The Environmental Protection Agency knew the coal ash at the center of the nation's largest spill had dangerous levels of arsenic in it but ignored its own supervisor's recommendations on how to protect workers from it, documents say.
Records obtained by USA TODAY NETWORK -Tennessee in an ongoing series of stories about the treatment of blue-collar laborers who cleaned up the December 2008 disaster in Roane County show the EPA gave in to the demands of a global government contractor and the nation's largest electricity provider for less protection and safety standards for those workers.
Those records also revealed tests approved by the EPA and meant to keep workers from breathing in too much arsenic didn't focus on arsenic at all, and the EPA allowed testing to be abandoned entirely - at the height of the cleanup effort when fly ash was captured on film swirling all over the work site.
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