CHAPTER 4

A Celebration of Muir Turns Toxic

As crude a weapon as the cave man’s club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life.

—Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

Kingston, Tennessee — I leave Mammoth Cave a bit confused and depressed, but eager to get back on the Muir trail. My mood instantly lifts. Route 90, which starts at Cave City and runs east to Burkesville, is also known as . . . the John Muir Highway. Green-and-white roadside signs attest to the very fact. Local business leaders, casting about in the 1990s for an outdoorsy marketing gambit, convinced Kentucky legislators to officially rename a thirty-five-mile stretch of blacktop in honor of the famed naturalist, who most likely trod the same path. Dick Shore, the Muir impersonator, told me he dressed up in character and “prostituted” himself at various schools and libraries in south-central Kentucky to lobby for the official designation.

Not only am I traveling the supposed same, and same-name, route as Muir, but I’m headed to the second annual Muir Fest in Kingston. That same entrepreneurial pluck that convinced legislators to rename a rural byway in Kentucky also rouses tourism-minded county officials over the border in Tennessee. The event is billed as an “Americana Music & Preservation Festival” with bluegrass bands, conservation-minded speakers, paddle-boarding, and handmade ice cream. And, bonus attraction: one thousand baby sturgeon will be released into the Clinch River.

It’s a cloudless and warm September morning, similar to what Muir experienced. Once past bustling Glasgow, whose Scottish roots must’ve pleased Muir, the highway rolls through cow pastures, tobacco fields with weathered barns, and crossroads communities with churches offering varying degrees of Baptist religion. A sign reads, “You’re Always Welcome Back to Barren County.” Another says, “Jesus Is Coming.” At the town of Summer Shade, the road climbs from creek-bottomed valley to forested knobs. In Beaumont, a charcoal briquet factory hugs the highway. The road crosses the Cumberland River in Burkesville and meanders farther east before petering out near US 127 which, each August, joins The World’s Longest Yard Sale along its seven-hundred-mile route from Michigan to Alabama.

Muir was enraptured by the “deep green, bossy sea of waving, flowing hilltops.” He clipped, and chronicled, mistletoe, asters, heartworts, royal ferns, azaleas, and rhododendrons. Burkesville, he wrote in A Thousand-Mile Walk, was “embosomed in a glorious array of verdant flowing hills. The Cumberland must be a happy stream. I think I could enjoy traveling with it in the midst of such beauty all my life.”

Not all, though, was “Divine beauty” and “noble oaks.” Cotton, to Muir, was “a coarse, rough, straggling, unhappy looking plant.” Thorny flowers and brambles—“luxuriant tangles of brooding vines”—blocked his path and scratched his skin. “The South has plant fly-catchers,” he wrote. “It also has plant man-catchers.”

Nor was Muir immune to the region’s postwar poverty and despair, a condition biographer James B. Hunt likened to a “context of embitterment.” While Muir was ascending the Cumberland Mountains near the Tennessee line, a man on horseback overtook him and strongly persuaded the naturalist to give up his satchel. After rummaging through his belongings—comb, towel, underclothing, the New Testament—the would-be robber returned the bag. Later, a lodger near Jamestown dismissed Muir’s botanical research, insisting that “picking up blossoms doesn’t seem to be a man’s work at all in any kind of times.” The next day, Muir’s path was blocked by ten long-haired brigands weighing whether it was “worth while to rob me.” They let him pass, most likely due to the flowers and plants sticking out of his plant press that gave the impression of a poor herb doctor.

Muir’s delight with the countryside faded upon entering the small Tennessee towns. Jamestown was a “poor, rickety, thrice-dead village . . . an incredibly dreary place.” Montgomery was “a shabby village.” Philadelphia was “a very filthy village.” Of Kingston, all he wrote was of reaching the small town before dark and sending his plant collection by post to his brother in Wisconsin.

Fort Southwest Point sits atop a steep knoll where the Clinch meets the Tennessee River. Built in 1797 to house federal troops tasked with keeping the Cherokee in check along the frontier, the finely reconstructed fort with palisaded walls affords a sweeping view of the river valleys, the foothills dotted with smokestacks and wind turbines and the distant Smoky Mountains. Its parking lot is jam-packed, apparently filled with sturgeon lovers and Muir aficionados. I’m psyched. I’m also late, so I hustle to the fish-drop. I’m sweating by the time I reach the banks of the Clinch, where upwards of three hundred Tennesseans, about a third bedecked in bright orange UT shirts, ball caps, and onesies, wait patiently to plop six-inch lake sturgeon into the drink. Muir Fest is under way.

