May 25, 2024 - City Raises Alarms Over Safety at Duksan Electera Plant
On Friday, May 24, a letter was submitted to the State Fire Marshal’s Office requesting a review of the Duksan Electera plant on Frank Martin Road which is currently scheduled to open in early summer. The letter states that the State Fire Marshal’s Office chose to exempt Duksan Electera from plan review and approval in December 2022 based on eight pages of plans they received. The city feels that there have been enough alterations from the original plans that a full review is now warranted. The letter states, “there are multiple outstanding issues involving both the interior and exterior fire suppression/sprinkler system that the City of Shelbyville formally requests assistance from the State Fire Marshal’s Office going forward.” The letter goes on to list a litany of concerns: • Reduction in water storage tank from the originally planned 300,000 gallons to 100,000 gallons • Department of Transportation requiring use of twin axle trailers, despite the originally designed foam system used at the point-of-product loading being set up for single axle trailers, rendering the foam system inefficient or useless for fire prevention • No stamped engineered plans for the interior fire systems being provided to the city for review • Exterior fire suppression system altered from original plans in multiple ways • Water supply from BCUD now appears insufficient. Bedford County Utility District (BCUD) cannot guarantee the ability to provide 339,600 gallons of water over a 2-hour period, which is what the sprinkler system was based upon. • Changes in operations which now create uncertainty around monitoring of fire systems during downtime. The original plan had Duksan providing its own Hazmat Team and Fire Brigade, both of which would be available 24/7. The city has since been informed that "due to the reduction in the number of employees and shifts (a maximum of 30 employees on one (1) eight-hour shift per day), there will be no such response teams on site." For these reasons and others, the city has requested a formal review by the State Fire Marshal's office. Without this review by the state, "City of Shelbyville staff will not be in a position to sign off on the completed construction of the facility, leaving the city unable to issue a Certificate of Occupancy for operations to begin." The letter goes on to request an up-to-date list of chemicals and substances being used at the Duksan facility. Based on their initial review, any fire at the facility will require an evacuation of at least a half-mile radius. This evacuation zone includes Vanderbilt Bedford Hospital, the Bedford County Justice Center and Court system, the Shelbyville Municipal Airport, Uncle Nearest Distillery, Walmart Distribution Center, Aludyne US, LLC, the Tennessee College of Applied Technology (when their construction is complete), and the Aerospace Department of MTSU (when their relocation to the airport is complete).Shelbyville NOW reached out to city officials on Saturday, but the response was that the city is awaiting the state's reply to the letter before commenting publicly. They did emphasize that the most important thing in this process is the safety of city citizens. Another question will be what response, if any, will come from the Shelbyville-Bedford Partnership to these safety concerns. The Duksan project is the crown jewel of their industrial recruitment accomplishments, and anything that tarnishes that accomplishment calls into question the taxpayer money that has been poured into both the Partnership and this particular project. |
Our previous article on the Duksan facility can be found on our website at 
