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Lesson 05
Before World War II, Memphis groundwater wasn't much of a policy issue. The city drank from a pristine aquifer with almost nothing on the surface threatening it.
Then the industry came. Scroll through eight decades of sites POA tracks — and watch them appear on the map.
1940s — WWII mobilization
A 642-acre military supply depot opens in South Memphis in 1942. For fifty years, fuel, solvents, pesticides, and munitions are stored, burned, or buried on-site.
Chlorinated solvents (TCE, PCE) leach into the shallow aquifer beneath the Boxtown neighborhood.
Also opened this decade: Valero Memphis Refinery (1941).
1950s — Postwar power
TVA builds the Allen Steam Plant in 1959 on the Mississippi River south of Memphis. Burning coal produces ash — tons of it — stored in unlined ponds next to the river and directly above the Memphis Sand Aquifer.
Decades later, arsenic will be detected in the shallow aquifer here at 300+ times the federal drinking water standard.
This site is where POA was founded: in 2017, fighting TVA's plan to drill cooling wells into the Memphis Sand next to the ash ponds.
1960s — Chemical era
Three 1960s sites define decades of POA advocacy:
1980s — The lawsuits begin
By the 1980s, TDEC and EPA start to understand what the previous decades left behind. Monitoring wells go in. Contamination plumes get mapped. Some sites close. Others just keep leaking.
This is also when hydrogeologists start noticing something strange: contaminants from the shallow aquifer showing up in deeper wells where they shouldn't be. The first breach maps (Parks, 1990) are about to emerge.
2020s — New threats
In 2024, the world's largest supercomputer moves to Southwest Memphis. 5 million gallons of water per day. 1.5 gigawatts of power. Next door to the TVA coal ash ponds and the Davis Wellfield.
The more you pump the Memphis Sand here, the more you risk pulling down the arsenic plume from above. This is POA's current fight — advocating for a water-reuse facility instead of raw aquifer withdrawal.
The Pattern
South Memphis. North Memphis. Collierville. Boxtown. These are the places where Memphis put its heavy industry — and they're often the same neighborhoods where frontline communities live.
The full Contamination Dashboard (POA's ArcGIS tool) maps them all.
The aquifer doesn't forget. Contamination that entered the ground in the 1940s is still being remediated in 2026. The chlordane Velsicol dumped in 1966 is still moving through the subsurface.
POA watches every new proposed site in the recharge zone for one reason: it's much easier to prevent a new plume than to clean up an old one.