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For now, there’s talk of an Ocoee River road left largely
unharmed as big trucks move to a parallel track, either
north or south of the gorge, completing East Tennessee’s
stretch of Corridor K by 2013
By Tom Bennett
Special to the Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition
Benton,
Tenn., July 21, 2009 – The presidency of James K. Polk
in 1845-49 was a time of westward expansion, adding Texas
and parts of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New
Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.
Now the
county that is named for Polk here in East Tennessee is
trying for some expansion of its own, seeking to be the
locale for one of the last unfinished stretches of the
Appalachian Regional Commission’s Corridor K developmental
highway.
This latest
try to get it built either above or below the landmark Ocoee
River gorge here in Polk County entails, at least for now,
what has the makings of a change in the hearts and minds of
Tennessee manufacturers. Time will tell if it really is
genuine, or if what is being said is just the sort of
rhetoric you hear early on in a developmental project. I’m
talking about the agreeable period of non-confrontation
during the start-up when citizens are invested by the
authorities as stakeholders. The volunteers’ desires for
protection of the land and water turn up in the agencies’
show-and-tell, and citizen advocates appear to be getting
through to the manufacturers, contractors, local
governments, economic development directors and chambers of
commerce who are so desirous of the road. I hope that’s the
case.
Six years
ago, Tennesseans seemed so determined to get their goods out
faster to east coast ports, and in the process skirting
Atlanta or Knoxville, that their state DOT wrote a draft EIS
of Corridor K east to North Carolina that was nothing less
than an engineering Goliath.
That Sept.
2003 draft called for four four-lane tunnels and 30 bridges
through the Ocoee gorge, according to Rick Gehrke’s 2007
case study for his master’s thesis at the University of
Tennessee. (The latter is the best overview available on the
Internet, since the document itself has been taken off the
web and is now only a Tennessee highway artifact and nothing
more.)
“We don’t
want Earth First! to determine this route,” U.S. Rep. Zach
Wamp of Chattanooga told the Polk County News. “Outsiders
brought in from Timbuktu” are not going to stop it, he told
the Chattanooga Times Free Press. (Wamp has since declared
he is a candidate for the Republican nomination for
governor.)
Well, road
politics are nothing if not varied. Today’s public workshop
here at Polk County High to evaluate work so far by URS
Corp. of San Francisco on a Transportation Planning Report
showed how attitudes have changed.
“The tunnels
and bridges are gone,” said Wesley Hughen, Tennessee DOT’s
project manager. “We’ve scrapped them and we’re starting
over.”
Sort of like
NASA’s blind reliance on the computer “Hal” in Stanley
Kubrick’s motion picture “2001, a Space Odyssey,” Quantm is
being employed by TDOT and URS Corp. to do a better job than
people at calculating road paths through the Blue Ridge.
This software has drawn five swathes across Polk County
that you can see on the Internet soon – if TDOT Nashville
ever gets them posted in graphics clear and understandable.
Here they are:
A blue,
purple and mauve line goes south of the Gorge and crosses
Ocoee Lake. An orange line tracks north of the gorge from
Parksville Lake campground and then somehow along the steep
southern edge of Little Frog Wilderness. Finally, a gold
line makes a big loop north to Archville and then in a
sweeping dogleg right, completely around the Little Frog
Wilderness. (The mileage in this route – perhaps 15 to 20 in
all – would be the most by far, and that could make it the
choice of the winning mountaintop-removal mining bidder that
would dynamite out granite from a nearby peak to make the
roadbed.)
All of the
routes begin west of the gorge at the Ocoee River Bridge.
All end in the east at the intersection of U.S. 64 and
Tennessee 68. For now this bucolic junction in rural east
Tennessee has a sign directing you to the nearby museum of
the Burra Burra copper mine; a BP station; and a Hardee’s,
which is going to sell a lot of roast beef sandwiches to
truckers one of these days if it can just stay in business.
In this
latest go-round in Corridor K, a highway talked about for 45
years, the National Environmental Protection Act deadlines
are July 2012 for a draft EIS; June 2013 for a final EIS;
and Nov. 2013 for a “record of decision.” That latter would
be the final step after the state of Tennessee and its
governor and DOT had cleared massive federal and state
hurdles. Not the least of them would be the signature of the
president of the United States on a federal law permitting a
four-lane highway through the Cherokee National Forest.
THE ASPECT
OF this current road drive that stops you in your tracks is
one that at least is being talked up in undocumented
meetings of a “citizen resource team,” which is a key part
of TDOT reforms.
