Developer William Adair was raised in Fayette County within 200
yards of the Wolf River.
“We ate fish out of the Wolf for the first 12 years of my life, and
I hunted up and down the river for many years,” Adair said. “That area
has a lot of sentimental value for me.”
That sentimental value is one of the reasons Adair agreed to sell
Norfolk Southern 500 acres of his land in Rossville for a massive new
facility. Earlier this year, the rail company planned to build an
intermodal facility — where trucks and trains drop off and pick
up cargo — in an area located just east of Rossville and a
quarter-mile from the banks of the Wolf.
Wolf River supporters worried that the location was too near the
river and could cause contamination of both the Wolf and the Memphis
Sands aquifer, where the city gets its drinking water.
“The original site would have run right up next to the river, and
there was no margin for error if there were spills or contamination
from oil and chemicals,” said Steve Fleegal, chief executive officer
for the Wolf River Conservancy. “The wetlands from the river ran right
up next to the [original proposed location].”
Adair’s property is located farther south of the river, and Norfolk
Southern spokesperson Susan Terpay has confirmed that the company has
chosen Adair’s land instead of the proposed location.
“As a result of meetings with residents opposed to the initial site,
we expanded our search,” Terpay said in an e-mail.
The new intermodal yard will be part of Norfolk Southern’s Crescent
Corridor, a 2,500-mile rail network that will provide an alternative to
highway transportation for domestic motor freight carriers between the
Northeast and the South.
Adair, a former insurance mogul who sold his Direct General
Insurance Co. for more than $600 million a few years ago, purchased
more than 3,000 acres of farmland in Fayette County in 2007. Though
Norfolk Southern will use some of that land for its operations, Adair
also plans to build Piperton Hills, a large residential-commercial
development, on the rest of the property.
“The way we’ve got the [intermodal yard] planned, we should be able
to control any sound and lighting issues that we think we might have,”
Adair said. “We think we’ve done a great job preserving the rest of our
development out here.”
Besides protecting the Wolf, the new location should also alleviate
some traffic concerns that residents of Rossville expressed with the
initial site. Norfolk Southern is predicting the facility will draw
about 2,000 trucks a day, or about 200 trucks per hour during a 10-hour
day. At the old location, trucks would have had to travel down a
two-lane highway. The new plan means trucks will drive down Highway 72,
which will eventually be widened to four lanes.
“As it’s proposed now, I think vehicle traffic will be much more
acceptable than it would have been in the former location,” said Buck
Clark, president of the South Fayette Alliance, a group formed to
protest the original proposed location.
Though he believes the new site is an improvement over the one east
of Rossville, Clark says he’d rather Norfolk Southern stay out of
Fayette County.
“It would be my preference … that the facility not locate in
Fayette County,” Clark said. “But the proposed location is the least
objectionable of the locations that have been considered.”
