“Valley So Low” is a gripping autopsy of the largest industrial accident in U.S., the 2008 failure of the enormous coal ash pond at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s giant Kingston power plant near Knoxville. The book provides a thorough, thoughtful, and impeccably researched history covering an event that continues to provide lessons today.
Journalist Jared Sullivan spent five years – from 2018 to the not entirely satisfactory end last year – mostly on the scene in Tennessee – learning the very personal story of the arrogance and avarice of a giant and unregulated electric company, TVA, and the victims of its outrageous behavior over 15 years.
The book often reads like a fictional legal procedural. But it is for real.
There are heroes, victims, and victims . The heroes are the TVA workers and their families who were financially and physically grievously injured – and too many died from their far-too-intimate encounters with toxic coal ash – and their tireless lawyers who risked their careers (and survived a suspicious fire that destroyed their office and the hard copies of most of their case documents, saved by digital copies in the cloud).
The victims are the cleanup workers and their families. The workers – all men – were drenched and covered with coal ash, which contains a witches’ brew of toxics: lead, mercury, radium among others.
The villains are the malevolent TVA, its mendacious cleanup contractor Jacobs Engineering (now known as Jacobs Solutions), and, for comic relief, a meretricious legal gun hired from a Washington law firm, Covington and Burling, who fired the equivalent of a machine gun ammo belt full of blanks.
For many who have never had contact with TVA, it is a legendary icon of 1930s New Deal progressivism. Created by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 during the midst of the Great Recession to help a most downtrodden region consisting of all of Tennessee and parts of Kentucky, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, TVA’s goal was to lift the region out of abject poverty.
TVA chose to focus its regional development activities on electrifying the region by building hydroelectric dams. TVA became the powerhouse that helped the U.S. develop the atomic bomb. By the end of World War II, TVA needed more power than its hydro system could provide. TVA turned to coal, building giant, technologically advanced coal-fired power plants, including the 1,400-MW Kingston plant between 1954 and 1955. Sullivan writes, “In the mid-1950’s, TVA, already the nation’s largest power system by output, became the country’s largest coal consumer, and the skies over the valley darkened as proof.”
As TVA’s attention focused on electric power, its interest in other approaches to regional development vanished. It became the largest electric utility system in the U.S., generating and transmitting power which it sold to municipal utility distributors across the region. The agency also developed an enormous appetite for money to pay for its power ambitions.
In 1959, Congress took action that ultimately transformed TVA from the benevolent icon of the New Deal vision to just another power company. Congress amended TVA’s charter so that it could issue (tax-free) bonds and self-finance through its electric sales. Sullivan notes, “This decision meant that TVA no longer needed taxpayer dollars, but the change put profits, instead of the public interest, at the center of its concerns for the first time.”
By December 22, 2008, when the enormous coal ash pile dike failed pouring a flood more than a billion tons of gelatinous coal ash slurry over the East Tennessee countryside, TVA had long become just another giant, profit-seeking electric utility. It was little different than its cousins such as Georgia’s Southern Company, Ohio’s FirstEnergy, or Louisiana’s Entergy.
TVA to this day tries to cloak itself as a publicly oriented regional development agency. That’s a deception. Unlike the conventional investor-owned utility companies, shareholders don’t own TVA. Instead, TVA’s investors just don’t own the company outright. Instead TVA has bondholders, and they have much the same interests – return on investment – as the shareholders of the IOUs, while TVA remains technically owned by the federal government.
An illustration of TVA’s transformation is its executive suite. Who is the highest paid federal government employee? The president? TVA’s CEO in 2023 made $10.5 million; the chief financial officer made $4.6 million; the chief operating officer made $3.6 million; the general counsel made $2.5 million. Joe Biden made $400,000 as U.S. president in 2023. Congress passed a law exempting TVA from federal government employee pay scales
Valley So Low is organized around three timelines: 2008-2013, 2013-2017, and 2017-2023.
Th first is the period of the accident and the cleanup. We meet Ansol and Janie Clark, protagonists the book follows through the entire period, including Ansol’s death in 2021 from the effects of breathing coal ash. He was a first responder to the spill and worked on the cleanup throughout.
During this period, TVA had hired Jacobs for the cleanup. TVA wanted it done quickly and with no indication to the public that the job was anything other than routine. When workers complained about the clouds of nasty ash, Jacobs, almost certainly at TVA’s direction, ridiculed them and denied requests for dust masks and, in some cases, respirators. This dreadful behavior continued throughout, even when workers presented prescriptions from their physicians for masks or respirators.
We also meet Jim Scott, a local attorney who befriended Ansol and Janie and eventually led the legal team that dominated the story through the rest of the tale. The legal marathon begins with a successful suit against TVA for damages to land and property. At the same time, widespread health complaints started surfacing.
The third section focuses on the suit over health effects, a massive and risky venture. Among the obstacles Scott had to overcome was TVA’s claim of sovereign immunity as a federal government agency. It was legally difficult, financially risky, and personally dangerous.
Read the book to discover the ending to this real-life legal thriller. It’s a great read.
–Kennedy Maize
The Quad Report
Valley So Low: one lawyer’s fight for justice in the wake of America’s great coal catatrophy
Jared Sullivan
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, available Oct. 15, 2024