Susan Allen doesn’t remember exactly when her local attorney suggested that she speak with a personal injury lawyer, but she remembers her response well enough to sum it up with one word: “Whatever.”
Her indifference in that moment was only natural. Susan was still in shock from the news that Wade Walters – her son and the oldest of her two children – had died while working at Arkansas Nuclear One, a powerplant not far from her home in Russellville, Arkansas.
Susan’s personal attorney was a member of her church and among a core group of friends and family who grieved with her on that tragic day and in the days that followed. He also took the initiative and called Sach Oliver, the CEO and lead trial lawyer for the Oliver Law Firm.
By the end of the week, Sach made the two-hour trip from Rogers, Arkansas, to meet with Susan and her family. And during the drive he reflected on how he had learned that something terrible had happened at Nuclear One, not knowing anything about who had been injured or killed.
It was March 31, 2013, and Sach and his wife were visiting his mother for Easter Sunday services at the Salem United Methodist Church in rural Fulton County, Arkansas. They had their two young daughters with them, and the preacher interrupted the service with the news of an “incident” at the nuclear power plant.
The pastor had very few details, so the concerns spiked among the congregants, especially since many had friends and family who lived near or worked at the plant. And since the facility was only 160 miles away, there were real fears, thankfully unwarranted, that radiation might be drifting with the winds in their direction.
An incident? Sach thought. Is this Hiroshima stuff? Do I need to get my wife and my young children out of here?
By the time the news began spreading to places like Fulton County, Susan already was at St. Mary’s Hospital in Russellville awaiting word about her son. But she, too, had learned about the incident while at church.
In fact, she was scheduled to lead the service at the Russellville Christian Center, the church her father cofounded in 1977 and that she now pastors. By car, the church is only seven miles from Arkansas Nuclear One, and far less as the crows fly.
“I’m down there early, and I heard something like a sonic boom, but I didn’t think much about it,” Susan said. “Then I got a call from a lady in the church who said something had happened at the nuclear plant and it was bad. She said her daughter, who worked there, was okay but that other people were hurt.”
Susan knew Wade, a 24-year-old iron worker for Precision Surveillance Corporation, was at the plant that morning. Wade travelled the country for jobs, most of them in nuclear power facilities, and he had welcomed the project near his home, even if it meant working on Easter Sunday.
The facility had shut down one of its two reactors for maintenance, which included moving a 525-ton turbine generator stator so it could be replaced. The plan was to use a special crane to lift the stator, move it to the turbine deck of the building, and lower it onto a train rail that led to a nearby building where it would be refurbished and sold.
While a crane slowly moved the stator toward a train cart, the crew in charge realized they hadn’t accounted for a railing around the train bay that was in the way. Wade and his team came in that Sunday morning and removed the railing.
“They moved over into the safety area, and about that time all hell broke loose,” said Susan, who later saw photos of the scene and a security video of the incident. “That crane gave way. It became like a warzone. Those huge steel beams just looked like rubber bands snapping.”
Wade was killed and eight others in the plant were injured, but it was hours before Susan and her family learned that news. At first, she was told Wade had been injured and that she should go to the hospital. The lawn at the hospital was covered with friends, family, and co-workers of the people who had been on duty that day, and ambulances came and went for several hours, but none of them brought Wade. Then they called her into a small room for a conversation she’ll never forget.
“I’m the coroner,” a man told her. “Where do you want us to take the body?”
“Are you telling me my son is dead?” Susan said in surprise.
“You mean nobody’s told you?” the coroner said.
“No,” Susan said. “We’re waiting on some liaison from the nuclear plant. But he’s never come.”
A man in the corner of the room raised his hand. “That’s me,” he said.
That was it. No details about what happened. No condolences. Just a hand in the air and a couple of empty words.
That’s me?
Is that all!?
The world became a blur. No longer able to take care of her son, Susan said she remembers a strange but overwhelming compulsion to take care of his possessions.
Someone go to Wade’s house and gather up his gun collection, she said. Can someone get his truck? It’s a new truck.
“I mean, this is the first thing that came to my head,” Susan said. “And looking back, I’m like, I’m just crazy?”
Not crazy. Just in shock.
“I call shock God’s medicine,” she said in retrospect. “It’s a gift. I think it would kill you if you had to process it all at once. So the shock kind of carries you through the first few weeks. And I think God designed it where it eases off. So you process different things at different times, so to speak. It’s a process as the shock begins to wear off. But I’m thankful for it.”
Susan remembers when anger became part of the process. It was within a day or two of Wade’s death, and she was at home with family and friends when a television reporter began an update on the tragic events.
