This particular power plant is known in some circles as being part of the "dirty dozen" - because it is of the environmentally unfriendly coal-fired variety, which still feed our national power grid in certain parts of the country because the EPA is a wholly-owned subsidiary of BP. And we all know Sarah Palin eats coal for breakfast (the perfect compliment to moose stew!).But in all fairness, if you can look past the black coal smoke belching out from the smokestacks and the bjillions of gallons of bay water that are sucked into the plant each day for cooling, you will find that at this plant, as in many of this country's pollution-belching industrial complexes, the people who work in the safety and environmental branches come to work every day and do their best to comply with regulations and prevent human injuries.
I was at the power plant with a group of state regulators who had been invited by the plant's environmental compliance staff to observe a boom deployment drill as part of an exercise that simulated how the plant would close off their water intake if there were an oil spill near the plant. And they did a bang-up job. From the safety briefing to the demobilization, I watched well-trained, competent professionals work well under less than ideal conditions (there was a big squall bearing down on us, 30+knot wind gusts, not the ideal conditions for towing boom or operating small boats.)
So the exercise was a success. Except for one minor inconvenience. The deployment site was directly downwind from the giant pile of coal. You would think they'd keep the coal in a silo or something, but no - just an enormous, black pile. Have you ever stood downwind of a giant coal pile during a windstorm? Every surface of my body was coated with black grit. I sped home and raced to the shower, and scrubbed black gritty dust out of all the nooks and crannies. I was horrified, and yet I'd spent all of an hour there, with my visitor badge and clipboard. What about the hard-working folks who are there every day, who have worked in that environment for years?
As much as I would like to throw it all back on Sarah Palin, or George Bush, or the EPA, I know I'm part of the problem. There's no better primer on the ugliness of fossil fuel combustion than a light coating of coal dust. So I now believe that every American who has ever flipped a light switch should be required to stand downwind of the coal pile for an hour or so. Because, even after you've lingered under a hot shower and washed away the last little specks of coal grit, you have to admit...you still feel a little dirty, don't you?
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
Albert Einstein
1 comment:
you are too cool for school, Elise. I want to follow you around for a month. Of course, I'd probably cry of exhaustion after 5 days.
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