99% Invisible - Valley So Low

Episode Date: January 28, 2025

What went wrong in Kingston, Tennessee, and what does it reveal about the messy legacy of public utilities turned corporate giants?Valley So Low Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In 2008, a billion gallons of toxic sludge spewed across 300 acres of Tennessee in the middle of the night. It was just before Christmas. I was a senior in high school and I remember seeing this billion gallons of sludge covering this town outside of Knoxville and thinking, wow, that looks awful. That's Jared Sullivan. For over 50 years, a power company called the Tennessee Valley Authority, or TVA, had been burning coal at a power plant near Jared's hometown. Burning all that coal helped bring electricity to the region, but it also created a mountain of ash and waste. Over the years, this mountain grew to be 60 feet high and 84 acres wide. And on December 22, 2008, the earthen embankment that contained this mountain of waste collapsed.

A lethal wave of coal sludge inundated the countryside. If you pull up the footage and look it up on YouTube or whatever, it really sticks with you because it is biblical in scope what happened. This disaster came to be known as the Kingston coal ash spill, and the culprit wasn't a private company. It was the TVA, a federally owned electricity provider that had been set up by the government during the New Deal. Immediately after this happened, TVA's PR lackeys got on the news and basically said, this stuff isn't toxic, no big deal, don't worry about it. And 900 blue collar workers from around the country descended on the site to help clean

it up. Everyone expected that they'd find bodies under the sludge. It was a miracle that no one died that night. The real tragedy came years later, when many of the workers in charge of the cleanup fell sick and even died from health issues caused by inhaling the toxins found in coal ash. The fallout from what happened at the Kingston coal plant led Jared to look more closely at the company in charge, the Tennessee Valley Authority. The TVA has been around since the 1930s, and today it provides electricity

to more than 10 million people. Its presence in the Southeast had a huge impact in transforming the region. The TVA is a backdrop to life as portrayed in Southern literature, film, and music. It's part of the region's folklore. So I thank God for the TVA. So I thank God for the TVA. Thank God for the TVA.

Where, oh, so they'll let us all work for an honest day's pay. I grew up in Tennessee and everyone's kind of vaguely familiar with TVA, but I did not really know the full history of what TVA was until I started reporting and writing this book. Jared writes about the TVA in his new book, Valley So Low. One Lawyer's Fight for Justice in the Wake of America's Great Coal Catastrophe. It's hard to remember those long subtitles. I had to...

I know. You see me side-eyeing my book. I was like, what's my book called again? Jared's book follows the aftermath of the disaster at the Kingston coal plant. And in doing so, his book reveals an even larger, ongoing American tragedy. How the TVA started out as a mission-driven public institution, but ended up acting like a private for-profit company. And what that shift can tell us about the consequences of privatization. The story of TVA really begins in many respects

with Franklin Roosevelt, who, as a young man, contracted polio and began making trips to Warm Springs, Georgia, for treatment. And on those trips, he got a firsthand look at how dire the situation was in the Tennessee Valley. During the 1920s, the Tennessee Valley, which is an area covering nearly all of Tennessee, large chunks of Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky, and bits of three other states, was deeply impoverished.

Much of the valley was farmland, but only 3% of these farms had electricity. The area also had a per capita income of less than half of the national average, and about a third of the population was stricken with malaria. The poverty was so crushing that it really challenged the notion of whether a democracy could care for its people and whether the American experiment had vitality. On the farms, crops would suffer from an uneven climate. Constant flooding from the Tennessee River would badly damage the soil. Sometimes the outlook was so bleak that people would abandon their farms altogether.

In the mountains, families lived in very crude, rudimentary shacks. They slept, in many cases, multiple people in a bed to stay warm throughout the winter. Infant mortality rates were high. People caught typhoid from drinking bad water, malaria was endemic. It was a grave, grave situation. There was this notion that something needed to be done, if not simply for the good of the people, then at least to prevent some sort of uprising.

There's actually some concern that the Southeast was ripe for a populist uprising, because the system was so not working, because the Bolshevik Revolution had not been that many years in the past, right? So there was really a strong sense of like, we have to do something or this region may never catch up or worse. The idea was simple.

