TDEC Investigating USN Complaints

By Walter F. Roche Jr.

Tennessee environmental officials say they are investigating complaints of fire on July 23 at the US Nitrogen LLC facility in Greene County.
Sherry Cooper, a resident who lives near the chemical company complex in Midway, registered a complaint with the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation in which she described seeing bright orange flames at the ammonium nitrate facility.
"All at once I seen this big orange flames and gases flowing way above the treeline it looked like the building was on fire," Cooper wrote in an email to TDEC.
Kim Schofinski, a TDEC spokeswoman, acknowledged the complaint and said it was currently under investigation.
Park Overall, a local environmental activist, also reported the incident to TDEC and both Overall and Cooper provided photographs of the incident.
Cooper said in her email that she was alerted to the incident by a friend at 10:49 p.m. on July 23.
She wrote in the email that she had barely gone two tenths of a mile down Little Chuckey Road when she saw the flames.
She said when she called police to complain she was told "they were just burning off in the pipes. They do it every now and then."
Cooper said in her email that she has seen other such incidents but few were as bad as July 23.
Overall also registered a complaint with TDEC describing a heavy odor in the air. "It had odor. It was like a fog," she wrote in an email to TDEC. Contact: wfrochejr999@gmail.com