meIt’s easy to forget how long it took to resolve the main litigation over what happened after the Tennessee Authority’s coal ash levee failed at its coal-fired power plant in Kingston, Tennessee in 2008. It became in one of America’s worst environmental disasters. history The main lawsuit filed by workers who responded over the massive cleanup handled by TVA contractor Jacobs Engineering, now known as Jacobs Solutions, was settled only last year.
The amount Jacobs paid under the settlement, journalist Jared Sullivan reports in a new book, was $77.5 million. The money will be split between the plaintiffs and their lawyers, he writes, with about $220,000 for each who sued.
the book, Valley So Low: A Lawyer’s Fight for Justice After America’s Great Coal Disaster (Knopf: 366 pages), tracks the problems of a few workers and their families and their lead attorney, Jim Scott, based in Knoxville, Tennessee. His legal victory that led to the settlement came in 2022, when a federal appeals court ruled Jacobs v. Adkisson that Jacobs was not entitled to the same immunity from liability afforded TVA as a federal power producer.
TVA hired Jacobs as one of its program management services firms for the cleanup in 2009. The workers, none of whom were direct employees of the company, had sought $50 million in compensatory damages and $3 billion in punitive damages.
A key issue, decided in an initial trial in Knoxville in 2018, was the claim by some workers that Jacobs discouraged the use of respiratory protection, even when they requested it.
Jacobs strongly denies this accusation.
The other important issue, decided in favor of the workers, was whether Jacobs was responsible for protecting them from a dangerous level of exposure to toxins, such as arsenic, or carcinogens in coal ash and fly ash in air in small amounts. The company, including its key safety officer on the Kingston project, argued in the 2018 Knoxville case that those ash components were never present in sufficient concentrations to pose a risk, a conclusion it said was supported by federal environmental regulations and air control equipment. on the spot
Many details in the book help bring the test to life. There was some controversy over how the readings from the air monitoring devices were taken and whether those selected as monitors were representative of actual conditions. Another point of contention arose over the exact words, the plaintiffs alleged, that Jacobs’ workplace safety supervisor or other employees said to discourage workers from wearing respiratory protective equipment of the cleanup, some of whom spent hours knee-deep in ash debris. Some workers claimed they had been threatened with discharge if they used the protections.
Five and a half years of air monitoring data showed that coal ash was “incapable of causing the harm” alleged by the workers, Jacobs’ attorney tells jurors as recounted in the book. Of great interest are his account of the statements and the testimony of Tom Bock, Jacobs’ site security officer.
Sullivan is honest about how his account favors workers and is written through his eyes and those of his lawyer, Scott. He also shows admiration for a Tennessee newspaper reporter who investigated the claims and followed the story for years—he eventually lost his job to side with the workers.
Disputed concentration levels
Sullivan is thorough in her representation of Jacobs’ argument that her employees never concealed the existence of hazardous exposures, and that her staff was not responsible for directing the workplace’s work activities; and that the company had no role in addressing radiation issues or testing river sediments. Although Sullivan sent detailed questions to Jacobs for the book, he writes that the company did not answer them in detail, characterizing them as “false and inaccurate.”
The company’s account of the cleanup issues is presented on a separate web page about the event.
Many coal ash ponds remain in the United States adjacent to coal-fired power plants, but with particularly recently tightened storage and cleanup standards and mandates by the US Environmental Protection Agency and states.
But what Vso low alley lacks, through no fault of the author, is Jacobs’ definitive account of how the cleanup contract was evaluated from the start, how safety issues were evaluated, and whether the company believed it would be awarded the same immunity from negligence that TVA. .
Seen from the eyes of the companies, this was a failure and a crisis in risk management. What is missing, and may never be known, is the calculation of the legal strategy that the company followed, according to author Sullivan, successfully, to keep its final costs related to legal exposure relatively low.
This raises the question worth asking: who really prevailed?