Electric power should become a public good, because if you want to improve people's lives, you have to give them electricity. The problem was at the time that all the big power companies were owned by private holding companies and there was no financial incentive for them to provide power to rural areas because there were just not that many people out there. There was not that much money to make from these rural communities. But as a result, these communities were basically stuck. Then in 1933, FDR got sworn in as president and pretty quickly got to work on New Deal programs,

one of which was to establish a power company, the Tennessee Valley Authority. In 1933, we started. Down on the Tennessee River, when Congress created the Tennessee Valley Authority, an authority commissioned to develop navigation, flood control, agriculture, and industry in the valley. It was, for almost a quarter century, the single most ambitious public work project in the world. Its mission was to lift the rural South out of poverty by making electricity more accessible to all. TVA had three basic goals.

Control the Tennessee River, produce power, and improve agriculture. The Tennessee River's propensity to flood not only damaged farmland, but also sometimes took out entire towns. It wiped out the city of Chattanooga, and I believe it was the 1870s, almost completely drowned the whole city. So they needed to control the amount of water that was coming down the Tennessee River, because you can't develop as a society

if your city's getting washed away every dozen years or so, right? The goal was to control the river and generate hydroelectric power, and so began the construction of the dams. They used eminent domain to remove about 20,000 families from their homesteads, and in their place, they peppered the valley with dams

and brutalist concrete buildings. Shortly after the TVA Act of 1933 is passed, TVA rushes to start building hydroelectric dams throughout the Tennessee Valley. And the first one that they complete themselves from start to finish is Norris Dam outside of Knoxville. First came the dams. Up on the clench at the head of the river. We built Norristown a great barrier to hold water in flood time

And to release water down the river for navigation in low water This is the middle of the Great Depression people needed jobs So they hired 40,000 men to throw up these dams all up the Tennessee River and they end up building It was 49 dams in all 29 of which produce power So that helped control the river and it helped generate much-needed electricity in the south. And it really worked. But the TVA didn't stop at just building dams. TVA initially had all these other like utopian side projects.

It's hard to imagine the federal government ever doing something like this today. It had a mobile library service that loaned out tens of thousands of books to people. It started a ceramics laboratory. It created 13,000 demonstration farms where it taught locals how to maximize crop yields. Alongside TVA's construction of their first dam in 1933, they also established a town called Norris. Norris was created to house the workers building the nearby dam. But the town was also a way to show America how cooperative living could

work. Norris was completely walkable with most homes facing each other instead of the street. It included a greenbelt, a school where dam workers could take classes, a post office, a gym, and even a farmer's market. And TVA, some of their board directors actually live in this little playing community. It's very cute. It still exists to this day. In those first few years, TVA continued to steadily build more and more dams. And in the process, they became the largest producer of electric power in the United States.

But these massive government interventions came with a lot of pushback. It was a huge fight over transmission lines and private industry definitely pushed back on TVA. They were very scared that TVA was going to expand into their territory. A guy named Wendell Wilkie led the fight against the TVA. He was the president of a large private power company in the South. Wendell and other power company reps complained bitterly about what they saw as unfair competition. They took the TVA to the Supreme Court and lost, twice. The TVA had this grand ambition to electrify the South. And it did. The dams tamed the

rivers and controlled the floods, which meant healthier soil and more productive farmland. Hydroelectric power was cheap and available, which meant the standard of living increased dramatically. For those who benefited, it was a social revolution. It was ambitious and had noble intentions and it actually worked. And I really do feel like it is like an American miracle. It exemplified a good government inaction.

For the first time ever, the Tennessee Valley could be lit up after dark. In one of the most conservative regions in the country, millions of people got their electricity from a federal agency that had no shareholders to answer to and no profits to make. And then something happened that caused the TVA to suddenly change direction. The big thing that forever changed TVA was World War II. During World War II, TVA supplied a tenth of all the electricity used by the country's defense industries.

The TVA, which was a program of the federal government, was suddenly summoned to support the war. Electricity was needed to produce weapons and military equipment, and to build atomic bombs. The government decided to base the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee because of TVA. What all this meant, though, was that electricity that was previously going to the public was now being siphoned off for war. Then in the early 1940s, Congress feared a power shortage because it was forecasting a dry year, which would lower the river levels throughout the valley.

