Photo: Eric England
Almost two years ago, residents in Old Hickory Village and nearby Rayon City, two older neighborhoods sitting just off the western shore of Old Hickory Lake, were fighting a proposed rock quarry in their backyard. Concerned about, among other things, the effects of blasting on the value of their homes and the structural integrity of their foundations and nearby Old Hickory Dam, they filled the neighborhood streets with signs declaring “Stop the Dam Quarry.”
But the quarry came anyway, despite opposition from the area’s Metro councilman, Larry Hagar, state legislators and even Nashville Congressman Jim Cooper. Now, all these months later as land-use lawsuits work through the court system, residents in Rayon City who live closest to the quarry site say they’re facing something different than shockwaves from nearby blasting. It’s oppressive fumes from the Hoover asphalt plant that accompanied the rock quarry, foul odors they say have made their neighborhood and even the inside of their homes uninhabitable at times.
Sitting in the Rayon City home she shares with her boyfriend a mile-and-a-half from the plant, Erin McDermott says she’s been sleeping with a wet washcloth on her face in an attempt to prevent the burning eyes, nose and throat that result from the fumes.
“I feel like I can’t escape it, I feel like I’m being violated in my own home,” she says.
Her boyfriend, James Osborn, chimes in.
“I try to imagine if you could pluck that [plant] up and drop it in Belle Meade, what would happen?” he says. “They’d be raising holy hell.”
McDermott and Osborn are among more than 1,500 members of a Facebook group called “No Quarry in Our Yard.” The group started during the fight over the quarry but has now become a clearinghouse for neighborhood complaints and reports about the asphalt plant and its noxious output, with posts about the concerns going back at least as far as June. They include not just the fumes and odor, but also the behavior of truck drivers coming to and from the plant. Residents say that although the drivers are supposed to use Industrial Drive to come off the main road and head toward the plant, they have been barrelling down neighborhood streets with the asphalt smell and debris trailing behind them.
McDermott says she’s been on the receiving end of a raised middle finger from one of them too.
Metro Health Department spokesperson Brian Todd tells the Scene that the department has received more than 45 complaints by phone or email about the plant — most of them over the past three weeks. He notes that most of the complaints have come in “just around start-up and the subsequent 45 to 60 minutes when the entire fleet of trucks leave the asphalt plant to head to a TDOT paving project on I-65 south of Nashville.” Department employees, he says, have spent “many hours in the area on weekends and weeknights while the plant was operating” but are not having the same experience as residents have been reporting.
“Even with our many visits and hours investigating when the plant has been operating, our inspectors have been unable to detect an odor in the residential areas to substantiate the complaints we have received,” Todd says.
Needless to say, this response has irritated the residents making those complaints.
“There is absolutely no way, if you guys drove around the neighborhoods, that you would not smell that smell,” McDermott says. “It’s so pervasively overwhelming that you would either have to be dead or not have a nose. And so many people are complaining on this Facebook page that it seems to me it’s like plausible deniability, that they’re just saying, ‘Oh, we can’t smell it.’ ”
Hagar, an attorney who has represented the Old Hickory-area district since 2014, says he has gone out to the area around the asphalt plant once or twice a week to see, and smell, for himself. Sometimes he smells the odor clearly, he says, especially when the trucks drive by. Other times, he doesn’t. And like residents, he offers his own theories about why the odor might be detectable in some nearby areas and not others. It depends on which way the wind blows, for instance. Or it could even travel down the winding path of the low-lying Cumberland River.
“Like I told somebody, I don’t have the best smeller in the world,” Hagar says. “But if it’s real strong, I’m gonna smell it. I’m not discounting anything that these complaints say, because I’ve got a whole list.”
On a recent evening, a Scene reporter visiting the plant and nearby neighborhood streets had an experience similar to Hagar’s, with the odor of asphalt wafting along here and there, stronger in some places, weaker in others.
One experience reported by residents that Hagar can confirm for sure is the apparently confrontational attitude of some of the workers at the plant. After a recent WSMV news story about the neighborhood complaints aired, one of Hagar’s old campaign signs was hung on the plant’s fence. At the mention of the incident, Hagar laughs hard.
“Oh, I was hot,” he says. “I was hot.”
The sign was taken down after Hagar called the plant’s attorney.
“That shows disrespect for me and the community, you know?” he says. “That was my position about it. You don’t do stuff like that. It’s childish.”
Hagar says the Environmental Protection Agency is scheduled to visit the site later this month to investigate. On its website, the Centers for Disease Control details the effects of exposure to asphalt fumes on plant workers as well as pavers and roofers, listing symptoms similar to those described by nearby residents. A review of scientific data conducted by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in 2000 suggests some elevated cancer risk for workers with exposure to asphalt, but was not able to draw strong conclusions on that front.
A lawsuit filed by residents in an effort to stop the quarry has been heard on appeal after a Davidson County judge ruled that the company behind the quarry was within its rights to operate on the land.
Reached by the Scene, Hoover Materials’ Tom Hoover Jr. declined to comment except to note the Health department’s assessment.
McDermott tells the Scene that Dr. Sanmi Areola, deputy director of health at the Metro Health Department, is scheduled to meet with her at her home this week. But every delay — whether it’s the 30 minutes it takes for a health department response or the weeks of waiting until the EPA arrives — is a further irritant to McDermott and her neighbors.
“It’s disheartening, because our property values just started to go up over there, and who the hell would want to live over there?” she says. “I want to move. I spent the night at a hotel the other night because I couldn’t be in my own house.”
