In December 2008, three days before Christmas, a 60-foot wall collapsed at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston Fossil Plant. Over a billion gallons of coal ash slurry — a hundred times the volume of the Exxon Valdez spill — surged into the Emory River and buried 300 acres of East Tennessee. It was, and remains, the largest industrial disaster in US history.

And most Americans have never heard of it.

For the first episode of TALKING TRASH, host and journalist Matt King digs into the Kingston disaster. He speaks with Jared Sullivan, author of Valley So Low — the definitive account of the disaster cleanup and legal fight that followed; Dr. Lisa East, an environmental sociologist at UT-Knoxville who taught about the disaster to students for over a decade; and Wes Bunch ...