The group fell silent around the TV, especially when the reporter interviewed the site vice president for Entergy, the owner of the plant. Surely this man would have something to say about Wade, they thought.
“He was on there talking about how their main concern is taking care of the family,” Susan said. “We all just looked at each other because we had not heard from these people. And at that point, that’s when it turned to anger.”
Susan had questions but no answers: How did it happen? What do we do? How do we even start to get answers from these big corporations?
Still, she wasn’t thinking about lawsuits or liability or lawyers.
She was thinking about a wiry young boy who grew up hunting and fishing with a grandfather who taught him to rope cattle in rodeos while modeling godly manhood.
She was thinking about a “beefy” young man who loved working with his hands, who enjoyed lifting weights, and who was planning to compete in the Mr. Arkansas bodybuilding event.
She was thinking about the dinner she and her husband, Rusty Allen (Wade’s stepfather), had the Friday before Wade died – the three of them along with Susan’s daughter, Chelsy (Wade’s younger sister). The last super.
And she was thinking about a verse in the Bible, John 10:10 – “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full” (NIV) – and how she would teach from that verse a few days later when she stood in front of friends and family at her son’s funeral.
“I am not trained as a counselor by anything other than the hard road,” Susan said. “And I think differently than some religious people. John 10:10 has been a key verse for me. Through this verse, I do not feel like God killed my child. I do not feel like God allowed, in the permissive sense, for Wade to be killed. I do not blame God at all. I was raised not to say that, so that was never a temptation. I feel like it was human error. We live in a cursed world. Adam and Eve let the enemy in and there are weeds that come up in the garden before the carrots.”
Susan never sought vengeance for her son’s death, but she did want to know what happened to him – the full story – and she wanted whatever justice was due.
Vengeance she would leave to the Lord; for justice, she turned to Sach Oliver.
“The day I met Sach we were at my local attorney’s office and Sach drives up in a big pickup,” Susan said. “You know, just a country boy, a roper just like Wade. He was anything but your typical attorney. It was so easy to talk to him. He wasn’t just interested in the case. He was interested in our whole family.”
Because Wade wasn’t married and had no children, his next of kin were his sister and his parents – Susan and her ex-husband, Keith Walters. Sach agreed to represent them along with the other workers who were injured after the crane gave way. And within a few months of that first meeting, Sach and his team filed a wrongful death and permanent injury lawsuit on behalf of his clients.
Sach, as Susan soon discovered, wasn’t just a personable, caring good-old-boy country lawyer. He quickly impressed her with his creative approach to the case, his proactive efforts to learn Wade’s story and the details about what happened that fateful morning, and his team’s attention to detail in the preparation of the case. In short, she totally trusted Sach and his team, which, she points out, was especially critical in the first few weeks following Wade’s death.
“It was interesting to try to grieve and handle a loss while thinking about legal issues,” she said. “And that’s where you gotta trust your attorney because you’re not always thinking clearly.”
Susan said she appreciated that Sach and his team quickly gathered video of the scene at Arkansas Nuclear One, which not only preserved evidence but helped her have more closure. She also appreciated the documentaries Sach’s team put together with interviews of Wade’s friends, former teachers, and family members.
“Wade was very opinionated and very much a cowboy who didn’t always grace his words,” Susan said. “So hearing the respect that he had of the men who were interviewed made me feel good. I think as parents, we always kind of look at where we failed. Those documentaries really helped me see where we as a family succeeded. And I say we as a family because I by no means raised him by myself.”
While the video testimonies were uplifting for her, they also were useful in the case because Sach shared them with the defendants and their attorneys.
“Every other week he would have another part of the story for the documentary and send it to the defendants’ offices,” Susan said. “I mean, he just hammered on who Wade was. I feel like he just did a really excellent job of representing who Wade was as a person.”
Susan said Sach and his team gave her confidence by keeping her informed, preparing her for what to expect, and inviting her to sit in on depositions and attend mock trials.
“I had never been to a deposition,” she said. “They were pretty intense. It was very interesting to me. Plus, I got to hear the other side before we got to court. We also had mock trials. If we had gone to trial, it would have really helped prepare me emotionally, just seeing how the whole thing worked.”
Sach and his team also gave Susan and her family personal advice about things like how to prepare for a potential financial outcome.
“Before there was money from a settlement, Sach sat us down and told us to get a trust set up,” Susan said. “We decided in advance, based on his advice, how we would handle any money and how it would be divided. It was probably the smartest thing Sach had us do, because once there’s money, it can have a strange effect on people.”
