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Seven Days

Wednesday, Oct. 22
In a front-page newspaper story, Kent Starwalt of the Tennessee Road Builders Association rails against "build-nothing extremists" and "small but vocal groups of local citizens," by which he means people who object to TDOT's rapacious, never-ending siege on Tennessee's cone-riddled thoroughfares. I'll be happy to shut up, Kent, so long as you agree to hang naked from a stick in the median of I-40 until the construction there comes to an end.

Thursday, Oct. 23
Local real-estate developer Mathis Bush is convicted of racketeering charges, but claims he never profited from the chain of Asian massage parlors to which he was linked. Don't believe it: his pay-offs were all under the table.

Friday, Oct. 24
After 12 years, Department of Energy officials at Oak Ridge National Laboratory say they've finished cleaning the nuclear pollutants out of four area ponds that were reportedly home to colonies of radioactive frogs. Yet another reason why I always speak of DOE in such glowing terms.

Saturday, Oct. 25
I know there were more important things happening Saturday than the University of Tennessee's 51-43 five-overtime football victory over Alabama. I just don't know what any of those things would be.

Sunday, Oct. 26
Hope you remembered to Spring Up, or, er, uh, Fall Out, or, um, uh... Screw it, just turn on the cable box and see what the hell time it is.

Monday, Oct. 27
CEO Rebecca Paul defends the six-figure salaries she and other lottery executives will make as they institute a state lottery here in Tennessee. I don't even remember when the lottery begins, but I think I already know who won.

Tuesday, Oct. 28
I wrote this on Tuesday, so I don't know what's happened yet. Make up your own damn joke.

Knoxville Found

(Click photo for larger image)

What is this? Every week in "Knoxville Found," we'll print the photo of a local curiosity. If you're the first person to correctly identify this oddity, you'll win a special prize plucked from the desk of the editor (keep in mind that the editor hasn't cleaned his desk in five years). E-mail your guesses, or send 'em to "Knoxville Found" c/o Metro Pulse, 505 Market St., Suite 300, Knoxville, TN 37902.

Last Week's Photo:
Sixty-some years ago a tall Russian pianist played his last concert at the University of Tennessee's Alumni Gym. Sergei Rachmaninoff, one of the greatest composers and pianists of the 20th century, died just weeks after this performance.
Fast forward 50 or so years to Moscow where Russian sculptor Victor Bokarev was completing a plaster sculpture called "Rachmaninoff: the Last Concert." Bokarev decides that he wants to donate the piece to the city in America that hosted this final performance.
Lucky for Knoxville. Seven years ago the statue was donated to the University of Tennessee and finally, after years of inexplicable wrangling, the statue recently took its place on the south end of the new World's Fair Park.
Helen Short of Knoxville was first to recognize the musical notes on the side of this marvelous statue. She will be receiving a copy of Barb Hollow Sessions, by two great composers and performers of the 21st century, Jeff Barbra and Sarah Pirkle.

Breeding Ground
Adventures with West Nile in North Knoxville

My phone rang late last Wednesday afternoon, and the caller I.D. said my brother was on the line. He's not the kind of guy to waste a lot of time in idle chatter, so I was already a little worried when I picked up the receiver. His voice was sharp with alarm, and did little to reassure me.

"Turn on TV," he said. "They're showing the front of your house. They're talking about West Nile Disease."

"Huh? I asked. "West Nile Disease? Are they saying I've got it?"

"Don't know," my brother said, hesitating before adding: "It looks like it might have something to do with your bushes."

My "bushes" are actually a tall, dense, somewhat unruly honeysuckle-and-wild rose-overrun hedgerow that surround two sides of my house, which is on the corner of Melbourne Avenue and Oswald Street in the Oakwood neighborhood. I am very partial to my bushes, which shield me from the street, afford a measure of privacy in my small, city lot, and create what I like to imagine is as a lush, urban-jungle bird habitat. Most of my friends and my mother just think they're a mess. Evidently somebody with the city thinks so, too, since the Service Department comes by and bushhogs it every spring just as it's set to grow another 10 feet taller. But to accuse them of having something to do with West Nile Disease? Come on!

