Ten years ago, environmental disaster struck Kingston, Tennessee. A dike containing massive amounts of coal waste burst, releasing 1.1 billion gallons of the heavy-metal sludge onto land and into waterways. It was the largest spill of coal ash slurry—a mixture of coal-burning byproduct and water—in United States history. The cleanup at the Kingston Fossil Plant took seven years.

Today, 30 of the laborers involved in the cleanup are dead. More than 250 are still sick. This isn’t a coincidence, they argue. The contractor they all worked for, Jacobs Engineering, “lied about the toxicity of coal ash, refused to provide them protective gear, threatened to fire them if they brought their own, [and] manipulated toxicity test results,” according to the workers’ lawsuit against the company.

On Wednesday, a federal jury ruled in the workers’ favor, finding that Jacobs Engineering “failed to ‘exercise reasonable care’ in keeping workers safe and, in its failures, likely caused the poisoning by coal ash of the laborers,” the Knoxville News-Sentinel reported. The verdict means the plaintiffs can seek monetary damages to cover medical testing and treatment of everyone who worked on the cleanup.

This is an important victory for those laborers and their families, albeit too late for some of them. But it also should serve as a warning to all Americans. The Trump administration is in the process of weakening the very regulations on coal ash that were put in place as a response to the spill in East Tennessee.

When power plants burn coal for energy, it creates coal ash. The waste typically contains a variety of heavy metals, anything from arsenic to selenium to chromium, depending on where the coal was mined. Exposure is therefore considered harmful to human health. Of the 110 million tons of coal ash produced in the U.S. every year, about half is recycled into construction materials. The rest is generally combined with water that’s stored in aging dikes and ponds.

