21

A Drop in the Bucket

The red brick exterior of the Potomac River Generating Station squats on the banks of its namesake, a body of water that has provided an easy outlet for heat and toxic chemical disposal over the sixty years of its operation. Perhaps most significant about its appearance are the five stubby smokestacks, built at a height as to not interfere with pilots landing at Reagan Airport across the river. Tracks are laid out alongside the plant, and a train with a blue engine delivers the coal. The Mount Vernon Trail runs in front of the generating station, and several joggers passed by as I approached the entrance to take a tour of the facility.

The event started with breakfast laid out in a break room—donuts, bagels, and fruit platters—providing an opportunity to mingle with the other attendees and plant employees. A woman appearing to be in early stages of retirement sat down across from me. Her gray hair curled around the outside of her face in the perma-hold of elderly women’s hair. She wore a thick silver-beaded necklace and a flowered jacket. “Did you know that recycling one can powers a TV for three hours?”

A woman in a denim jacket next to me responded, “Taking care of the environment when I was growing up meant you sunk your cans.”

I must have looked at her quizzically.

“You know, fill them with water and sink ‘em instead of letting them float around.”

The prim woman across from me shifted the topic with another environmental statistic, seemingly off the top of her head, “Plastics kill one million sea creatures every year.”

“What kind of creatures?” asked the woman in denim.

“Well, sea creatures.”

I learned later that these were statistics printed out in a display across from the food, indicative of the plant’s environmental concerns.

Erin Thomas, 2011

Potomac River generating station

Somebody down the row nodded, “Yeah, plastic bags can get stuck around ducks’ necks.”

“So why are you here?” the prim woman asked the one in denim.

“My son works here. He has a degree in engineering.”

“Green engineering?”

“A degree in engineering, been graduated a year. His dad came down already. I decided I would come see what it was all about. He loves it here.” Then, with a sly look, the woman in denim asked the prim woman, “Are you a city resident?”

“Of Alexandria? Well, yes.”

“Are you for or against the plant?”

“Well,” the prim woman paused, choosing her words carefully, so as not to reveal too much. “That is what I am here to see.”

“The Mirant Potomac River Power Station burns low sulfur coal from central Appalachia, which includes southwestern Virginia and Kentucky,” began Mike Stumpf.

He meant this as a plug for the plant, but somebody in the crowd had been watching the news.

“Isn’t that where they cut down all those mountains?”

“No, all the mines in central Appalachia are deep mines. Mountaintop removal takes place in the northern part of West Virginia. If we don’t agree with how our suppliers get their coal, we don’t do business with them,” responded Mike with a very moral look. He had a long face, and when he straightened his lips, it stretched even longer.

The coal ribboned through the Appalachians is low sulfur, clean burning coal. In 1990, with the passage of the Clean Air Act, demand for low sulfur coal increased dramatically as power plants endeavored to comply. As the air became cleaner, mountaintop removal became the leading method of coal extraction in West Virginia. Kayford Mountain, Marsh Fork, Sylvester, and Inez are all in central Appalachia.

Mike was presenting to what, in general, was a nay-saying crowd. The majority were residents from the nearby City of Alexandria, which, at the time, was deadlocked in a lawsuit with the Potomac River Generating Station for polluting the air, polluting the sound, and being a neighborhood eyesore. This strip of Northern Virginia where the plant is located used to be an industrial suburb of Washington, D.C., after World War II. From a bird’s-eye view, the plant’s red exterior complements the green of the trees that surround the buildings in Alexandria. It would make a pretty picture for industrial era nostalgics, the power station a remnant of former times. From ground level, it is a surprising landmark so close to neighborhoods and the highrise of Marina Towers that equals the smokestacks in height.

The prim woman from Alexandria raised her hand, “Isn’t it true that energy produced by this plant doesn’t benefit Alexandria residents?”

At this point, Misty Allen, a lawyer hired by the plant to promote their public image, chimed in: “That isn’t exactly true. All energy enters the grid. It’s all connected. The Pepco [Potomac Electric Power Company] grid is right out front. Energy is generated exactly to meet the demand. The electrical pressure is always the same, sixty cycles per second.” To be specific, the Potomac River Generating Station produces 482 megawatts, servicing 482,000 homes in the PGM energy market. But the Potomac River station does not, in fact, benefit Alexandria residents. The power it produces is siphoned off into energy lines that head north toward the District of Colombia and Maryland. The City of Alexandria is serviced by the Dominion power grid.