I flip on the television and await the evening news. Before long, here comes a Channel 8 reporter and an attractive young woman, walking right down Melbourne Avenue, big as life. The camera pays special attention to my bushes, particularly the arched boughs framing my front sidewalk. I think it looks pretty good.

But they are indeed talking about West Nile Disease.

The day before, the News Sentinel had reported the first confirmed case of West Nile in Knox County in 2003 — a 57-year-old woman who had been hospitalized with encephalitis. The newspaper didn't say where she lives, but the TV guy is saying it's someone in my neighborhood. The TV guy and the attractive young woman continue their stroll and end up at a construction company around the block. The camera shows closeups of the creek that meanders through the construction company's lot and flows on southward parallel to Broadway. The young woman blasts the county for not spraying for mosquitoes and lets the construction company have it for keeping big barrels full of stagnant rainwater and for obstructing the creek.

While I am greatly relieved that nobody actually fingered my bushes, I am alarmed to learn that Knox County's only case of West Nile Disease is somebody in my neighborhood. I think back over all the summer days when the voracious mosquito population in my back yard had run me swatting and scratching out of my pool and off my deck and into the house. No matter how much I kept turning over flower pots and garbage cans and any other container that might catch water, the pestilence continued unabated.

I go next door and ask my neighbor Sam if it's true that somebody in the neighborhood has West Nile. Sam generally knows what's going on around here.

"Yep," he says. "But I think she's going to make it." He points down the block. "That's her house right down there."

By this time, I am even more upset. Christenberry Elementary School is just a scant block south, and I think about the children on the playground and wonder why nobody has warned the neighborhood. And what about that spraying that the attractive young woman says the county won't do?

So I call county mayoral mouthpiece Mike Cohen, who directs me to Ronnie Nease, director of Environmental Health at the Knox County Health Department.

He is a remarkably patient man, and explains to me that he cannot "warn the neighborhood."

"We cannot divulge the patient's identity because of privacy issues," he says. And he also tells me that my street, and every other street in the area, had in fact been sprayed the previous Monday, just days before the airing of the Channel 8 story. Also, there have been no specific complaints made against the construction company, he says.

"The rain has affected when we could spray. We can't spray when there is rain, or wind above 10 miles-an-hour, or when the temperature is below 50. In the last month, it has been so cool at night when we spray that we haven't been able to do much. This week, we sprayed two nights."

Spraying is done from midnight until 6 a.m. by a pickup truck with a machine mounted in the back. The truck has flashing lights, strobes and a placard identifying it, but most Knoxvillians are asleep when it comes by, and they never even know that it's been through their neighborhood. No spraying is done on Friday or Saturday nights when people are more likely to be out and about.

Some do not want the spraying done around their homes, and Nease says reactions to the mosquito control program "run the gamut. I've had all kinds of reactions from folks."

A recently-released efficiency report on every department of county

government says that the health department needs more money for mosquito eradication. Cohen says the mayor's office is studying the recommendation, but that it is not clear whether the Maximus Inc. report took into account the fact that utility districts in the county have been helping with spraying in outlying areas.

Mease says the school system has been taking precautions against mosquitoes for some time. The county sprays school playgrounds, parks, football stadiums with a chemical biomist that is very specific to the mosquito population and leaves no residual effect. And moreover, children are not generally as susceptible to the West Nile virus as are older adults.

"West Nile has been identified in all parts of Knox County, as confirmed by the presence of West Nile virus in birds. This means that there's the potential for West Nile virus to be anywhere," Nease says. He tells me that Oakwood-Lincoln Park mosquitoes are no worse than anybody else's mosquitoes.

"Mosquitoes have been fierce this year in lots of places. The rain this summer has provided ample breeding sites. This allows them to breed no matter how much you spray."

He says county health department officials had been hoping for the best, but are not surprised that someone has come down with West Nile.

