I’ve been thinking a lot about the Kingston coal ash disaster lately.

You might remember it — December 22, 2008. The containment pond at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) Kingston Fossil Plant failed and dumped an unfathomable amount of toxic coal ash into the Clinch River in Kingston, Tennessee. We’re talking about a tidal wave of gray sludge — the byproduct of burning coal — filled with arsenic, lead, and even radioactive material.

The story hits close to home for me. Deeply personal, you might say. . .

My father, Melvin Medema, helped build the first TVA dams back in the 1930s. Some of my family’s original land now lies beneath the water, buried under sandy silt, behind Norris Dam. I have cousins who’ve lived downstream from the Kingston plant since the 1940s. And I once owned riverfront property just a mile from where the spill happened.

So when I say this disaster feels personal, I mean it. It wasn’t just an environmental accident. It was a rupture in a long, complicated relationship between land, power, and the people who call this place home.

I recently read Valley So Low by Jared Sullivan, the lawyer who represented the cleanup workers in the litigation against the TVA. This book lays bare what happened after the spill. The cleanup dragged on for years. Workers were told the ash was basically harmless — like dirt. They were discouraged, sometimes even forbidden, from wearing protective hazmat gear. Meanwhile, day after day, they were breathing toxic dust.

And people paid for that.

At least 54 cleanup workers have died from exposure-related illnesses. More than 150 others have suffered serious health problems. Meanwhile, no executives went to jail. No one at the top was held to meaningful accountability.

The scale still shocks me. About 1.1 billion gallons of coal ash spilled — that is more than 100 times the volume of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Around 4 million tons of ash were hauled away in 41,000 rail cars and dumped in a landfill in a poor, predominantly Black community in Alabama. Cleanup took seven years and cost over a billion dollars.

Across the country, more than 700 coal ash ponds remain — many aging, many poorly regulated.

This isn’t ancient history. It’s a warning.

My friend, fellow Tennessean and bluegrass musician Daniel Kimbro, wrote a song called “Loyston” about how “progress” displaces people — farms, forests, entire towns. It’s a pattern that keeps repeating. It’s not just coal. It’s mining. Oil and gas. Fracking. Pipelines. Data centers. The same story over and over.

Profits first. People second.

I stepped back and began to see deeper problems. I’d trusted elected officials and regulatory agencies to protect the community from harm, but denial, greed, and negligence led to this mess. I fear that there will be more spills, oil pipeline ruptures, or industrial chemical spills.

Kingston was a preventable disaster — if its causes had been addressed. Regulations were weak. Coal ash wasn’t even classified as hazardous waste. The public was misled. Cleanup workers were told they were safe. Political money shaped policy. Gucci-shoed lobbyists framed environmental oversight as the “War on Coal.” Corporate contracts rewarded speed and cost cutting — not safety. Warning signs were ignored because “nothing bad happened before.” In the depths of the 2008 financial crisis, desperate men and women took dangerous jobs because they needed to feed their families.  

And in the end? No real accountability. Not a single TVA exec went to prison.

Some folks in East Tennessee started calling TVA an environmental bully.

What troubles me most is that this disaster wasn’t merely a regulatory failure. It was something deeper — a moral failure.

As Christians, we confess that Creation belongs to God. The Gospel of John (1:1-3) begins by reminding us that all things came into being through God. If that’s true, then treating Creation as disposable is not simply bad policy. It is spiritual blindness. When we dominate and exploit the earth, we inevitably end up dominating and exploiting people too.

“Creation care” isn’t some fringe slogan. It’s about right relationship — with God, with neighbor, with the land itself.

Now, almost two decades later, this story feels urgent again.

Energy policy is shifting. Under President Trump’s push for “energy dominance,” coal plants — including Kingston — are no longer scheduled to be decommissioned. Plans for a green energy transition at the site have been shelved. He’s doubling down on what one TVA official called “beautiful, clean coal.”

After Kingston, I can’t hear that phrase without flinching.

Coal-related catastrophes will happen again. Hundreds of aging and poorly monitored coal ash ponds are still out there. And when disaster strikes, it will likely be the poor and communities of color who will bear the heaviest burden — just as they have before. Wealthier, White communities have the resources and political clout to block bad environmental practice, the presence of power plants, and their toxic holding ponds.

Why does this still matter, 17 years later?

Because memory matters.
Because justice matters.
Because people matter.
Because God’s Creation is once again battered. 

And maybe because loving our neighbor sometimes starts by saying no to systems that treat both people and God’s Creation as expendable.

To flip the infamous words of coal industry champion Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky on their head, it is not a “War on Coal.” It is a war on human beings. The only solution that remains is to “Just Say No.”