Yes, there
are three years to go before a draft EIS is due, and yes,
what the well-meaning citizen stakeholders say in early
stages can disintegrate later when political realities come
into play. But for now, there is lots of talk of doing only
“spot improvements” for greater safety in the two-laner
through the gorge. Then it would continue its role since
the 1970s as what the Tennessee Overhill Heritage
Association calls the way to get to “the premier place in
the world for whitewater competition.”
In this
perfect realm, the slalom whitewater and kayak rodeo
enthusiasts would keep the river and road to themselves. No
longer would they have to deal with the marauding
tractor-trailers that are barreling east to the port of
Charleston -- along a perilous winding road that in 2004-06
had 263 total crashes. Instead, the trucks with their goods
would be moved to one of the multi-colored paths. And which
one would be best?
STATING
YOU OWN HEREFORDS ISN’T PROTECTED SPEECH
Denny Mobbs
of Polk County was telling me how he is 67 years old; a
trial lawyer; and the owner of a 125-acre farm at the Ocoee
River Bridge where he raises polled Hereford cattle. I
started to write that down and he said, “That’s off the
record.”
I countered by
saying that in all his years in the law, he must have formed
an appreciation for the freedom of press and speech clauses
in the First Amendment, and he is aware it’s alright for one
American to write it down when another says, for example,
that he owns polled Herefords.
“Well, then,
you can write anything about me that you want,” he replied.
So I will.
In addition to
being a lawyer and a former county attorney, he is a
mountaineer who, after climbing peaks here, made 11 trips to
the Alps. There he scaled, among others, the Eiger in
Switzerland; the Matterhorn on the Swiss-Italian border; and
Mont Blanc on the French-Italian border.
Denny Mobbs
has pressed hard for Corridor K. He is a tanned, taut and
intense person who seems to frame every conversation as if
he is at the jury box in a closing argument to save a client
from the gas chamber. So I spoke gingerly as I asked, “Do
you have land that you would like to sell to TDOT for right
of way?”
“I have no
financial interest in this project whatsoever,” Mobbs told
me.
Instead, he
described a lifelong obsession with the danger of the gorge
road. He and his wife (they are childless) live on the west
side and she taught Humanities for years at Cooper Basin
High School on the east side in Ducktown. There came a time
when she had an illness and every day for 33 school days,
after she was finished with her classes at 2 p.m., she had
to drive the gorge to get to Erlanger Hospital in
Chattanooga. So safety is the reason that her husband says
he wants to see completion of the four-lane highway, and
certainly not along the perilous route down there along the
river.
A PROJECT
MANAGER PLEADS FOR MORE DISCLOSURE ON HIS STATE’S WEB SITE
During today’s workshop, a lonely lady sat at a
transcription machine in a corner ready to take our
comments. Here are those of one citizen, one paid-up
taxpayer who resides in retirement in the Blue Ridge
Mountains:
“The graphics
you’re showing today are naïve. They lack the TVA Apalachia
Reservoir; the L&N Copper Basin rail line; and the cities of
Reliance and Etowah. I need all these to be able to better
understand the orange, gold, and purple, blue and mauve
lines.
“Secondly,
good chat, scuttlebutt and rumor coming out of the Citizen
Resource Team (there are 15 members from Polk County and
impacted groups such as Benton MacKaye Trail Association)
needs to be in minutes and on the TDOT project web site.
What happens is, all that gets told and re-told until it’s
hearsay you don’t want to repeat because you don’t know if
it’s true. If you will collect minutes and post them, one
day you will be glad you did; and
“Locate Kimsey
Mountain Road on graphics. Three years ago this historic
dirt path of the Cherokee was talked about by Denny Mobbs as
the best route for Corridor K. Now it’s not even on URS
Corp. of San Francisco’s QUANTM study-area map, and good for
that, yet it needs to be just so I can put everything in
perspective.”
Well,
Project Manager Wesley Hughen happens to be urging TDOT’s
webmaster to get posted a variety of Corridor K data,
including Citizen Resource Team minutes that DO exist,
Hughen told Holly DeMuth, executive director of WaysSouth.
“He wants all
of that to get posted on the site, and for them to remove
the paragraph that says they’re ‘in the process of selecting
a consultant to perform the Transportation Planning Report,’
which is really out of date, because they have that
consultant, and it’s represented here today,” Demuth said.
* * *
Tom Bennett of the Martins Creek Community west
of Murphy is a Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition member and volunteer.
E-mail him at
farblumtn@gmail.com
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