspended in the dust. For preshift safety
meetings, they met at a house near the spill
site that served as a makeshift off ice for
Jacobs and T.V.A. off icials. Addressing the
workers from the deck, Tom Bock, the top
Jacobs safety off icer on-site, repeatedly
said that the workers could eat a pound
of f ly ash—the dusty component of coal
ash—each day and be f ine. That’s how safe
it was. Bock, a full-cheeked guy with half-
rim glasses, repeated the spiel frequently
enough that it became a joke among the
workers: Don’t worry, man. You can eat a
pound of ash a day—just don’t inhale it!
Soon after the cleanup got underway,
however, some workers began to feel slug-
gish and fall short of breath on walks from
the parking lot to the work site. Others
coughed up black jelly and couldn’t keep
their noses from running. They called it
“the Kingston Crud” and initially blamed
it on the long hours and grind of the work.
Then sluggishness led to dizzy spells, then
to nosebleeds, then to worse.
Jeff Brewer, a dump-truck driver and
part-time Baptist preacher, started to have
blackouts after a year and a half on the job.
The spells tended to hit as he waited in
his dump truck for another load of ash to
move. “All I know is that I’d be sitting there
waiting in line, looking around,” he said,
“and the next thing I know, I’d be out.”
The workers were put in an impossible
position. Many of them hailed from rural
communities outside Knoxville. By one
estimate, half hadn’t finished high school.
A number needed help to read. With the
Great Recession in full swing, they’d bejust hope that the ponds never leaked or
broke.” Studies suggest that 90 percent
of these ponds do leak and contaminate
groundwater, endangering human health.
What set the Kingston plant apart was
that its pond just happened to explode.
The spill made national news. From
the outset, T.V.A. insisted that, though
coal ash dominated the landscape, it
posed no threat to people. For the ash to
cause harm, “you’d have to eat it,” said
Barbara Martocci, a T.V.A. spokeswoman,
in a statement the week of the spill. “You
have to get it in your body.” Ansol Clark,
like many workers, took T.V.A. at its
word. Each night, for the four years that
he worked at the cleanup site, he arrived
home with coal ash caked to his boots, his
clothes, and his face. He thought little of it.
But many residents of nearby Kingston
were less sanguine. From the ridges sur-
rounding the spill site, they could see coal
ash hanging in the air, and they would f ind
it dusted over their yards and gardens. In
October 2009, at the First Baptist Church
in Kingston, a public meeting was held.
Addressing the crowd, Anda Ray, a T.V.A.
senior vice president, acknowledged the
potential dangers of the ash, and stressed
that the health of the workers was a “topJim Scott is dragging forward a law-
suit on behalf of 300 Kingston workers.007474
ich and the hexavalent chromium look like
Sesame Street,” Scott said.
By taking on Jacobs, Scott and his
small team are, by extension, also taking
on T.V.A., which was created as part of the
New Deal and has since become the nation’s
largest public utility, operating six coal-
f ired power plants, three nuclear plants,
and 29 hydroelectric dams. It earns $11 bil-
lion in annual revenue and employs 10,000
people. What’s more, some of the country’s
largest law f irms are defending Jacobs. For
years, Scott, meanwhile, worked on the
case largely alone, on a contingency basis.
As Janie Clark put it, “They have million-
dollar law f irms, and we’ve got Jimmy.”PART III —THE CLEANUP
Across the U.S., there are some 400 coal-
f ired power plants, and each year, they
produce about 100 million tons of coal
ash. In 2008, as now, T.V.A. and other
utilities were not required to treat this coal
ash. “All they had to do,” said Elizabeth
Southerland, a former senior E.P.A. off i-
cial, “was pour it into these big ponds”—
typically bare holes in the earth—“then