IIt’s easy to forget how long it took to resolve the main dispute over what happened after the Tennessee Valley Authority’s coal ash pond dike failed at its Kingston coal-fired power plant, in Tennessee in 2008. It became one of the worst environmental disasters in the United States. history. The main lawsuit filed by workers responding to the massive cleanup managed by TVA contractor Jacobs Engineering, now known as Jacobs Solutions, was only settled last year.

The amount paid by Jacobs within the framework of the regulationreports journalist Jared Sullivan in a new book, amounted to $77.5 million. The money will be split between the plaintiffs and their lawyers, he wrote, with about $220,000 going to each of the plaintiffs.

The book, Valley So Low: A lawyer’s fight for justice following the great coal disaster in the United States (Knopf: 366 pages), traces the problems of a few workers and their families as well as their lead lawyer, Jim Scott, based in Knoxville, Tennessee. Their legal victory leading to the settlement was assured in 2022, when a federal appeals court ruled in Jacobs v. Adkisson that Jacobs was not entitled to the same immunity from liability afforded to TVA as a federal electricity producer.

TVA hired Jacobs as one of its program management services companies 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.

One of the key issues, decided in an initial trial in Knoxville in 2018, was some workers’ claim that Jacobs discouraged their use of respiratory protection, even when they requested it.

Jacobs categorically denies this allegation.

The other major 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 contained in the ashes of coal and fly ash suspended in the air in small quantities. The company, including its main safety officer at the Kingston project site, argued in the 2018 Knoxville case that these ash components were never present in sufficient concentrations to pose a risk – a conclusion that , she said, was supported by federal environmental regulations and air monitoring equipment. on the site.

Many of the details in the book help bring the trial to life. Some controversy arose over how measurements were taken from the air monitoring devices and whether those selected as monitors were representative of real-world conditions. Another controversial point emerged over the exact words — as plaintiffs alleged — spoken by Jacobs’ construction site safety supervisor or other employees to discourage the use of respiratory protective equipment by cleaning workers , some of whom spent hours digging through knee-deep ash debris. Some workers said they were threatened with dismissal if they used these protections.

Five and a half years of air monitoring data proved that coal ash was “incapable of causing the damage” alleged by workers, Jacobs’ attorney told jurors, as recounted in the book. Of great interest is the account of the depositions and testimony of Tom Bock, head of security at the Jacobs site.

Sullivan is honest about how his account favors the workers and is written through their eyes and those of their lawyer, Scott. He also shows admiration for a Tennessee reporter who investigated the allegations and followed the story for years.—she ultimately lost her job for siding with the workers.

Contested concentration levels

Sullivan carefully defends Jacobs’ argument that his employees never hid the existence of hazardous exposures, but also that his personnel were not responsible for directing work activities on the job site; and that the company had no role in resolving radiation issues or testing river sediments. Although Sullivan submitted detailed questions to Jacobs for the book, he writes that the company did not answer them in detail, calling them “false and inaccurate.”

THE company reporting of issues related to cleanup is featured on a separate event webpage.

Many coal ash ponds remain in the United States adjacent to coal-fired power plants, but with enhanced storage and cleanup standards and mandates by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and states in particular. recently.

But what Valley so low Missing, through no fault of the author, is a definitive account from Jacobs of how the cleaning contract was evaluated from the beginning, how safety issues were evaluated, and whether the company believed that it would benefit from the same immunity from negligence that TVA had.

Seen from a business perspective, this was a risk management failure and crisis. What is missing, and may never be known, is the calculus of the legal strategy the company followed – according to author Sullivan, successfully, keeping its final costs associated with legal exposure at a relatively low level.

This raises the question worth asking: who actually prevailed?