The fanfare surrounding the recent surprise announcement of the Georgia Ports Authority’s new inland port was reminiscent of ceremonies held by cities winning the bid to host the Olympics or Super Bowl. Even though the temperature in Chatsworth was in the mid-90s, the promoters dragged a table onto the shade-less lawn of the Murray County Courthouse for the signing of the memorandum of understanding to take advantage of the photogenic backdrop of the Cohutta Mountains .
Among the perspiring dignitaries seated at the table were Gov. Nathan Deal, the executive vice president of CSX railroad and the county’s sole Commissioner, Brittany Pittman. “Twenty-five years from now you are going to look back in pride at what took place today,” Gov. Deal said. The CSX vice president said, “the port will provide cost-effective options for environmentally friendly transportation services.”Asked about the impact of increased truck traffic, commissioner Pittman said, “All the due diligence has been done”.
The executive director of the Cohutta Springs Conference Center, a mountain retreat and youth camp owned by the Seventh-Day Adventists Church, was a smiling observer of the festivities. He said a CSX representative told him the future port’s exact location would be “five or six miles up the road” from the center. A few days later, he learned that its actual location was to be approximately 600 yards upwind of the resort’s boundary. He was no longer smiling.
The inland port will operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and is projected to handle 50,000 shipping containers the first year, increasing to 100,000 within 10 years. It’s also promised to be a catalyst for attracting many more truck-laden businesses.
Stacked shipping containers will block the viewshed of the only U.S. Highway 411 leg of the “Cohutta-Chattahoochee Scenic By-way” at the road’s closest approach to the Chattahoochee National Forest. The low rumbling sounds from locomotives, warning beepers on equipment, train cars coupling, trucks hitching to trailers, and the slamming about of containers will be audible for miles in all directions. Bright lights will illuminate the sky 365 nights a year, and the trucks, locomotives and other equipment will produce a perpetual cloud of toxic diesel emissions that will be carried by the prevailing upsloping winds into the highest elevations of the ecologically fragile Cohutta Mountains.
The Cohutta Wilderness, a “Class I Wilderness,” and the largest mountain wilderness east of the Mississippi, is just five miles downwind, and the contiguous national forest is just one mile downwind. Together, they form the watershed for the upper Conasauga River, equally renowned by trout fishermen and biologist for its pristine waters and biodiversity. The river is the habitat for a dozen endangered or threatened species, and through the efforts of numerous businesses, non-profits and environmental groups, it was recently named as Georgia’s only “Outstanding Natural Resource Waters.”
Little Sumac Creek, near its confluence with Big Sumac Creek, is the southern boundary of the port site. Leakage of toxic petro-fluids from trucks and equipment, combined with the inevitable accidental spillages of other toxins, will end up in runoff that will flow downstream into the Conasauga River within the habitat of the Conasauga Logperch, an endangered species found nowhere else in the world.
Shipping containers — principal conveyances for invasive species — will be opened in the shadow of Grassy Mountain, home to 550 species of flora and fauna. Grassy Mountain is littered with the ancient trunks of the fabled American Chestnut tree, killed by a fungus brought from Japan at the turn of the century. The still-standing skeletons of Canada Hemlock trees, ecologically important icons, are the more recent victims of an insect brought from Asia.
Inadequately inspected containers, potential delivery systems for terrorists’ weapons of war, will be unloaded a few hundred feet from a community park with ballfields, a walking track and playground. The port site is directly across the highway from a century-old church and there are numerous nearby residences.
After jobs creation, the port’s most frequently touted selling points are its positive environmental impact and relief for Atlanta’s traffic congestion. The port, which will create 20 mediocre jobs, will be located over 20 miles from I-75. The additional heavy-truck traffic will create havoc on the area’s connecting two-lane country roads, but will hardly be missed in Atlanta.
This illogical site selection will negatively impact the health of the area’s residents, erode their property values and present the potential for catastrophic damages to some of our most valuable natural resources.
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