Ooo, That Smell

Scott Martin knows how people must feel when they look at Daniels Drive. It's the same way he felt 10 years ago when he first laid eyes upon the neighborhood.

Squeezed between a dried-up creek and a CSX rail line, the dead-end street in Franklin features rusted beaters parked haphazardly outside of rental homes, the grass turned to dust under their treads. Post-war ramblers with gutters askew offer a boom-or-bust contrast to the residents here, either single elderly people or Mexican immigrants.

Martin himself had a poor first impression: "I didn't think this was where we'd be buying our first home."

His appreciation changed, however, when he reached the cul-de-sac at the end of the block. There, Martin and his wife Galyn found a hidden gem: A wooded amphitheatre backing up to the Harpeth River. The backyard would eventually offer their two little girls the kind of proximity with Mother Nature normally reserved for a petting zoo, with bobcats, fox, deer and otter. In a development-heavy suburb like Franklin, Martin felt like he'd found an oasis.

Putting up with the occasional rumbling freight car meant that Martin, a software developer, could live a firmly middle-class existence. The only trade-off, it seemed, was the smell.

Every once in a while, the air would fill with an acrid bite reminiscent of a nail salon. Martin brushed it off. One of his neighbors often refinished furniture in his basement; that was explanation enough for him.

More puzzling, however, were the times when Daniels Drive smelled like one big overturned litter box. It was enough to push residents inside, their eyes and mouths burning. But despite their puzzlement, they always figured it was an oddity peculiar to the block, never thinking it could be something bigger.

At least until one November morning in 2006, when all of Franklin woke up smelling like cat piss.

Suddenly, the scent isolated to a small strip of lower-income homes was stinking up the city's every nook and cranny. The Disneyfied downtown. The granite countertop units of a new condo development. The playground at tony Battle Ground Academy. Franklin officials scrambled to find a source, eventually tracking the smell to Liberty Creek, a meek little stream between the school and Daniels.

By January, air and water samples around Liberty revealed high concentrations of two chemicals: toluene and acetone, both paint solvents. There were pools of noxious black fluid seeping up from the creek bed.

While the city tried to ward off panic, ensuring Franklinites the chemicals were harmless and their drinking water was safe, the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) and a non-profit went looking for a culprit, a search that revealed a clear suspect.

Only one local company used the two chemicals found in the creek: Egyptian Lacquer Manufacturing. The dozen-employee factory made its money producing paint, mostly for pencils. It sat atop the hill overlooking Daniels Drive and Liberty Creek, and the bedrock beneath made a perfect conduit for spreading pollution.

"It's like Swiss cheese," says Mark Quarles, an environmental consultant hired by the Harpeth River Watershed Association (HRWA). "The bedrock has these miniature caves in them, so that enables contaminants to migrate."

At first, Egyptian Lacquer denied culpability. In order to produce readings that high, the company argued, its storage tanks would have to leak gallons of chemicals per hour, and they were regularly checked. But the pipes leading from the tanks were another story.

Buried underground for 30 years without so much as a checkup, they were found to be leaking acetone and toluene. Pools of slick, bubbling water were discovered seeping into the Harpeth near a fishing hole and a site where kids swim.

Egyptian Lacquer hired TriAd Environmental Consultants, the logical choice in Tennessee. It's run by Dwight Hinch, a 13-year veteran of TDEC's hazardous waste department, who once told a newspaper that he "basically wrote" the state's regulations. TriAd's first task was to figure out where, and how much, pollution had been spilled. But, rather curiously, the company decided this would be best accomplished by testing nowhere beyond Egyptian Lacquer's property.

Then it came up with an equally curious plan: clean up the area around the company, while leaving neighbors in the hands of Mother Nature. Digging up all that pollution underneath Daniels Drive and elsewhere, TriAd argued, was just too much work.

"The fancy name for the plan TriAd came up with is called 'natural attenuation,' " says Pam Davee, development director of HRWA. "Dumbed down, it means we're just gonna let the shit keep flowing."

Not surprisingly, the plan was rejected.

Neighbors were irate. It'd been a year since the leak was detected and still no one could tell them what kind of toxic waste was running under their houses. TriAd went about assuaging concerns by promising to drill wells and conduct tests. But it seemed to be doing its best to find as little pollution as possible. The wells were nowhere near where most assumed the chemicals had flowed.

TriAd passed it off as a way to establish a perimeter. In order to know where the chemicals were, it argued, one had to also know where they were not.