The following year, at the government's urging and with its funding, the TVA began construction on its first coal-fired power plant. It meant that at least some of the TVA's power would no longer depend on the weather. After World War II, Tennessee stayed in the bomb-making business. This time, there was a need for uranium enrichment for the Cold War nuclear arsenal. And so, the demand for TVA's electricity kept going up.

After that, it was the Cold War. Oak Ridge did not shut down after Hiroshima, right? Just the opposite. Oak Ridge is still in the bomb making game and TVA had to supply power for it. Almost half its power at one point went to the government bomb making facilities in Oak Ridge. Meanwhile, the South was also seeing an uptick in population. AC became more widely available, air conditioning, so it was like more tolerable to live here.

So a lot of people migrated south. And TVA's power production couldn't keep up with the growing demand from both war manufacturers and people living in the Valley. So they started to build more coal power plants. And they ended up building 11 of the world's largest coal fire power plants. Partially to serve Oak Ridge, but also again,

to meet the energy demands from the growing population here. Coal plants were cheap and helped the bottom line. It was the easiest way to produce more power under so much pressure. Then in 1952, Dwight Eisenhower was elected president, and unlike FDR, he was highly skeptical of TVA as a whole. He really hated TVA. He accused that being an example of, quote, creeping socialism, and he reportedly wanted to sell off the whole thing.

Eisenhower's administration affected TVA's ability to expand, even though more people were in need of electricity than ever before. Republicans in Congress who are aligned with Eisenhower, they repeatedly withheld appropriations from TVA, which it needed to build power plants to keep up with energy demand. Then in 1959, Eisenhower cut TV off from federal funding entirely.

This was a monumental change. It meant that the TVA, although owned by the government, needed to start operating like a private corporation in order to finance itself. Since 1959, the TVA has raised capital for its electricity projects by issuing and selling bonds. This new financial model meant that the TVA began to shift its priorities. What was once FDR's mission-driven project to lift up the Southeast from poverty shifted its focus to

building profit. There was no time or money anymore for cute little walkable towns where you learn how to farm and do ceramics. In this new chapter in TVA history, those social services were the first to fall away. It was impossible to justify the other programs. It was impossible to justify the farm programs, even things like the ceramics laboratory, the library. All of that just seemed, it was impossible to justify the farm programs, even things like the ceramics laboratory, the library, all of that just seemed, it just fell by the wayside because TVA had to be so focused on money now and actually act more like a corporation, right? I think this is the period where TVA went from being this quasi-governmental corporation

to basically a true and true corporation. And it morphed into a power giant because it had to really care about money, unlike it had before. Over time, the TVA began pumping out electricity, producing large quantities of coal-powered electricity throughout the valley. Then they started plotting a transition to nuclear power.

In the late 60s, the government starts passing this first big wave of environmental laws. And TVA feels the pressure of this. So they decide that it's going to build seven jumbo nuclear power plants with 17 nuclear reactors. In 1965, the TVA announced plans for its first nuclear plant. A Knoxville newspaper headline read, nuclear roars at King Cole. But it's almost a disaster right from the beginning.

There's a well-documented record of TVA's nuclear projects running far behind schedule, far over budget, and many times being abandoned altogether. Of the seven nuclear power plants TVA had intended to build, only three of them were completed. Plans to build the rest fell away after the TVA amassed $10 billion in debt because of their nuclear endeavors.

And then in 1975, TVA's first nuclear plant in Browns Ferry, Alabama, accidentally caught on fire. There was an electrician looking for an air leak like in a pipe or something, and he's using a lit match to find the air leaks. I'm not an electrician looking for an air leak, like in a pipe or something, and he's using a lit match to find the air leaks. I'm not an electrician, I won't pretend to understand how a lit match will help you find an air leak in a pipe,

but it catches this whole huge area on fire and it forces an emergency shutdown at the plant and causes millions of dollars of damages. So that's like the most noteworthy safety issue, but there was tons of other small issues. Even though nuclear power is cleaner than coal, it's a lot more expensive to implement. The TVA didn't have the money to really invest in this experiment. And its initial nuclear failures, along with other well-known nuclear disasters like Three Mile Island,

mired public perception of nuclear power's potential to pivot to cleaner energy. Throughout the 1980s, the TVA cancelled or put on hold many of these nuclear projects. Some exist today only as blueprints, while others are fragments of concrete and metal that dot the landscape of the Tennessee Valley. The nuclear fiasco has left TVA with a total debt of nearly $20 billion. All of this also meant that the TVA was still heavily relying on coal to produce its power. So TVA wanted to get off coal, it just couldn't. But it was still effectively hooked on coal and would be for the next several decades.

