was still deteriorating drastically.
One weekend, a few months after Scott
argued before the appeals court, Mike
Shelton, a 51-year-old truck driver, visited
a health clinic at his wife’s urging. He’d
been coughing up blood and had breathing
problems. An X-ray discovered a spot on
his lungs—cancer. That July, he underwent
surgery to remove the tumor and part of a
lung. Before the doctors sedated him, he
told his wife, Angie, “You be strong.” He
never fully regained consciousness and
died of complications days later.
Scott was at his office when he received
the call. He knew that the workers were
sick, but he hadn’t realized how little time
some of them had. Shelton’s case was par-
ticularly upsetting. When Shelton died,
his widow had no children or other family
to turn to. Angie had been a homemaker,
and now, for the f irst time in her adult life,
she’d have to provide for herself, in a tiny
outlying town with little besides fast-food
joints and a Piggly Wiggly grocery. “My
life was devoted to him,” Angie said of her
husband. “I don’t know who I am with-
out him. I never dreamed I would be here
left alone.” Each night, she texted Scott
prayers, blessing him for his work.
Within months of Shelton’s death,
Billy Isley, the buff worker with low tes-
tosterone, noticed a lesion on his face
that quickly doubled in size. He’d already
started to cough up blood, and the cough
only worsened. One night, three years
later, his wife, Lena, heard a thump in
their bathroom. She found him lying face-
down, with blood covering the f loor and
smeared across the toilet and the bathtub.
She rushed to him. When she turned his
head, “the blood just comes pouring out
all over,” she said. Mixed among it were
f ine black particles. “The f irst thing I
thought of was the stupid coal ash,” she
said. Isley died in her arms before para-
medics arrived, smiling at her a f inal time
before foaming at the mouth.
In time, Lena suffered three strokes,
which she attributes to touching and wash-
ing her husband’s ash-covered clothes. Mike
McCarthy’s 3-year-old daughter needed a
blood transfusion; his son has lung prob-
lems. One of Jeff Brewer’s daughters devel-
oped digestive issues. Brewer is a devout
Christian, but he struggled to forgive Jacobs
and T.V.A., as his faith instructed he ought.
He often thought about Christ’s persecu-
tion: “While hanging there on that cross, he
said, ‘Father, forgive them. They know not
what they do.’ ” That, Brewer said, was the
problem with T.V.A. and Jacobs: They knew
exactly what they were doing.responded favorably to Scott’s points. As
he left the courtroom, other lawyers who’d
been listening told him that he had a good
shot at winning. But he knew that the odds
suggested otherwise.
Over the next week or two, as Scott
awaited the Sixth Circuit’s decision, he tried
to occupy himself with other cases; he typi-
cally juggles 100 to 150 at various stages.
Besides that, he said, “about the only thing
you can do is pray.” The Clarks, meanwhile,
listened, over and over, to Scott’s oral argu-
ment, the audio of which had been posted
online. They’d call other plaintiffs and put
the phone up to a speaker, to let them hear
parts. “We didn’t have any idea whether we
were going to win,” Janie said.
After a month, the decision arrived.
Scott’s secretary came into his off ice and
delivered the news—the judges had sided
with Scott. The case was still alive. “I was
just like, Oh my God, I did it!” he said.
Janie Clark was in her kitchen when thephone rang. “Jim doesn’t express a lot of
happiness,” she said later, “but he was so
happy when he called. He said, ‘We w o n!
We w o n! We w o n!’ ” For the Clarks, the
news was a rare cause for celebration. “We
knew right then that the case was going
somewhere,” Janie said. On the phone, she
thanked Scott for all he’d done. Scott, in
turn, apologized for everything that they
had had to endure. And, with a jury trial
still to come, he knew that more lay ahead.IN THE WEEKS following Scott’s win-
ning appeal, a few dozen more workers
approached him about being added to
the suit. To help carry the case forward,
Scott recruited three other Knoxville
attorneys: John Dupree, Tyler Roper,
and Keith Stewart. They soon began to
depose Jacobs off icials and the workers.
The cleanup had concluded in the spring
of 2015. The trouble was that, though the
workers had taken new jobs, their healthpet turkey outside. Two years before, he
had retired early from Kingston, owing
to poor health. As he dressed, his vision
suddenly blurred. He grabbed ahold
of his bed. Then blackness. He awoke
at Parkwest Medical Center in Knox-
ville, as an emergency crew worked to
keep him alive. He’d suffered a stroke,
and was subsequently diagnosed with
polycythemia vera, a rare form of blood
cancer linked to environmental exposure
to radium, a particle found in coal ash.
“That was the worst day of our lives,”
Janie said. They’d met in night school,
shortly after Clark had returned from a
stint in the Navy; Janie, not yet 18, sold
movie tickets at a theater downtown.
Some 40 years later, the couple still adored
each other. Janie had never seen the beach
before, and, after years of planning, they’d
intended to vacation in coastal North
Carolina once Clark retired. But, after the
diagnosis, Janie refused to travel far from
her husband’s Knoxville hospital. “He’s
never going to be the same,” she said. “Our
lives are never going to be the same. We
had hopes for a future together, to live out
our golden years. That won’t happen now.”
A month later, Scott f lew to Cincinnati
to appeal his case before the Sixth Circuit.
He’d never argued there before, and if he
lost, the workers stood no chance of receiv-
ing the money they needed to cover their
mounting medical bills. Adding to Scott’s
anxiety, he and his wife had recently
decided to divorce, under messy circum-
stances. The night before his day in court,
he watched the Reds play the Brewers.
The next morning, he dressed in his nicest
suit—dark navy and custom-tailored—and
walked to the courthouse.
To curry favor with juries, Scott por-
trays himself in court as a simple country
lawyer. But in the Sixth Circuit, he had
to make his case before a panel of three
judges, so he couldn’t rely on homespun
charm. That morning, there were maybe
15 people in the courtroom. As he waited
for his turn, he felt as if he were a kid again,
afraid to cause a disturbance in church.
When his time came, he stood at a lec-
tern before the judges. His argument cen-
tered on the idea that, because Jacobs had
allegedly acted outside T.V.A.’s authority
and knowingly broken state and federal
laws, it shouldn’t be immune. He didn’t get
off to a smooth start: Four minutes into his
allotted 15, a judge asked him a clarifying
question. As Scott responded, the judge
interrupted—“Is the answer yes or no?”
“Yes, yes sir!” Scott replied.
Besides this minor hiccup, the judges007676
“WE HAD HOPES TO
LIVE OUT OUR GOLDEN
YEARS TOGETHER,”
JANIE SAID. “THAT
WON’T HAPPEN NOW.”