LINCOLN COUNTY, Tenn. (WHNT) — A homeowner in Lincoln County said that Jack Daniels, the popular liquor distillery, is building warehouses that are creating an uncontrollable whiskey fungus that’s killing his plants and trees.
Patrick Long said that the whiskey is releasing too much ethanol that’s allowing a thick fungus to grow that will not go away on its own. Long says he has spent thousands to remove the fungus from his home.
“The black fungus will cover an entire shrub and just completely strangle the bush,” said Long, whose home in Mulberry Tennessee is right next to the Jack Daniels barrel house. “The evaporation of the ethanol that’s inside of those barrel houses with all of that alcohol turns into a black fungus and that black fungus attaches to anything that doesn’t move.”
Long said that the black fungus, or whiskey fungus, is coming straight from this liquor barrel storage facility that’s owned by the Brown-Forman Corporation for Jack Daniels.
Long took his concerns to the Lincoln County Commission on Nov. 15, and the mayor of Lincoln County informed him that the plan is to build six more warehouses in the area.
“That’s a hazardous material and that zoning does not prohibit that to even occur and yet we are going to have 66,000 barrels of Jack Daniels whiskey in each of those warehouses that will produce the black fungus that you see here at six times the levels that we have today,” Long said.
Long has researched all legal possible ways to stop or halt the construction of the new warehouses. He says the Lincoln County Commission has ignored the alleged environmental impacts for monetary gain.
“We as homeowners in the surrounding area and really most of Lincoln County should because as Jack Daniels continues to move forward with their barrel house plans over the next five to ten years. They will begin to turn the rest of Lincoln County into the same black fungus that we are currently dealing with today.”
Efforts to reach neither Lincoln County Mayor Bill Newman nor Brown-Forman Corporation were unsuccessful.
