Anniston Star
September 12, 2003

Pollution from Anniston Army Depot impacts catfish business

By Sara Clemence
Star Staff Writer
09-12-2003

BYNUM

The photographs in a small cabin off Alabama 202 seem testimony to a thriving summer business.

Grinning men grip big, slippery catfish. They fill the frames, as does the name of the place in the picture, Cooper’s Catfish Lakes.

But the frames hang a little askew. Outside, the grass is growing long; the 11 lakes are a little low.

“I haven’t really taken care of my lakes the way I should, on account of them buying it,” said T.A. Cooper, who has owned the lakes for a half-dozen years.

“Them” is the Army, which has long promised to purchase the 37-acre property and its 11 rectangular lakes.

“They’re going to pay me next week next week, next week,” said Cooper, 79. “I’ve let ‘em drill wells on my place. I’ve done everything I could to help ‘em, and now I’m mad at ‘em.”

The reason for that is chemical contamination from the Anniston Army Depot, which is visible across a set of railroad tracks from the lakes.

Though it doesn’t make the fish unsafe to eat, the solvent in Cooper’s lakes has kept customers away.

On a bright summer day a few weeks ago, he drove his pickup along the square banks, pulling up alongside two men who fished quietly with spools of line.

They were his only customers. Cooper held out his hand and rubbed his fingers together. One of the men dug his pants. He pulled out a wadded-up five-dollar bill.

“I owe you a dollar,” Cooper said, patting his shirt pocket.

Summer used to be a busy season at the lakes, he said. He charges $2 to drop a line, and $1.50 per pound to take fish away.

“I used to take in $400 or $500 a week,” he said.

Now the lakes are heavy with Cooper’s uncaught catfish.

“Now I don’t go down there but once in a while and collect a couple of dollars,” he said.

Three years ago, tests revealed that the well where he gets the water for the catfish pools was contaminated with trichlorethylene, or TCE.

The colorless chemical is used as an industrial degreaser at the depot.

For years, workers disposed of TCE in lagoons and ditches. That resulted in a chemical plume in the aquifer – a problem the Army has been trying to solve for more than a decade.

TCE has been detected at very low levels, below 5 parts per billion, in Coldwater Spring, Anniston’s water source. Federal health agencies say people can safely drink that amount for years.

Three years ago, tests found 190 parts per billion of TCE at Cooper’s property.

The news devastated his business.

“It’s just like hittin’ a fly with a hammer,” he said.

TCE has been linked with kidney and liver ailments. But it does not make the fish hazardous to eat.

“I would catch catfish there and eat them,” said Ted Simon, a toxicologist for the Environmental Protection Agency who is familiar with the situation. “The fish themselves are processing the TCE without storing it.

“That’s if any of it even gets in the water,” he said.

TCE evaporates easily, especially from a water body with a large surface area, and it breaks down in sunlight.

But customers don’t understand that, Cooper said, and they have all but stopped coming.

Plus, the pump he uses is so powerful — it can draw 300 gallons of water a minute — that Army engineers have said it could be affecting the way the contamination migrates.

So the Army has promised again and again to buy his land, only to draw back each time the deal is close to being closed. The last time was in the middle of July.

“I feel for him,” said Pat Smith, an environmental engineer for the depot. “It’s true. As soon as we get to a certain point and it looks like it’s going to go through we hit another stumbling block.”

The Army wanted to buy Cooper’s property with fiscal year 2003 funds, Smith said.

“In order to do that, we had to do it like any other property appraisal, with an environmental study,” he said. “Basically we ran out of time.”

The purchase could be completed by the end of the year, he said.

Cooper is fed up and is considering a lawsuit.

“Might is the devil, might,” Cooper said. “I just want them to give me yes or no. They’ve strung me along for three years and we got to the gate and they shut the gate on me.”

He wants to be compensated for the money he’s lost, and will continue to lose, because of the contamination.

He wants to know one way or the other, so he can carry out some of his “wild ideas,” like building a teepee for Boy Scout campouts, and a kiddie pool with a schoolbus waterfall.

He has spent thousands of dollars stocking the lake, he said, and wants to go back to fattening his crop.

“I quit pushing the fish, because they ain’t gonna buy,” he said. “They ain’t gonna buy.”