By DON FLETCHER
News Staff Writer
Chattanooga, Tenn.-based contractor Berry Construction’s practice of checking every possible angle of a commercial project, combined with a weekend deluge that dumped more than 1.5 inches on the city in just a few hours, has come back to bite the company.
A 7,000 square-feet “footing hole,” about 10 feet deep, was halfway filled with muddy water Monday morning, December 30. The extra dirt was scooped out of the foundation area where Atmore’s new AutoZone is being built.
The extra excavation was reportedly done to make sure no environmental issues existed in the subsoil, a problem that three years ago cost Coastal Growers LLC thousands of dollars and delayed construction of an $85 million peanut mill for several weeks.
Work on the 7,381-square-feet AutoZone store, which began about two weeks ago, has been halted until the muddy water can be siphoned off. Site Manager John Gibson of Birmingham and two of his employees were in the process early Monday of hooking up a pump to drain the rectangular “pond.”
City records show the new, 7,381-square-feet auto parts store is being built on the 2.39-acre site where Baldwin Pest Control formerly ran its operations, at North Main Street’s junction with Avenue A. It will lie between the Atmore Village shopping center (Little Caesar’s, AT&T and Advance America), and an abandoned brick house that has a small cemetery next to it. It is located just across North Main from Snappy Car Wash.
AutoZone was started in 1979 in Arkansas as a one-store operation called Auto Shack. The company now has more than 7,000 stores — including those in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, as well as in Puerto Rico, Mexico and Sao Paulo, Brazil — and employs more than 1,000 people. It has become one of the world’s leading retailers and distributors of automotive replacement parts and accessories.
According to its website, Berry Construction has built more than 1,800 freestanding and renovation projects for a client list that also includes Walmart, Dollar General, Buc‐ee’s, O’Reilly Auto Parts, Dollar Tree, Burger King, Sonic and numerous others.
No timetable for completion has been announced.