Book Review: ‘Valley So Low,’ by Jared Sullivan

VALLEY SO LOW: One Lawyer’s Fight for Justice in the Wake of America’s Great Coal Catastrophe, by Jared Sullivan

A concise summary of Jared Sullivan’s “Valley So Low” is offered halfway through the book by its hero, Jim Scott, a plain-talking, suspender-wearing, Skittles-addicted plaintiff’s lawyer: “They had a toxic tub of goop, and it blew up.”

“They” are the Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation’s largest public utility. The “goop” is coal ash, the residual soot after coal is burned for electricity. Soot might not sound so bad (one pictures a burned-out campfire). But this coal ash contained arsenic, iron oxide, aluminum oxide, selenium, cadmium, boron and thallium, what Scott called “a Long Island iced tea of poison.” As for the “tub” …

The tub began as a spring-fed swimming hole. It stood near the site of the T.V.A.’s Kingston Fossil Plant, which, when it was completed in 1954, was the world’s largest coal-fired power station. Every day the plant burned enough coal to power 700,000 homes and produce a thousand tons of ash. The T.V.A. dumped much of that ash into the swimming hole. Over decades there rose from that pond, like a zombie crawling from a tomb, an ashy colossus. It broadened into a mountain range of coal slurry, sprawling across 84 acres — until, on the morning of Dec. 22, 2008, it collapsed.

A 50-foot-high tsunami of poisonous sludge buried docks and homes and soccer fields beneath mounds of coal ash as high as six feet. By volume, it was the largest industrial disaster in U.S. history, a hundred times the scale of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. But for years most of its victims believed themselves unharmed.

Anyone with a passing knowledge of Chernobyl, Deepwater Horizon or the World Trade Center cleanup will not be surprised by what happened next. The T.V.A. announced that exposure to the ash did not pose a “significant” health concern, but nevertheless barred journalists, lawyers, environmental groups and scientists from visiting the site. Workers were warned, under threat of termination, against wearing dust masks and hazmat suits, lest local residents grow alarmed.

One safety officer told his charges that they could eat a pound of ash a day and “be fine.” Incriminating air-monitoring data was ignored, manipulated or tossed out. Before long the workers, and the wives and mothers who cleaned their clothing, began feeling dizzy, having nosebleeds and coughing up “strange black jelly.” Later they discovered that the Kingston ash was not merely toxic. It was radioactive.

There is a grinding predictability to stories of industrial disaster, particularly when it comes to the behavior of the institutions responsible. Jared Sullivan, in his scrupulous account of the aftermath of the Kingston disaster, had not only to dramatize a convoluted series of abstruse, drawn-out legal cases. He also had to contend with his villains’ shameless lack of originality. The T.V.A. and the firm it hired to clean up its mess, Jacobs Engineering, played their assigned roles with great dedication. Nearly every strategic decision they made, Sullivan suggests, seemed calculated to be “cartoonishly wicked.”

While T.V.A. spokespeople urged the public to remain calm and downplayed the extent of the spill, internal communications revealed an institution adrift in confusion and incompetence. “This is unbelievable,” one employee says, despite decades of warnings. “We did not expect this.” The T.V.A. hired white-shoe law firms to force costly trials, refusing settlements and pursuing every delay tactic possible while the plaintiffs began to die off. Meanwhile, the T.V.A.’s chief executive — at one point the nation’s highest-paid federal employee — gave a speech declaring, “We’re going to clean it up, we’re going to clean it up right.”

Standing against the corporate-federal behemoth is a gaggle of interchangeable middle-aged personal-injury lawyers in cheap suits and cowboy boots who spit tobacco juice into their office wastebaskets. Chief among these is Scott, whose single-minded dedication to the case starves his personal relationships, destroys his marriage and nearly kills him.

To these familiar elements Sullivan brings a maximalist, punctilious approach. Although he did not arrive at the scene until 2018, he reconstructs the events of the previous decade, and the lives of his large cast of characters, with dutiful, and at times grueling, precision. “Valley So Low” is a legal procedural in which seemingly no deposition, policy brief, pretrial motion, post-trial hearing, cross or recross, direct or redirect, has been excluded. We don’t just read about the trial’s interminable delays: We feel them.

The book resolves the way these stories often do: Legal victories and payouts, when they finally come, are partial and overdue. Victorious lawyers question whether their lump fees were worth a decade of heartburn and heartache. Survivors try to tell themselves that their triumph will ensure “that this doesn’t happen again.” And the reptilian villains slough off their old skin for a new one. Jacobs Engineering, with enviable gumption, has renamed itself “Jacobs Solutions.”

Hundreds of American coal-powered stations have shuttered since the Kingston disaster, and under President Biden, the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of coal-ash dump sites, first announced by the Obama administration in 2015, has become more stringent. But their legacy lives on: in the cancers of coal country residents, the air that tastes of aluminum foil, the pine trees drained of their colors, the riverbeds of radioactive sludge, the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide and on the consciences of those who continue to say, This is unbelievable. We did not expect this.

VALLEY SO LOW: One Lawyer’s Fight for Justice in the Wake of America’s Great Coal Catastrophe | By Jared Sullivan | Knopf | 366 pp. | $30