Amazon: For more than fifty years, a power plant in the small town of Kingston, Tennessee, burned fourteen thousand tons of coal a day, gradually creating a mountain of ashen waste sixty feet high and covering eighty-four acres, contained only by an earthen embankment. In 2008, just before Christmas, that embankment broke, unleashing a lethal wave of coal sludge that covered three hundred acres, damaged nearly thirty homes, and precipitating a cleanup effort that would cost more than a billion dollars—and the lives of more than fifty cleanup workers who inhaled the toxins it released.
https://www.amazon.com/Valley-So-Low-Americas-Catastrophe/dp/0593321111
In 2023, after a trial and appeals, Jacobs Engineering (company contracted by the TVA to clean up the mess) settled a lawsuit for $77.5 million with 230 workers who got sick from cleaning up the coal ash. After attorney fees/costs, each person received about $220,000.
https://www.enr.com/articles/60072-jacobs-role-in-a-huge-coal-ash-cleanup-and-the-workers-quest-for-justice
Testimony in the 2018 federal trial revealed that managers with both Jacobs and TVA repeatedly told workers coal ash was safe enough to eat and refused to provide them protective gear, including masks. When workers began pressing for respiratory protection, Jacobs’ safety manager Tom Bock ordered masks stored at the disaster site destroyed to prevent workers from wearing them, testimony showed.
Coal ash contains 26 cancer-causing toxins, heavy metals and radioactive material, including radium, lithium, selenium, molybdenum, arsenic, lead, cobalt and uranium. Initial testing in January 2009 by an independent firm showed the Kingston coal ash was six to eight times more radioactive than surrounding soil.
But training materials provided by both TVA and Jacobs to Kingston disaster workers never mentioned the radiological threat coal ash posed or provided a full list of dangerous ingredients in the waste. Instead, the training materials stated the only ingredients of concern in the ash were arsenic and silica.
https://tennesseelookout.com/2023/05/23/jacobs-engineering-settles-kingston-coal-ash-case/
EPA sued in 2022 for exempting coal ash from health protections
https://earthjustice.org/press/2022/epa-faces-lawsuit-for-exempting-half-a-billion-tons-of-toxic-coal-ash-from-health-protections
Tennessee has 29 toxic coal ash dumpsites as of 2023
https://earthjustice.org/feature/coal-ash-states/tennessee
