WASTEWATER STORAGE PLANS IRK AREA RESIDENTS
Some residents continue to oppose the city’s plan to relieve sewage overflows near Hixson Pike.
Ron McGill and Carrie Grimmett stood outside City Hall on Monday, hoisting signs declaring their disapproval of a proposal to build two wet-weather wastewater holding tanks. They planned to be out protesting today, as well.
Chattanooga’s wastewater system has experienced flooding after heavy rainfall for years, causing wastewater to overflow into streets and and yards of area neighborhoods. A proposed holding tank will support a nearby sewage pump station located on Memphis Drive, just west of Dupont Parkway. Another holding tank is proposed for Lupton Drive.
“I live beside this disaster,” Ronnie McGill told the Times Free Press earlier this month. “I’m just a common man. I’ve dealt with this thing for 25 years, and now you’re going to put this holding tank beside my house.”
He and other residents have been voicing their opposition to the DuPont storage tank at Chattanooga City Council meetings since last month, with some calling for the tank to be placed on the other side of DuPont Parkway, near McKamey Animal Shelter.
But Justin Holland, administrator for Chattanooga’s Department of Public Works, said moving the tank to another location would cost millions of dollars in additional funding.
“It’s going to cost another $1 million or $2 million, so what?” McGill said. “It should have been put there to begin with.”
Council Chairman Jerry Mitchell said at a Chattanooga-Hamilton County Regional Planning Commission meeting on the Lupton Drive tank that the process for public input on the placement of the storage tanks is “terrible,” because plans are taken to the planning panel before community input is sought.
The proposed Lupton Drive holding tank will hold 7 million gallons of sewage. The one near DuPont Parkway is a bit bigger, with a 7.5 milliongallon capacity.
Both the DuPont Parkway and Lupton Drive holding tanks are part of the city’s long-term consent decree agreement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The agreement was arrived at in 2012 because the city’s aging sewer system — with some lines dating back to the 1890s — is ill-equipped to handle the 26 billion gallons of sewage that flow through it each year. With heavy rain sending storm water into the sewage lines in some places, the overflow sends hundreds of thousands of gallons of raw sewage into the Tennessee River each year.