How Clean Is Green Chattanooga?

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Clean blue skies prevail over Enterprise South today, where the U.S. Army once belched, spilled and dredged pollutants into the environment at the largest TNT manufacturing facility in the world.
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"Deer!" is a common cheer uttered by passengers of cars passing through Enterprise South, along with less frequent cheers of "wild turkey!" "coyote!" and "fox!" Such wildlife sightings underscore a remarkable resiliency of the former Volunteer Army Ammunition Plant and its inhabitants. In spring and summer many sins of the past are completely overgrown by kudzu. Only with the onset of cold weather and resulting loss of foliage are automobile passengers reminded of the area's mysterious industrial past.

Starting in the 1940s, the VAAP became the world's largest manufacturer of TNT explosives. Production declined after World War II and the Korean War until it was finally decommissioned in 1977. It sat like a derelict in its own waste until a decade ago.

Chattanooga has been trying to market the massive acreage since then, first the Army contractor ICI Americas as the Volunteer Site and now Hamilton County and the City of Chattanooga as Enterprise South. The efforts have been largely unsuccessful, but some of that faltering has been deliberate. Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce Director of Marketing J.Ed. Marston has noted, "This is the last large undeveloped piece of land in Hamilton County. We only get one shot at developing it right."

Before the Army could sell the reservation to local governments, the Environmental Protection Agency required significant remediation of the chemical waste that had been carelessly mishandled during production of TNT. As a result, the transfer of ownership was incremental and the Army is still on the hook for remediation until around 2020 according to a 2004 Public Health Assessment.

Chattanooga's Cinderella story from "dirtiest city in America," a dubious honor bestowed by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1969, to one of America's ten greenest according to travel and environmental journalist Brian Goodspeed has been a model of public and private cooperation. Numerous other environmental and travel writers have also noted the remarkable transformation that has taken place in Chattanooga. Governments from American and overseas cities have sent delegations of observers to study progress of the new environmental emerald of the South.

Yet the recent loss of the Toyota assembly plant incited speculation that environmental issues were at least partially responsible. One of the earliest U.S. reports about Toyota's decision to locate in Tupelo, Mississippi, appeared in the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Writer Amos Maki asserted that "Air quality problems in and around Marion (AR) and Chattanooga opened the door for Tupelo."

State and local authorities then scrambled to deny that environmental issues factored into the decision to pass over Chattanooga. Bob Colby, Director of the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Air Pollution Control Bureau, addressed air concerns by insisting that "Chattanooga would not have even been considered as a site without a 2003 Early Action Compact that worked to achieve cleaner air by this year."

As a part of its preemptive efforts to meet EPA ground level ozone requirements for 2008, the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Air Pollution Control Bureau enacted a program labeled the Early Action Compact that included mandatory vehicle emissions testing and seasonal burning bans to reduce air pollution. The efforts reportedly put Chattanooga two years ahead of schedule and might forestall mandated draconian measures like industrial development limitations and use of specially blended fuels in cars and trucks.

Hamilton County Commissioner Bill Hullander addressed ground contamination or brown field concerns by stating, "An EPA study gave the site a clean bill of health and only a couple of places needed cleaning up. It wouldn't qualify it as a brown field."

Presumably Hullander's information is from an update of the aforementioned 2004 Public Health Assessment which listed 26 sites of potential locations of contamination ranging from debris, pesticides and acids to far more lethal toxins like vanadium pentoxide, asbestos and "a minor mustard gas release." Though he didn't claim that the cleanup had been completed, the significant progress from 26 sites to "a couple" apparently represents a significant acceleration ahead of the 2020 conclusion projected by that same report.

The most reassuring statement denying the significance of environmental issues, however, came from Toyota itself. Jim Press, President of Toyota North America, Inc., stated that air quality issues did not affect the Tennessee and Arkansas sites. "We were able to clear all of the goals in terms of environmental impact," Press said, as reported by the Associated Press. "The site in Tennessee, environmentally, was fine."