"We expected it. It starts with flu-like symptoms, and as it progresses, it could go into stiffness of the neck and slurred speech, in severe cases. This is caused by encephalitis, which is an inflammation of the brain. Only 1 percent of people bitten experience these symptoms, and it's like the worst case of flu you ever had."

I hesitate before asking him what I really want to know.

"Do bushes cause mosquitoes?"

"Cause mosquitoes? No, standing stagnant water is the habitat for mosquito larvae. You've got to get rid of standing water to break the cycle," Mease says, much to my relief.

But then he goes on.

"Basically what happens is around a creek, like in your neighborhood, it's cool, and is surrounded by trees and bushes, so when the adult mosquitoes hatch out, they go to those cool areas."

Nease says the north side of buildings provide ideal spots for these shade-loving, teen-aged mosquitoes to hang out.

"We have been advising people for the last two or three years, if you are going to be outside, dress properly. We don't have enough manpower to visit every home and do surveys."

Even with the caveat about shady spots, I decide my bushes have been exonerated as plague-spreaders. I am relieved, at least until my phone rings. It is a friend who saw the Channel 8 report.

"Bean. I saw your house on TV. It was a story about West Nile Disease. I think it has something to do with your bushes."

—Betty Bean

Road To Somewhere?
A task force tries to break deadlock on the James White Parkway

After meeting for a year and a half, the James White Parkway Extension Task Force recommended that if Tennessee Department of Transportation is going to build an extension, it should make significant changes to the design.

Formed by City Councilman Joe Hultquist in January 2002, the task force included people both opposed and in favor of the road and some neutral, in an attempt to find common ground. Hultquist presented the task force's findings to TDOT Commissioner Gerald Nicely last week. A TDOT spokesman could not be reached for comment. However, Hultquist says the commissioner is expected to announce what its plans are for the road on Nov. 10.

The highway has been in the works for decades, with several different designs and routes being considered. In 1983, the South Knoxville Bridge was built, but with no major roads connecting to it, it was dubbed the "bridge to nowhere." In the early '90s, the first section of the road was built from the bridge to Moody.

The task force didn't take a yes-no approach to the road, but looked at things people on both sides of the issue are concerned about: routing and design, traffic, impact on businesses, environmental effects, neighborhood preservation, and transportation issues. "This group agreed that they might never come to agreement on the key question of whether or not to build the proposed final segment of the James White Parkway, but they also agreed to explore the issues together and work to identify the questions that still need to be answered," Hultquist wrote in his introduction.

The main recommendations from the 57-page report include:

* Extending the highway all the way to John Sevier Highway instead of ending it at Chapman Highway.

* Delaying the project five or six years until TDOT has the funds and the means to extend the road to John Sevier. "There is a general feeling that if it is not extended to John Sevier Highway now, it never will be," the report says.

* Eliminating the interchange at Redbud Road. "There is no justification for building an interchange at Redbud," the report states. "An interchange there will create multiple safety hazards: additional traffic on a winding, narrow, two-lane road; traffic exiting at Redbud Road will drive at a speed greater than the speed limit due to coming directly off an interstate-style road; the additional burden at Chapman Highway and Redbud Road will present the opportunity for even more accidents than happen there now."

* Waiting until the James White Parkway interchange with I-40 is improved before building the extension.

* Designing the road as an urban parkway with limited access, instead of a major interstate, like the current section looks. It should be a four-lane road with a narrow median and a speed limit between 45 and 55 mph.

* Building bikeways and sidewalks and preserving as much of the trees and vegetation as possible.

* Burying utilities.

* Considering a no-build corridor along the James White Parkway, to prevent sprawl and protect merchants on Chapman Highway, which fear their business will suffer if the road is built.

Hultquist pitched the process as a model TDOT can use in dealing with communities. "I said to them, 'We have not a perfect model, but a good model. We have a task force sanctioned by the local government with people on both sides of the issue as well as neutral, who have found consensus,'" Hultquist says.

—Joe Tarr