The sturgeon once ruled the Tennessee and other Southern and Midwestern rivers and lakes, growing to six feet and 275 pounds. They can live to be 150 years old. Their eggs, or roe, were prized by caviar lovers, which prompted their rapid demise the last century. Add dam-blocked rivers, polluted water, and sedimentation, and the sturgeon, listed as endangered by the state of Tennessee, didn’t stand a chance. The state’s last documented, indigenous sturgeon was recorded in Fort Loudoun Lake near Knoxville in 1960. But the Clean Water Act, and more ecologically sound dam management by the Tennessee Valley Authority, laid the groundwork for a sturgeon revival. Twenty years ago the Tennessee Aquarium, downriver in Chattanooga, began reintroducing sturgeon to the river. The aquarium and partners have released 200,000 sturgeon into the Tennessee and its tributaries, few with more fanfare than the 964 placed gently into the river by kids and parents during Muir Fest.

The crowd clears out quickly once the fish are dumped; the Volunteers have a noon kickoff against the University of Texas at El Paso. (They won 24–0.) I’m left to wander through the fort and handful of exhibits with only a few dozen festival-goers. I meet Steve Scarborough, a local businessman, blogger, kayak designer, environmentalist, and festival booster. He wears a straw hat and Clemson T-shirt and sips a beverage while waiting for the music to begin. Steve pushed for years to get Muir Fest off the ground as a way to introduce the wider world to the natural and recreational wonders of Kingston. He isn’t deterred by the low turnout of the second annual Muir Fest.

“It’s a new event. It hasn’t really found its market,” Steve says. “But what better patriarch to commemorate the outdoors can you have than John Muir? He can resurrect this town. Kingston should be on the map for a number of reasons. It’s fucking beautiful.”

I agree and move on. But something sticks in my craw. It isn’t just the poor turnout. It isn’t the swirl of ominous clouds in the east portending the arrival of a weakened Hurricane Florence. I can’t quite place my unease.

I climb to the top of the hill to check out the booths set up by a handful of nonprofits. I chat with Frank Jamison of the Cumberland Trails Conference, which is cobbling together a hiking trail across the Cumberland Plateau. We talk about overdevelopment, Muir’s popularity, wild and scenic rivers, invasive species, and the infamous snail darter that killed a Tennessee dam. What Frank says next stops me cold.

“You know about the coal ash spill, right?”

It finally hits me. Those towering smokestacks to the north—of course. Kingston is the site of one of the nation’s worst man-made environmental disasters. So much for my feel-good story.

The first call to the 911 dispatcher comes at 12:40 a.m. on the Sunday before Christmas 2008.

“I’m over at Swan Pond and there’s a heck of a mud slide or something that just came through our backyard,” the caller says.

A few minutes later, another call comes in.

“The power lines are down near Swan Pond Methodist Church.”

Then another: “My father lives up there and I can’t contact him.”

And another: “Can you tell me what’s going on?”

Ten minutes, and a handful of frantic, perplexing calls later, Roane County emergency dispatcher Thomas Walden figures enough out.

“The dike has failed,” he says. “That’s all I can tell you at this time.”

Chris Copeland, a firefighter who lives along an Emory River inlet, and his wife DeAnna are in bed, a white-noise machine humming, when a freight-train-like rumble jolts him awake. Maybe it’s the wind, Chris thinks. He looks out the window. It isn’t the wind. He sees trees floating up the cove. Waves, bigger than he’d ever seen before, push the trees forward. And the noise. The trees snapping in half sound like shots from an automatic rifle.

Chris walks downstairs past the Christmas tree, whose lights blink out, and outside into the cold. He can’t see much. Clear as day, though, flash the lights atop the thousand-foot smokestacks of the Kingston Fossil Plant.

He calls 911.

“We live in a cove back here and it’s full of mud. Everything’s gone,” Chris tells the dispatcher. “I don’t even know where it came from.”

A minute or two later, he calls back.

“I bet I know what it is,” Chris says. “The dike at the TVA is collapsed. It’s unbelievable.”

