Chattanooga Times Free Press, Ian Berry
Published August 14, 2005
The massive task of clearing the former Volunteer Army Ammunition Plant site of decades of accumulated pollutants soon will pick up considerably as officials plan two projects that combined could cost more than $18 million.
The roughly 6,600-acre site, where the Army produced and stored TNT from World War II through the 1970s, is in the center of the county between state Highway 58 and Interstate 75. Cleanup of two key areas -- the TNT Manufacturing Area and the East Acid Area -- could start early next year, Army Command Representative Scott Bolton said. The public comment period for the project started in mid-July and ends Tuesday, he said.
"We're really starting to ramp up for the big-time remediation," Mr. Bolton said.
Enterprise South, the industrial park to which city and county officials hope to lure an auto manufacturing plant, will not be affected, although cleanup will take place on adjoining sites.
Timothy Woolheater, a senior remedial project manager with the Environmental Protection Agency in Atlanta, said 2010 is a likely completion date for cleanup of the VAAP site.
The larger of the two upcoming cleanup projects is the TNT Manufacturing Area, which is "currently overgrown with dense vegetation and has not been used for operations since 1975," according to a written summary of the plan. Beneath the kudzu, however, are large quantities of TNT, DNT, lead and arsenic, as well as other chemicals, according to records.
The Army's written plan states it considered three options for cleaning up the site. Officials decided on a plan to stabilize the soil and send it to a landfill, the only option that did not include bioremediation -- using microbes to consume and reduce the contamination.
Although it is the cheapest and quickest option of the three, it will take 40 months and an estimated $13.5 million to complete.
The other cleanup is at the East Acid Area, where the key pollutants are nitric acid and toluene. Among three cleanup options, one of which was to do nothing, the Army chose a plan to treat the soil on-site before disposal in a landfill. This option will take 19 to 23 months and cost $5.5 million, according to records.
Mr. Bolton said all of the cleanup is being paid for through federal taxpayers' money.
"If the environmental concerns intrinsically don't move you, the economics of it should," he said.
The two sites are among eight within the VAAP site that still need to be cleaned, Mr. Bolton said. Of those, the other remaining significant cleanup is of the groundwater across the whole property.
Steve Muffler, a consultant with Tetra Tech in Oak Ridge, Tenn., who is evaluating cleanup options for the groundwater, said there are explosives contaminating the soil that could leach into the groundwater, which runs north to south -- not west, toward the Enterprise South site.
He said it's clear that natural biodegredation can eliminate the explosives, but said it is unclear if that process could take five years or 500 years at VAAP.
"We're trying to get a handle on how much is there, and whether it's going to be there long-term," Mr. Muffler said.
Mr. Bolton said the site produced about 2.9 billion pounds of TNT during World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War.
Mr. Muffler said significant contamination from explosives exists in the bedrock as well, although Mr. Woolheater with the EPA disagreed. Mr. Muffler said the matter is unresolved.
"That's a conversation that will probably take a while, but we're working on it," Mr. Muffler said.
Mr. Muffler said a final report on the groundwater cleanup for the most contaminated areas would be issued late this year.
One item the Army has not tested for is perchlorate, a contaminant present at many military facilities and often used in rocket fuel. Testing for perchlorate has been a contentious issue elsewhere, especially in California. Some studies show the chemical affects the thyroid, although others say the science is inconclusive.
Mr. Bolton said there likely was perchlorate on the site several years ago when a private company, Raytheon, produced rockets at the site. He said the Army reviewed proprietary documents and spoke with former workers to determine there was no chance of contamination at the site.
But Bill Walker, a spokesman for the Environmental Working Group, a national group that has campaigned against the hazards of perchlorate, said the Army should go further.
The organization in 2003 placed VAAP on a list of 63 Department of Defense sites where "perchlorate testing is urgently needed."
"If it's a site where they know it was used, and they're dismissing the presence of it based on a paper investigation, that's not taking enough steps to protect the public's health," Mr. Walker said.
The federal Government Accountability Office issued a report to Congress earlier this year in which it said the Department of Defense should be more willing to test for perchlorate. There is no set standard for perchlorate levels, but the report states the Department of Defense often refused EPA or state requests to test for the chemical.
But Mr. Woolheater said perchlorate should not be a concern because it was always encapsulated when it was on the site. Nancy Frazier, the senior remediation manager for the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, also said it wasn't an issue.
Mr. Bolton said Raytheon simply took rocket motors, in which perchlorate was already sealed upon arrival, and placed them in air frames for missiles, before shipping them back out.
"We just don't have any reason to believe there's perchlorate on the site," he said.