And that is really where my book picks up. It's after decades of TVA burning coal and not being able to get off of it. After the break, I talk with Jared about one of the consequences of TVA's decision to stick with coal, that billion gallon toxic sludge eruption at the Kingston Coal Plant in Tennessee. I'm back with Jared Sullivan. So your book largely centers on one particular coal power plant that's run by TVA. It's the Kingston Fossil Plant in Kingston, Tennessee.

Tell me about this plant. The Kingston Fossil Plant was built in 1954, or rather it went online for the first time in 1954. It creates enough electricity to power 700,000 homes. It is a jumbo jumbo facility, and it sits at the confluence of two rivers, the Clinch and the Emory.

And so in 2008, a billion gallons of this substance called coal ash bursts out of this power plant. What is coal ash? Coal ash is kind of this, it's like the stuff that's left over after you burn coal to produce electricity. It's almost like if you have like a charcoal barbecue, it's like the sooty stuff that's left over afterwards, like in the bottom of it. So what has been the typical system or protocol that coal power plant operators use in terms of managing or disposing of this coal ash?

The standard practice for every power company, not just TVA, was just to dig a big hole in the ground and dump all your coal ash there. They call it a pond, this coal ash pond, but the name is not accurate. It's not a pond. This thing grows into a mountain effectively. It's six stories tall and 84 acres. These I should say, there's 750 of these things across the country. This is not just a TVA problem.

And almost all of these ponds leak toxins into the groundwater. They are a huge, huge mess. In Kingston, this mountain of coal ash was just a part of the landscape near the power plant. The TVA had covered it with a layer of clay, which allows grasses to grow on top. So to the unfamiliar eye, it could have just looked like a grassy hill. People would do their regular morning runs up and down this mound. Okay, so walk me through what happened at this Kingston plant in 2008 when this mountain of coal ash burst free. This wave of sludge slams into a peninsula. Half it kind of hits this peninsula and it

kind of forks right and fills in this deep channel in this river, the Emory River. And the rest of it slams into this peninsula and knocks homes off their foundation. It hurls fish onto the riverbank. It knocks down power lines. It's almost like something out of the Bible. This was in the middle of the night. At first, people living nearby thought it might be an earthquake or a landslide. The whole earth felt like it was rumbling and trembling.

And so I talked to one local who, you know, he looked out of his window and saw a black wave just rolling across his yard. One home in particular was shoved, I think it was like 60 feet off its foundation and thrust against this embankment and basically collapsed in on itself. One woman describes watching as dark sludge, like wet, soupy sludge, came in under her door and started filling up her sunroom and her living room, which again is like something almost out of like a horror movie, you know? While the disaster itself didn't result in a big loss of life, the real problems took place during the cleanup.

It's 2008. The economy is on its knees. The housing market and the stock market have just collapsed. TVA hired 900 people from across the country to come clean up the disaster. So as these union reps start calling to get people to come clean this up, many of these workers, blue collar workers, are delighted to get people to come clean this up. Many of these workers, blue collar workers, are delighted to get this call. They know this is a huge environmental disaster,

but it's kind of a godsend for them. What they didn't know was that this job came at a huge cost to their health. And turns out these workers had asked for respirators and dust masks throughout the cleanup, and in most cases were not given them. And so they had inhaled this coal ash sludge, and coal ash contains arsenic and radium and mercury,

and just stuff you really do not want in your body at all. I mean, I found documents going back to 1964 that show that TVA has known this stuff is hazardous, is toxic. I mean, this puts them in a real conundrum, because everyone knows that this spill was bad enough that they had to clean it up, but TVA kept insisting that the sludge

wasn't actually toxic. Could you describe what's going on there? TVA did not want to upset the community. I think it would have been really troubling for the community if the workers were out there stomping around in head-to-toe hazmat suits and dust masks and respirators. So instead, TVA comes out and they basically tell the public, this stuff poses no significant health risk.