A fifty-seven-foot retaining wall at the TVA’s steam plant had crumbled, sending more than five million cubic yards of coal ash sludge into the Emory and Clinch Rivers, burying Swan Pond Creek and three hundred acres of land under as much as six feet of toxic muck. The black wave of slurry covered roads, toppled trees, caused a train wreck, and knocked out power, sewer, and gas lines. A few homes were destroyed; two dozen were damaged. Deer were buried alive; at least one dog died. Remarkably, nobody was hurt or killed.

It was the largest industrial spill in US history. The ash contained arsenic, mercury, lead, zinc, beryllium, cadmium, and chromium. The heavy metals, if eaten, drunk, or inhaled, can cause cancer and ruin the nervous system. They can also damage the heart, lungs, and kidneys, as well as lead to gastrointestinal illnesses and birth defects.

Kingston was just the most tragic example of an industrial contagion plaguing the South, the region of the country most at the mercy of penny-pinching corporations, development-hungry politicians, and job-hungry citizens. Forty percent of the South’s electricity comes from coal, so, not surprisingly, the region is home to the highest concentration of coal ash dump sites in the country. The Southern Environmental Law Center reports that nearly every major Southeastern river has one or more unlined and leaking ash lagoons on its banks. Coal ash is the twenty-first-century version of DDT, a deadly chemical that nearly wiped out the bald eagle until its toxic ills were documented by Rachel Carson and Congress banned its use. Utilities, though, continue to produce millions of tons of coal ash and people continue to get sick.

Tennessee fined the TVA $11.5 million. The utility spent more than a billion dollars scooping up the muck and prettifying the area. It also encircled the coal ash landfill with a seventy-foot retaining wall. Yet little was done in the aftermath of the Kingston spill to regulate coal ash. So, sure enough, six years later, on Super Bowl Sunday, more than fifty thousand tons of coal ash and twenty-seven million gallons of tainted water leaked into the Dan River near Eden, North Carolina. Seventy miles of river bottom were coated with toxic sludge. It was the nation’s third-worst coal ash spill.

The Obama administration finally mandated that all ash ponds be inspected for structural stability, and that leaking sites—utilities were legally and illegally dumping a billion pounds of chemicals and heavy metals into waterways each year—be cleaned up. Groundwater monitoring systems were also mandated. Environmental groups and the coal industry both sued, the former claiming the rules were too lenient, the latter too stringent. SELC, the Sierra Club, and others were appalled that the EPA failed to classify coal ash as hazardous, a victory for coal companies and utilities.

The TVA and its contractor shipped trainload after trainload of dried, yet still-toxic ash—enough to fill the Empire State Building two and a half times—three hundred miles south to Uniontown, Alabama, where 90 percent of townsfolk are Black and half live below the poverty line. The massive Arrowhead landfill, which surrounds the town’s historic New Hope Cemetery, received four million cubic yards of the stuff. Residents soon complained of nosebleeds, breathing troubles, nerve damage, and cancers that they attributed to the coal ash. The transfer reeked of environmental racism whereby landfills, chemical plants, and refineries crop up alongside economically depressed, minority-heavy rural communities desperate for piddling tax revenues and low-paying jobs. Uniontown residents filed a civil rights complaint with the EPA alleging that Alabama’s environmental agency had unlawfully permitted the landfill. In 2018, the EPA rejected the claim.

Coal ash’s toxic legacy extends beyond lagoons and landfills. More than half of the coal ash produced each year is recycled as cement, drywall, roofing shingles, agricultural additives, or snow-dissolving cinders. It’s also a cheap alternative as a road-paving material. Before leaving the newspaper in 2017, I was working on an investigative piece on the widespread, yet little-known, practice of spreading recycled coal ash across miles of South Georgia roads. Rural transportation departments, with little money and miles of unpaved lanes, sought inexpensive ways to reduce their maintenance budgets. The Jacksonville Electric Authority, for example, was more than willing to sell or even just donate its treated ash, marketed as EZBase. Camden, Glynn, and Charlton Counties in southeast Georgia spread recycled ash on roads, golf course paths, parking lots, and fire stations. Complaints of headaches and breathing troubles ensued. The town of St. George bought 200,000 tons of EZBase to pave roads. Residents told me that the dried ash drifted into yards and homes, turning everything white and sickening family members. Jacksonville Electric agreed to move the remaining stockpiles of ash in St. George to a nearby landfill. I’ve always regretted not finishing that story.

