A riveting courtroom drama about the victims of one of the largest environmental disasters in U.S. history-and the country lawyer determined to challenge the notion that, in America, justice can be bought
For more than fifty years, a power plant in the small town of Kingston, Tennessee, burned fourteen thousand tons of coal a day, gradually creating a mountain of ashen waste sixty feet high and covering eighty-four acres, contained only by an earthen embankment. In 2008, just before Christmas, that embankment broke, unleashing a lethal wave of coal sludge that covered three hundred acres, damaged nearly thirty homes, and precipitating a cleanup effort that would cost more than a billion dollars-and the lives of more than fifty cleanup workers who inhaled the toxins it released.
Jim Scott, a local personal-injury lawyer, agreed to represent the workers after they began to fall ill. That meant doing legal battle against the...
