Honoring the Kingston Coal Ash Cleanup Workers

The ash had to go somewhere. The EPA sent much of it about 300 miles south to the Arrowhead landfill at Uniontown, Alabama, a town that is 91 percent Black, where median household income was under a third of the national figure. Residents reported asthma, headaches and rashes after the shipments began and filed Civil Rights Act complaints; the EPA dismissed one in 2018. When four residents criticized the landfill on Facebook, its owner sued them for $30 million, then dropped the claim in a 2017 settlement. Kingston's cleanup finished in 2015 at about $1.13 billion.

What the plaque says

Honoring the Kingston Coal Ash Cleanup Workers On December 22, 2008, a dike ruptured at the Tennessee Valley authority's Kingston Fossil Plant, releasing more than one billion gallons of coal ash slurry into the Emory and Clinch Rivers and the surrounding area. Hundreds of workers spent six years cleaning up this spill, considered the largest in U. S. History. In 2018, a federal jury found TVA's cleanup contractor did not properly inform workers about the dangers of coal ash exposure and failed to provide necessary personal protective equipment. Continued: in December 2023, the Roane County Commission resolved that in each year December 22 will be a day of remembrance in honor of each worker's heroic sacrifice made to restore the condition of the impacted area. This marker serves to honor and memorialize all whose lives have been forever impacted by this tragic and devasting event.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Southwest Point State Historic Park — 4.0 mi
  A reconstructed 1797 federal fort on a knoll at the meeting of the Clinch and Tennessee rivers, headquarters of Cherokee agent Return J. Meigs, a state park since July 2026.
• Historic Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary — 14 mi
  The coal-mining prison opened in 1896 after the Coal Creek War ended convict leasing, where James Earl Ray escaped in 1977, now a tourist site and distillery.
• Frozen Head State Park — 15 mi
  A 24,000-acre Cumberland Mountains park around a 3,324-foot peak, made from Brushy Mountain prison lands and the CCC, and home to the Barkley Marathons.
• American Museum of Science and Energy — 16 mi
  The Oak Ridge museum that opened in 1949, when the Manhattan Project city's gates opened, in a town whose Black workers were housed in the Gamble Valley hutments.

More markers nearby

• Harriman: Utopia of Temperance — 2.5 mi
• Dixie Lee 1909-1952 — 2.5 mi
• Southwest Point — 2.9 mi
• Capitol for a Day — 3.1 mi