Book Review
Jacobs' Role in a Huge Coal Ash Cleanup and the Workers' Quest for Justice
The engineering giant has long denied culpability for worker illnesses stemming from the 2008 powerplant site disaster in Tennessee
Photo: Wade Payne/AP
It's easy to forget how long it took to resolve the main litigation over what happened after the Tennessee Valley Authority's coal ash pond dike failed at its Kingston, Tenn., power plant in 2008. It became one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history. The main lawsuit filed by 221 cleanup workers against TVA contractor Jacobs Engineering, now known as Jacobs Solutions, was only settled last year.
The amount Jacobs paid under the settlement, reports journalist Jared Sullivan in a new book, was $77.5 million. The money will be divided by the plaintiffs and their attorneys, he writes—with about $220,000 for each who sued.
The book, Valley So Low: One Lawyer's Fight For Justice in The Wake of America's Great Coal Catastrophe (Knopf: 366 pages), tracks the troubles of a few workers and their families and of their lead attorney, Knoxville, Tenn.-based Jim Scott. Their legal victory leading to the settlement was secured in 2022, when a federal appeals court ruled in Jacobs v. Adkisson that Jacobs was not entitled to the same immunity from liability granted to TVA as a federal power producer.
TVA hired Jacobs as one of its program management service firms for the cleanup in 2009. The workers, none of whom were direct company employees, had sought $50 million in compensatory damages and $3 billion in punitive damages.
One key issue, decided at an initial trial in Knoxville in 2018, was the contention by some workers that Jacobs discouraged their use of respiratory protection, even when they asked.
Jacobs steadfastly denies that allegation.
The other major issue, decided in the workers' favor, 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 airborne flyash in small amounts. The company, including its key jobsite 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 backed by federal environmental regulations and air-monitoring equipment at the site.
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Many details in the book help bring the trial to life. Some controversy flared over how readings were taken from air-monitoring devices and whether those selected as monitors were representative of actual conditions. Another disputed point emerged over the exact words—as plaintiffs alleged—said by Jacobs' jobsite safety supervisor or other employees to discourage use of respiratory protective equipment by cleanup workers, some of whom spent hours slogging in knee-deep ash debris. Some workers claimed they had been threatened with discharge if they used the protections.
Five and one-half years of air monitoring data proved the coal ash was "incapable of causing the harm" alleged by workers, Jacobs attorney tells the jurors as recounted in the book. Of great interest are its account of the depositions and testimony given by Tom Bock, the Jacobs site safety officer.
Sullivan is honest about how his account favors the workers and is written through their eyes, and those of their attorney, Scott. He also shows admiration for a Tennessee newspaper reporter who investigated the claims and followed the story for years—eventually losing her job for siding with the workers.
Concentration Levels Contested
Sullivan is thorough in representing Jacobs' argument that its employees never concealed the existence of hazardous exposures and also that its staff were not responsible for directing jobsite work activities; and that the firm had no role in addressing radiation issues or in testing river sediments. While Sullivan submitted detailed questions to Jacobs for the book, he writes that the company did not answer them in detail, characterizing them as "false and inaccurate."
A representative of Jacobs, contacted for response to the book, indicated that all the company had to say on the subject was covered on website pages related to the cleanup.
There remains in the U.S. many coal ash ponds adjacent to coal-burning power plants, but storage and cleanup standards and mandates have been toughened by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and states recently.
But what Valley So Low lacks, through no fault of the author, is a definitive account from Jacobs of how the contract for the cleanup was evaluated from the beginning, how safety issues were assessed and whether the company believed it would be granted the same immunity from negligence that TVA had.
Looked at through corporate eyes, this was a risk-management failure and crisis. What's missing, and may never be known, is the legal strategy calculation that the company pursued—in author Sullivan's view successfully, in keeping its final costs related to legal exposure comparatively low.
That raises the question worth asking: who really prevailed?