Tommy Johnson, a self-described “country boy,” camped and fished for crappie and catfish in the shadows of the Kingston Steam Plant, once the largest coal-fired plant in the world. If he wasn’t fishing, he was hunting rabbits with beagles. Tommy didn’t hunt deer, though he tried once.

“I had him in my sites, but he walked off,” he recalls. “I couldn’t shoot him.”

His father pastored an AME Zion church in Rockwood, five miles down the interstate from Kingston. In high school he fell in love with a girl named Betty and took her to the prom. They went their separate ways after graduation.

“But that love never stopped for me,” Tommy says.

He went to work. If there was a major construction project in eastern Tennessee, Tommy was on it. Tellico Dam. Interstate 75. Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Phipps Bend Nuclear Plant. Interstate 24. He’d drive a dozer, a loader, a scraper. In between jobs, he cut tobacco, hauled hay, worked at a nursing home. He even helped build the coal ash ponds at the Kingston plant in the early eighties.

“I worked out there building the dikes up to the very top level,” Tommy remembers.

He returned to the steam plant in 2005 to build a pond to hold gypsum residue. (It leaked in 2010.) He was laid off three years later. But not before getting sick.

“I was diagnosed with a few things,” says Tommy, a salt-and-pepper Vandyke framing a worn, friendly face. “Diabetes. Breathing difficulties. Headaches. Rashes. But I never paid much attention to it.”

Tommy and Betty, who was divorced and raising a daughter, rekindled their love. They married in 1996, had three kids and bought the sixth house built in the Walker’s Reserve subdivision in West Knoxville. They live on a corner lot with a two-car garage and two American flags on the front porch. “Welcome To Our Home,” says the sign on the door.

I sat down at the kitchen table with Tommy and Betty to hear their stories of Kingston and coal ash. Family photos covered side tables, the mantle, the refrigerator. A still life of vases and pears hung over Tommy’s shoulder.

When the dike broke, a call went out for men and heavy machinery.

“I knew it was going to happen,” Tommy says. “I worked on top of that dike. There was rusty, slimy water running down the hill. We had told the general foreman what was happening. He came out, walked the area, and said it was just the pond relieving some pressure.”

His first job was to pump diesel fuel into the front-end loaders and backhoes scooping up the muck. Up to sixteen hours a day, six days a week in the cold or the heat, surrounded by heavy machinery kicking up sixty-foot-high dust devils of toxic fly ash which, when inhaled, lodged deep into his lungs. One day, Tommy fainted. Fell down. Sat there for a moment. Shook his head. Got up. And went back to work. Another time he fell hip-deep into a mess of wet ash.

Tommy spent eight years cleaning up Kingston, eventually doing what he does best, running the dozers, backhoes, and the mighty double-barrel scrapers. His health, though, worsened. In addition to the headaches and rashes, Tommy added coughing jags and weird bumps running up and down his back. He blacked out in church. Twice.

“In our church,” Tommy says, “you don’t sit around.”

“We praise the Lord in our church,” Betty adds.

He went to doctors. Diabetes, said one. Asthma, said another. He kept working.

“When you’re making thirty-four dollars an hour, with sixteen-hour days, and they’re telling you it’s safe enough to eat . . .”

TVA and Jacobs Engineering, the contractor hired to clean up the mess, insisted for years that coal ash wouldn’t harm the nine hundred cleanup workers. In 2009, a TVA official told 60 Minutes she would swim in the muck-filled Emory River. The top on-site safety officer repeatedly told workers they could eat a pound of fly ash daily without harm.

Jamie Satterfield, a reporter at the Knoxville News Sentinel who has done Pulitzer-worthy coverage of the spill and its aftermath, uncovered evidence showing that the EPA wanted workers to be protected with Tyvek suits and respirators. TVA and Jacobs pressured the agency into doing without. The workers were warned they’d be fired if they showed up on-site with protective gear; Jacobs didn’t want to alarm the public. One worker testified that his doctor insisted he wear a dust mask. He was fired. EPA also directed Jacobs to provide showers and changing rooms for workers at the end of their shifts. Instead, the contractor offered pans filled with water and brushes to clean boots. Vehicles, though, were a different matter. TVA built a million-dollar car wash to ensure that trucks were cleaned—twice—before leaving the work site. And on-site air monitors were altered or destroyed, employees said. Meanwhile, trailers for Jacobs employees were equipped with air-filtration systems.

