dinator named Robert Muse testif ied that
he saw Bock alter or destroy air-monitoring
results, in v iolation of t he law. He also said
that he’d once heard that Bock had ordered
some dust masks be removed from the site.
According to Muse, when he confronted
Bock, Bock told him that dust masks
weren’t “an image we wanted to put out
to the public.” Muse said that he took his
concerns about Bock to T.V.A. and union
off icials, but this led nowhere.
Bock undoubtedly proved a disaster for
the defense. Throughout the trial, people
saw him roll his eyes when sickened work-
ers hobbled into the gallery. On the stand,
he claimed, “We never told anybody f ly ash
was safe.” Yet he also admitted that he’d
told the workers that they could safely eat a
pound of f ly ash a day. “It was an analogy,”
he said. At one point, Friedman had Bock
read a part of his deposition, in which he
said, in effect, that the most important doc-
ument on-site was not the health and safety
plan but his paycheck. (Bock declined
interview requests but wrote in an email,
“There have been many false accusations
and much misinformation published about
worker protection, but I think the Kings-
ton Cleanup safety team did a great job.”)
In week three, Jacobs called a surprise,
last-minute witness: William Cheung, an
engineer for Mesa Labs, a company that
makes portable air monitors. On the stand,
Cheung said that tapping out the air moni-
tors wouldn’t affect their results. When
cross-examined, Cheung was unwavering,
but he conceded that if someone banged
an air monitor against a table “technically,
yeah...I’m sure something will fall from
the filter.” Cheung couldn’t confirm, how-
ever, whether his company’s air monitors
were used at Kingston.
On November 6, closing statements
began. Before a packed gallery, Friedman
recounted key moments from trial, referring
to blown-up photos of the workers who’d
testif ied. He also recalled how Jacobs of f i-
cials had demanded air-f iltration systems
for the trailers in which some of them had
worked, to ensure that they weren’t breathing
in coal ash. Then, for the defense, Sanders
insisted that, according to the E.P.A., “this
was not a hazardous waste site,” and that
there was no way, based on the air-monitor
results, that the coal ash was dangerous.
The plantiffs’ case, he added, was based
in “alternative reality.” (Sanders did not
respond to interview requests.)
At 2 p.m., Judge Varlan dismissed the
jury to deliberate, then recessed the court
at 6 p.m. Scott and his team felt relieved
just for having f inished the trial. Butspill cases. Moreover, he’d trained under
the attorney James F. Neal, who’d success-
fully defended Ford Motor in suits over the
design f laws in its Pinto subcompact.
Scott took his place at a wooden coun-
sel table. He doesn’t lack conf idence in a
courtroom: “I’ve had judges tell me I was
the best jury-trial lawyer that has been
in their court.” Even so, he’d recruited
Jeff Friedman, a veteran Birmingham
litigator, to lead the trial and to deliver
the opening statement. Scott sat between
Friedman and Gary Davis, an environ-
mental lawyer, who, along with Friedman,
had done substantial work to pull together
expert and fact witnesses.
The trial would be broken into two
phases. The f irst would determine
whether Jacobs had failed to protect the
workers and potentially harmed their
health. If the workers won, a second trial
would then determine how much in dam-
ages they would receive.
Standing before the jury for the f irst
time, Friedman explained that the cleanup
had moved at a record pace, but only
because T.V.A. had incentivized contractors
to ensure that it did. Jacobs, for one, stood
to earn $1.5 million on top of its $60 million
fee. But, Friedman said, the air-monitoring
devices that had been on-site presented
Jacobs with a problem. The results, had
they been accurately recorded, would have
shown that the workers were exposed to
dangerous levels of coal ash, which would
have required that extra, time-consuming
precautions be taken. To avoid this, Fried-
man said, Jacobs off icials tended to deploy
the air monitors when it was wet outside,
when less f ly ash was airborne.
In the defense’s opening statement,
Sanders f ired back. On-site E.P.A. off i-
cials, he said, had time and again signed
off on reports aff irming that the cleanup
was being carried out safely. And he
pledged that the trial would prove that the
levels of f ly ash at Kingston were incapable
of sickening the workers.
Over four weeks, 32 witnesses testif ied.
A key moment came when a former Kings-
ton worker named Danny Gouge told the
jury that Tom Bock, Jacobs’ on-site head
of safety, had once told him, “Man, if
these people knowed what was in this ash,
they’d quit.” Moreover, the workers had
sometimes worn portable air monitors;
Gouge, who’d been friendly with Bock,
testif ied that he’d seen Bock hit the moni-
tors against a table—knocking out the coal
ash and thus manipulating the results.
The workers weren’t alone in testifying
against Jacobs. A former T.V.A. safety coor-PART V—THE TRIAL
On the morning of October 16, 2018, Jim
Scott put on a dark, cheap suit. He never
dressed too sharply for trial; he never
wanted the jury to think that he was
different from them. Nearly six years had
passed since Ansol Clark and the other
workers had f irst shown up at his off ice,
and, in the year leading up to the trial, the
case had become Scott’s world. Now the
day had f inally arrived in which Jacobs
would have to reckon with its handling
of the cleanup.
Scott met a few lawyers from his team
at their of f ice, then walked the few blocks
to the courthouse. He was conf ident, but
the stakes still felt impossibly high. Some
20 workers had already died, and Scott
feared that Clark might soon be among
them. Janie had recently asked Scott to
deliver the eulogy at Clark’s funeral, when-
ever the day came. It was tough to tell how
much time he had. He struggled to rise out
of bed some mornings; he had dizzy spells;
his mind slipped. He and Janie nonetheless
insisted on sitting in the gallery through-
out the trial. They felt they needed to.
The U.S. District Court in Knoxville sits
on the third f loor of a high-towered brick
building. As Scott entered the courtroom
that morning, he made a point to shake
hands with the defense lawyers, hoping to
avoid a contentious trial. Jacobs was rep-
resented by James F. Sanders and a team
from the Nashville f irm Neal & Harwell.
A Vanderbilt grad, with f lowing silver hair
and a silver mustache, Sanders had previ-
ously defended Exxon in the Valdez oil-For years, Ansol and Janie Clark
trusted T.V.A. that coal ash was safe.077
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