Honor Award

Hope Municipal Airport Intervention

Marin Braco, Student ASLA and Andrew Murphy, Student ASLA, Graduate, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry
Faculty Advisor: Martin Hogue

Hope Municipal Airport is located 6 miles Northwest of Hope, Arkansas, a town of approximately 10, 000 people. Originally established as a military airport during World War II, it was one of the largest of its kind. More recently, it has housed 15,000 relief trailers manufactured for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

FEMA spent $2.7 billion to buy 145,000 mobile homes and trailers in the aftermath of the 2005 hurricane season to assist in disaster-stricken areas. Many of the 90,000 units rushed out to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast were built to extremely poor standards. In addition to leaky construction, it was later determined that the wood and glue specified in their design released harmful levels of formaldehyde gas that have caused serious respiratory troubles. Many of these units were later deemed unfit for human occupation, causing important stockpiles of unusable trailers.

Clearly visible from Google Earth, the blue tint of the Hope stockpile is an enduring and embarrassing reminder of Katrina and of FEMA’s poor management of this particular crisis. Parked on the airport’s linear runways for nearly 5 years, the leaky trailers have released harmful contaminants into the ground and have caused flooding in nearby properties.

Our intervention at Hope Municipal Airport will be an interweaving of three phases: remediation of the trailers, remediation of the site, and repurposing the site. The trailers currently contain toxic levels of formaldehyde because they were produced quickly and cheaply in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. To remediate the trailers we will utilize laminates on the particle board that prevent emission along with ventilation systems. The trailers will then be removed from the site, with the exception of 3,000 left for future disaster relief. To remediate the site we must address the high level of compaction on the soils left by the trailers. For this we will till biosolids into the ground at a depth of 12". This will be followed by a mulching and seeding to prevent erosion and further the nutrient cycling of the soil. This will prepare the soil for future agricultural purposes, to create formaldehyde free products.

Based on the logic of the site, and our ambition to solve the larger problem of formaldehyde we choose to repurpose the airport for creating alternatives solutions to particle board. The site not only has ideal soils and climatic conditions for the growth of the agricultural products necessary for alternative particle board, but there is also a particle board manufacturer, less than one mile east of the airport. This can easily be converted to produce alternative particle board, while the hangar on the airport grounds can be retro-fitted to accommodate a processing plant for formaldehyde-free adhesives.

One well-researched alternative adhesive is made of soybean resin. Almost all of the manufacturers that made these formaldehyde free board were taking other measures to promote health, both for humans and the environment. Instead of using wood chips which requires continually cutting down trees, they used more easily renewable resources such as wheat and sunflowers. We wanted to follow this approach in our own design. To help us organize the plantings of these crops and to approach this in the most sustainable way, we looked at rotational systems. We added three other crops to promote nutrient cycling, erosion control, and soil structure. This significantly reduces the need for fertilizers, pesticides, while also making this a more economically stable enterprise by diversifying our products. This 6-crop, 3-year cycle will begin one parcel at a time, as soon as soil is remediated and it is the proper time to plant.

American Society of Landscape Architects