The Environmental Journal of Southern Appalachia

Displaying items by tag: groundwater

Monday, 30 October 2023 12:25

Waste at Smokey Mountain Smelters finally sealed

EPA’s Peter Johnson addressed the cleanup efforts and some general ideas of what will come next in a recent YouTube video uploaded Monday, Oct. 23.
 

EPA consolidated toxic South Knoxville smelter refuse in single on-site landfill.

KNOXVILLE — The Smokey Mountain Smelters site is in the Vestal Community at 1508 Maryville Pike near Montgomery Village Apartments.

“We are excited to announce the cleanup at Smokey Mountain Smelters has been completed,” EPA remedial project manager Peter Johnson said.

From the 1920s through the 1960s, agricultural and chemical companies operated at the site before Smokey Mountain Smelters, also known as Rotary Furnace Inc., came to the location in 1979. The company melted scrap aluminum and aluminum dross together to cast the byproduct into aluminum bars. These operations continued until 1994.

Johnson has said in other talks the dross and saltcakes left over from the process react with water, releasing heat and ammonia gas. They leach aluminum, ammonia, chloride “and many other contaminants,” he said. Smokey Mountain Smelting’s toxins have flowed through groundwater into a tributary of Flenniken Branch, causing concerns about effects on fishing.

In 2010 the EPA placed the site on the Superfund program’s National Priorities List (NPL) because of contaminated soils, sediment and surface water resulting from past industrial operations at the site. The EPA did some cleanup work in 2010 and 2011.

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This story from ProPublica is shared via Hellbender Press under a Creative Commons license. Click here for the entire ProPublica story, including illustrations and photos. 

By Max Blau for Georgia Health News

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Series: Sunken CostsCoal Ash in Georgia

Mark Berry raised his right hand, pledging to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The bespectacled mechanical engineer took his seat inside the cherry-wood witness stand. He pulled his microphone close to his yellow bow tie and glanced left toward five of Georgia’s most influential elected officials. As one of Georgia Power’s top environmental lobbyists, Berry had a clear mission on that rainy day in April 2019: Convince those five energy regulators that the company’s customers should foot the bill for one of the most expensive toxic waste cleanup efforts in state history.

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