Basically, don't worry about it. And they say this over and over and over. Another sort of trap that these workers are in is that it's extremely hot. And so if they were to be in head to toe hazmat gear, not only would it look bad and make TVA look bad, it would mean they'd have to take even more precautions for the workers because wearing a hazmat suit in 95 degree weather means that they can't work as much or as hard and they have to provide cooling

and all kinds of other stuff. Yes, exactly. So the EPA gave TVA pretty tight deadlines to clean this stuff up. And if Jacob's engineering, the subcontractor in TVA gave the workers dust masks, yes, they would need to take more breaks. And that would mean they would have to leave the job site, get on a shuttle or some kind of bus, take it to a break area, de-robe, take their break, put all their gear back on again, then take a shuttle back to the job site. And it would have slowed the whole process up. And I think there's very compelling evidence that TVA said,

this can't happen. Like this is, we can't take this much time with this protective gear, or we just not going to hit our deadlines and the EPA is going to fine us hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars if we're slow. One TVA contractor told workers that they could eat a pound of coal ash a day and be fine. But things weren't fine. Many workers started to feel sick after the first few months of cleanup,

but they chalked it up to being overworked or lack of sleep. Things got much worse over time. And these workers start, they start passing on their trucks, they start coughing up blood, then the cancer diagnosis has come, you know, not long after that. Eventually, with the help of a local lawyer, hundreds of these workers gathered together to sue TVA and their subcontractor, Jacobs Engineering, for not giving them the appropriate hazmat gear to protect their health. But the lawsuit proved very difficult, and there were many hurdles to overcome. One of the biggest problems was that a judge ruled that because Jacobs was acting on behalf

of the TVA, they couldn't be sued. This is because the TVA, even though it operates like a private company, is still owned by the federal government. It grants them something called sovereign immunity. Sovereign immunity protects TVA and many other government agencies from a whole lot of lawsuits.

Not every single lawsuit, but it grants them broad protections. I think the simplest way to think about it is if the government or one of his contractors is acting in good faith, like they're trying to follow the letter of the law and acting in the government's interest, they are protected by the law. So after all this litigation,

this like all centering around the people that are cleanup crews and how they were exposed to this. Cole Ash, what ended up happening? So after 10 brutal years of litigation where the case gets basically thrown out twice, the lawyers save it on appeal twice, the workers have to, they have to capitulate. They're getting so sick and they're getting

also just exhausted of 10 years of this big question hanging over their heads. Are we going to get any money to cover our medical bills? Eventually in 2022, a federal appeals court ruled that Jacobs Engineering was not entitled to the sovereign immunity granted to the TVA and the 230 workers settled for $77.5 million. That works out to a couple hundred thousand dollars per person. But some workers didn't survive to receive the settlement. They were not pleased, but that's what often happens in these sorts of big environmental tort cases. I talk a lot in my book about Exxon Valdez. There's a lot of parallels between the

Exxon Valdez case and the case I write about in my book because it's the same playbook. You drag things out until people get so desperate that they have to more or less take whatever offer you give them. And that's what happened to these workers. So what's the status of the Kingston coal plant now? It is still up and running at this moment. I believe the intent is to convert it into a natural gas facility.

TVA over the past 10 years, basically ever since the Kingston disaster, has been gradually phasing out its coal plants and turning its coal plants at these same sites, building natural gas facilities. In 2015, the government passed a new set of laws. These laws mandated that the TVA had to monitor its active coal ash dump sites to make sure that coal ash wasn't contaminating the groundwater. But there's a major loophole here. Most coal ash sites across the US aren't actively used.