Satterfield uncovered tests conducted by the TVA as far back as 1981 showing that its coal ash contained radioactive materials and heavy metals. She also unearthed documents detailing radium levels nearly twice the EPA’s maximum allowable limit during the cleanup.

Workers got sicker and sicker. The money, though, was too good to quit. It was the Great Recession, and Tommy was able pay off his house, buy a Chevy Silverado, take vacations with Betty. In 2015, the cleanup was finished. And so was Tommy.

“I would still be working if I could, but I had to retire,” he says, laboring to breathe. “I was just plain out of it. I was going through a lot of pain and a lot of sleepless nights. I had coughing spells that would last fifteen minutes.”

At sixty-nine, Tommy is a broken man. The list of ailments fills a notebook: diabetes; asthma; “dangerously high” potassium levels; chronically inflamed lungs; memory loss; disorientation; sleep apnea; blisters. His neuropathy is so bad “it feels like there’s a zipper underneath my skin and somebody’s pulling it.” He’s swollen to more than three hundred pounds due to excess fluids. He wears wide-fit Skechers and compression socks to prevent blood clots. He passes out any time, any place.

“I’ve got more doctors than I have friends, and they tell me I’ve got a lot going on in my body,” Tommy says, ruefully. “My health is gone. I don’t think I’ll ever get it back.”

In 2013, Tommy and dozens of cleanup workers sued Jacobs, claiming the contractor lied about the dangers of coal ash and failed to provide them with protective gear. The plaintiffs wanted Jacobs to cover their skyrocketing medical costs. A US District Court judge dismissed the suit a year later. New evidence, though, secured an appeal, and in 2018 jurors ruled that Jacobs’ actions endangered workers and that coal ash likely caused their illnesses. The judge ordered mediation. Jacobs offered a reported ten thousand dollars to each of the nearly two hundred plaintiffs, who roundly rejected the settlement offer. A trial for damages was supposed to start in 2021.

Meanwhile, the Knoxville News tallied four dozen dead and more than four hundred sickened by the coal ash cleanup. The longer the case drags on, and the more deaths, the angrier the survivors get.

“Angry ain’t the half of it, especially since TVA and Jacobs have been lying about it to us all along,” Betty says. “My husband is sick and four hundred other people are, too. And Jacobs is not taking responsibility for it killing people. Coal ash is a toxic chemical and they knew it and they did not tell these people. I am angry and willing to stay on the battlefield until we get what we need.”

In the South, we still build homes along coastlines, daring hurricanes and rising seas to destroy properties and lives. We still give away our precious groundwater to Big Ag, Big Industry, and Big Development, guaranteeing shortages when the droughts inevitably come. And we still allow the residue of coal-generated electricity to sit in leaky ponds and landfills, polluting our rivers and drinking water and, slowly, killing us. Study upon study has shown that coal ash is hazardous, but the federal government considers it no more harmful than household trash. In 2019, the Trump administration rolled back rules limiting the leaching of arsenic and other metals into groundwater. EPA, under the enlightened leadership of a former coal industry lobbyist, allowed power plants to continue dumping coal ash into unlined ponds for years to come. The agency also decided that cash-strapped, utility-dominated states know best how to dispose of coal ash.

How’d that turn out? Well, in North Carolina, after the disastrous Dan River spill, Duke Energy agreed to excavate eight relatively small ash ponds, yet balked at cleaning up six others. In 2020, following lawsuits by the Sierra Club, SELC, and others, as well as pressure from the state’s environmental agency, the nation’s largest utility agreed to dig up and transfer eighty million tons of wet ash to lined landfills or recycling facilities. The deal was touted as the largest coal ash cleanup in US history.

Duke and two other utilities had earlier agreed to rid South Carolina of all unlined coal ash dumps. Unfortunately, much of the Carolinas’ ash was trucked down Interstate 85 to a North Georgia landfill. Georgia imports more solid waste—mostly coal ash—than any of its Southern brethren. The ash comes from the Carolinas, Florida, and Puerto Rico, and molders in municipal and private landfills. Impoverished rural counties eagerly accept the paltry tipping fees. When the EPA allowed states to handle their own coal ash problems, Georgia jumped at the chance. Lauren “Bubba” McDonald Jr., who chairs the state’s utilities commission, said that Georgia should craft a plan suitable for Georgians and, by golly, that’s what we did. Georgia Power, the state’s largest utility, announced in 2016 that coal ash from sixteen ponds would be excavated. Its remaining thirteen ponds would be “closed in place,” some without plastic linings to keep toxic gunk from leaching into the groundwater. Environmental groups reported two years later that water near ten of the utility’s coal-fired plants was contaminated.