Sach also introduced the family to financial advisors and accountants who set up investment accounts that would become the initial home for any financial outcomes and who would help them manage the money responsibly.
“It’s best to earn and learn, and you’re not earning and learning here,” she said. “You need someone to help, especially if you are like us. We were middle class. I was debt free before this ever happened, and I thank God that my dad had taught us so much wisdom financially. But we didn’t have a lot of money in savings or invested. We were just working hard and enjoying life.”
It’s not just your attorney that is important, Susan added, it’s also who your attorney has access to – lawyers, financials advisors, accountants, and negotiators, not to mention the team at Oliver Law that worked tirelessly on the case, usually behind the scenes.
“So it’s not just Sach,” she said. “It’s Sach’s connections. There’s this whole network of people protecting you. Most attorneys don’t care what you do with the money when you get it. So he kind of has it all. All the connections, which is great because I wouldn’t know where to start.”
Having an attorney the family could trust to look out for their interests, personal and legal, was essential, she said, to surviving such a long ordeal.
“That first day we met, Sach looked across the table and said, ‘Before this is over, you’re going to feel like we’re married. You’re gonna know about my kids. I’ll know about your kids,’” she said. “So I would say hire somebody you can live with, somebody who cares about more than just the case. I feel like I could call Sach tomorrow when he would talk me through anything.”
Sach and Susan talked frequently during the 11 years it took to settle the lawsuits.
“I don’t know that I could have gone through 11 years with the nice-shoe attorneys,” Susan said with a smile.
The first three or four years were hard, she said, and then the subcontractors began agreeing to settlements. The case against Entergy, however, dragged on. It appeared headed to trial in 2023, then the presiding judge retired. A new trial with a new judge was set for 2024 but a few weeks before that date arrived, Entergy agreed to settle out of court.
“My advice to somebody going through this is just throw away the calendar,” Susan said. “You’re in this to find out what happened and to get justice, and if that’s not your purpose then just don’t do it. Throw away the calendar because you don’t have control of that and the attorneys don’t have control of that. So they’ve got to be willing to hang in there too.”
As time and the case wore on, life continued with all of its typical highs and lows. Susan’s daughter, Chelsy, married P.J. Lyles and gave her grandchildren, while her father, Tom Underhill, passed away. Tom had been particularly close to Wade, especially in the years following Susan’s divorce when she and her ex-husband were going through personal challenges.
“My dad stepped into that role and taught my son everything he knew how to be a man,” Susan said. She paused reflectively. “A good man,” she added.
While life went onward, Susan and her family scheduled vacations around court hearings and seldom had a week pass when some aspect of the case didn’t impact what they were doing or how they were going about life.
“My daughter was very instrumental in keeping me in the fight,” she said, remembering a particular poem that Chelsy wrote for her on Mother’s Day 2018 titled “She Chose to Fight.” It was a great reminder, Susan said, of all the things they were fighting for – their community, justice, their sanity, her son, their family.
“One thing you have to remember when you’re going through all this is the rest of the family,” Susan said. “It’s really easy to get involved in the fight and forget that there are other people grieving around you. My parents. My daughter. I mean, she had never known life without Wade. So sometimes you just have to stop and take care of the living.”
The “living,” Susan said, needed to find places to relieve their pain, and they did through “acts of kindness” that honored Wade’s life—scholarships in his honor to a local Christian school and for the welding program at the University of Arkansas Community College at Morrilton, a bass fishing tournament with 100% payout to the fishermen, and “kindness” cards that Chelsy made for people to hand out when they did something selfless like paying for someone’s dry cleaning or their meal in the drive-through at a fast food restaurant.
“We gave out around 500 of those cards every year for several years,” Susan said. “The pain has to go somewhere, you know? You have to do something with it. We tried to find things Wade was passionate about.” Susan and Chelsy chose to set up a private foundation to support those passionate causes in their community. (The Wade Walters Foundation)
In the end, she said, she surrendered the pain and the results of the lawsuits to God.
“I had faith that win or lose this community was going to know what was in their backyard,” she said, “and that we needed some things to change.”
After an 11-year fight, Susan can’t say how much has changed within what she describes as the insulated culture of Arkansas Nuclear One, but she’s confident the ordeal resulted in much greater awareness about safety issues in her community and at all high-risk plants. She’s encouraged to know, for instance, that a friend’s husband who teaches safety courses in facilities around the country always begins with Wade’s story. It’s a story she never forgets and believes will live on with those who knew him and many who only knew of him.
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