There are still many giant holes in the ground filled with coal ash across the country, but the power plants they're connected to aren't operating. These sites do not need to be regulated. Yeah, so earlier this year, the EPA under President Biden finally passed a rule that required power companies to monitor their legacy or old coal ash ponds and to remediate or clean up any contamination that they found. The problem with this is that the power companies self-regulate under these rules. You can read my book and judge for yourself whether you trust power companies to be honest

about whether their coal ash ponds are contaminated in groundwater. I for one would rather have EPA people on staff independently testing these sites. Studies have found that of the 750 coal ash ponds across the country, almost all of them contaminate groundwater. They contaminate thousands of miles of American rivers and the drinking water of millions each year. I think a lot of people in bad faith could go, well, you know, the TVA is the real problem here.

But I sense some reluctance on your part to vilify the TVA because of its rich history of acting on behalf of people for decades and then becoming this corporate entity that caused a lot of harm. Could you talk about your ambivalence about the TVA and how you want its legacy to be presented to today's world? I do not want to burn TVA to the ground. Okay. Some people do. Yeah. I do not. My book is very critical of TVA because it has made some horrible missteps over the years. made some horrible missteps over the years.

And I think what happened at Kingston is an American tragedy. The Kingston disaster was a huge black eye for the organization, but we need TVA to be great. We need them to produce abundant clean power, you know, so we can hit our climate goals. And so we can continue to have industry here. South is still lags the rest of the country in income and whatnot.

And I wrote a very critical book of TVA in hopes that TVA can be reformed and can recapture some of the FDR-era magic that it had. Well, it's clear that these dirty coal plants make people sick and TVA knows this. So could there be a way for TVA to try again with nuclear power like they did in the 1960s and 70s, but this time without the failures? Like I'm just curious about what could be possible with nuclear power and how our clean energy landscape would look today if the government had fully invested in that path back then.

The problem with, okay, I mentioned the seven nuclear power plants that TVA wanted to build. It only completed three of them. But as a result of that, it is billions of dollars in debt, $20 billion in debt, actually. Well it has a, there's a cap on how much debt TVA can take on. It's $30 billion. So it only has $10 billion of wiggle room to build more stuff. Well nuclear power plants cost more than $10 billion. So TVA is in a tight spot right now where it actually is trying to decarbonize because

I think it sees, because of the Kingston disaster and other such missteps, it knows that coal is not the future. It knows it needs to get off fossil fuels, but it really can't. It is an American tragedy that TVA did not build those seven nuclear power plants. Now this region, the Sun Belt, is exploding in population and we need those nuclear power plants more than ever. Yeah, to me, the sort of the original sin of it is the 1959 act to make it self-sufficient

and act like a corporation. I mean, I firmly believe that anyone who believes that the government should be run like a business doesn't know anything about government or business. You know, like that's not how things work. That's totally my view. We have to hope that lawmakers outside the Tennessee Valley nudge it in the right direction. Yeah. Well, what it needs to, I mean, to me,

what it needs to do to work is it needs to be run the way it was designed to run, which is a socialist organization. Like, I mean, that's really, it's the source of the conundrum, is that it is a thing designed to do a thing that is not allowed to do that thing it was designed to do.

Exactly. I'm kind of like a classic New Deal Democrat. And so I actually have a TVA electricity for all baseball cap that I wear. So can I wear this with pride? Like do you, when you think of like, what does TVA mean to you and would it be okay for a progressive like me to wear a TVA hat? TVA was born of such noble intentions,

but all of the rest of the stuff that comes after World War II is, that's the messy part. As much as I am rooting for TVA, I would not wear a TVA hat. The day TVA finishes its seven nuclear power plants, I'll probably wear a TVA hat again. Yeah, yeah.

Jared, thank you so much for the book. I loved reading it and thank you so much for talking with us. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you for having me. This was such a treat. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Lash Madon, edited by Nina Potuck, mixed by Martin Gonzalez, music by Swan Riau. Special thanks this week to Jared Sullivan, author of Valley So Low, One Lawyer's Fight

for Justice in the Wake of America's Great Coal great coal catastrophe. It is a really good fun read. If you like those John Grissom style like legal thrillers, this is right up your alley. Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kolstad is the digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Barrupe, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Ley, Joe Rosenberg, Gabriella Gladney, Kelly Prime, Jacob Medina Gleason, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% visible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.

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