You’d think that if any state should get its coal ash house in order it’d be Tennessee. You’d be wrong. The state allows the TVA to investigate itself and decide if its coal ash contaminates the water and air. And then the TVA, in its best fox-guarding-the-henhouse routine, determines what should be done about it. At the time of the Kingston spill, the quasi-public utility that electrified a large swath of the rural South operated eight coal-fired plants. Today, thanks to nuclear power and an abundance of natural gas, the TVA runs four coal plants in Tennessee. All of them, though, have ash disposal problems and contaminate the Cumberland, Tennessee, and Clinch Rivers. The TVA agreed in 2019 to dig up twelve million tons of coal ash from an unlined, leaky pit at the Gallatin Fossil Plant near Nashville. The utility says it will close the Bull Run plant near Oak Ridge by 2023, but leave five million tons of coal ash sitting in an unlined pit alongside the Clinch River. (Meanwhile, the Biden administration is rolling back some of Trump’s coal-ash disposal rules.)

Tommy worries that Bull Run, a few miles from his house, is another Kingston with flimsy retaining walls waiting to blow.

“I should know,” he says. “I helped build them. That ash is not going to hold.”

Tommy doesn’t get out much these days. He might ride over to Kingston to get a haircut, but Betty worries he’ll have another spell and run off the road. He faithfully tries to make it to church, Believers Voice of Deliverance, where he’s a deacon, unless the swelling is too bad and he can’t get his shoes on. Somebody else cuts the grass. The golf clubs sit in a corner of the garage. Vacations long dreamed of—Maine, Yosemite, Route 66, an uncle in Kansas, the Green Bay Packers at Lambeau Field—look doubtful. He’s got seven grandkids who’ll never learn about hunting and fishing from their grandpa.

“He promised me the world and he can’t give me the world,” Betty says. “But I love my husband and will stay with him. It’s a blessing that we’ve got a good relationship and we can be understanding of each other. Jacobs took a lot from us, and our lives, but they can’t take everything. We won’t let them.”

They’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars on doctors, medicines, and emergency room visits. Medicare only covers so much. Their savings are gone.

“All I want is for them to take care of my bills,” Tommy says. “I know they can’t give me my life back.”

We’ve talked for three hours. Tommy’s worn out. He’d lost his train of thought, mid-sentence, and stares out the window at the rain falling softly. His eyes redden. He uncrosses his arms and rubs his eyes.

“I sit and think about what we’re going through, and then I look back at when we worked on the ash years ago and a whole lot of guys died,” Tommy says, ticking off the names of dead co-workers. “Jacobs knew it was hazardous. They knew all about it for years.”

I return to Kingston a year later and climb the steep hill to Bethel Cemetery, where Muir may have slept. Established in 1811, on land donated by a Cherokee chief named Riley, the cemetery is the final home of hardscrabble pioneers, soldiers from every American war, and riverboat captains whose tombstones are embossed with anchors and pilot’s wheels. It affords a grand view of the Clinch River and Fort Southwest Point, where Muir Fest—canceled due to lack of interest—was to have been held. Upriver sits the Kingston Fossil Plant, all gussied up with seven thousand new trees, a riverside park, and fishing piers. There’s no trace of the gray ash that washed over Swan Pond and swamped the Emory River. TVA, in a 2015 report, said the cleanup “is protective of human health and the environment (and) was completed to the maximum extent practicable.” The utility recently announced it will shutter the plant by 2033.

Yet the plant still burns fourteen thousand tons of coal daily and stores its toxic by-product in the lined landfill next door. More than five hundred thousand cubic yards of ash remain at the bottom of the Emory and Clinch Rivers.

A large white cross with black lettering that reads “First Responders Gave All” sits on a hillside across from the coal plant. Ansol Clark built the memorial in honor of the fifty or so workers who reportedly died cleaning up the toxic mess. Ansol, who worked alongside Tommy for years, was diagnosed with a rare type of blood cancer. He died in May 2021. Tommy was devastated. I ask Betty how he’s doing.

“Tommy has a few bad days,” she says, “but he is holding on to God’s hands.”