My breakfast fellow’s question got the crowd going. Another visitor took courage, “Does the plant pollute the river?”

Mike fielded this one: “The wastewater is filtered before it leaves the plant, and the pH adjusted. It only is fifteen degrees hotter, but in the Potomac it’s like a drop in a bucket.”

Heat pollution always seems like a minimal issue, but it can alter the ecosystem of a body of water. The Geneva Steel factory that my greatgrandfather Zephaniah applied to after leaving Castle Gate was still in operation until 2001. A welcome development in World War II times, it provided jobs for many residents more mechanically inclined than Zeph. Over the years, the heat the steel plant released into Utah Lake caused an overabundance of algae. Most of the native species of fish have died off, overrun by the sturdy Asian carp that Americans don’t have the patience to cook long enough to eat. Utah Lake is known for being rough due to the mountain winds, and many swimmers have died in its waters; from under the murkiness and overgrowth, their bodies have never been recovered. As a teenager waterskiing on Utah Lake, I was always afraid of what would surface.

“Maybe you could dump ice cubes in the river every hour, you know, to even it out,” offered a man with a long white braid down his back.

We file out of the presentation room and put on hardhats, goggles, and earplugs that prove to be essential. It is my first tour of a power plant, having only walked through buildings built in the seventies and early eighties that were designed to resemble power plants. This was before the environmentalist movement took full swing; industrial was in. Utah Valley State College, where my dad worked before he started at the College of Eastern Utah, looked like a power plant. The Pompidou Center in Paris is meant to imitate a power plant. The Tate Gallery in London actually was a power plant. They are all strikingly accurate. In the plant I was touring, painted pipes of different diameters crawled the cement walls; everywhere were valves and wheels. The hum of the equipment was deafening.

The Potomac River Station has five generators, but only three were currently operating, a result of the lawsuit between the city and the plant. The production of energy follows the same basic principles of the first steam engine—designed by Thomas Newcomen in 1717 to pump water out of a coal mine—except instead of moving a piston, the steam turns a turbine. Coal is conveyed into a pulverizer, and then the dust is pumped into the broiler where it ignites into a ball of flame. The heat evaporates water into steam, which turns a turbine, which spins a magnet in a generator. Coiled around the magnet is a long wire that catches the electrical current from the magnet, converting steam power into electrical power. This specific technology hasn’t changed for over seventy years, but the operation requires constant watch: the most common problems are caused by wet coal, rocks, and fan malfunction. After the coal dust is consumed, the ash falls to the bottom of the broiler. After a cycle, the steam is cooled, and then the water is filtered to be pumped back through the system in a continuous loop.

Lynwood Reid, the operations team manager, led our group. He had a winning smile, so winning that Mirant posed Lynwood cultivating their wildlife garden for one of their brochures. A large black man, he worked for Mirant for thirty-seven years, entering the plant just after high school. His job for the day in his words was to show us, “What’s our intentions and how we doin’.”

After taking us through the generator rooms, we filed into the control rooms, where he cautioned us not to lean against the gauge- and knob-covered panels of the old supercomputers. Here we met Larry Lane and a handful of other employees who managed their modern-day counterparts of the retired equipment, watching fireballs that flickered across the TV screens in green-orange and amber. It was a Saturday and the plant was operating on low, but on regular days, 133 employees worked at the plant. On average, they made sixty-five thousand dollars a year, were forty-seven years old, and had worked at the plant for twenty-one years. I could understand why none of them were too eager to back down to the City of Alexandria’s complaints without a fight.

The roof, reached by climbing up a steel-grated staircase, was our last stop in the plant. Throughout the tour, the group had strained to hear Lynwood through their earplugs and over the hum of the equipment. On the roof, it was silent except for a beep. The blonde middle-aged couple and their adopted son, the young Asian American and his tow-headed wife, and the two female yuppie roommates all discovered that they lived near each other in Alexandria.

I looked out over the Potomac River and the trees, businesses, and apartment buildings that lined its banks. The coal was piled and terraced in a long field next to the plant, and the yellow scoop had paused in its operations until Monday. At the edge of the coal piles stood a fence, then trees, then Marina Towers, one of the plant’s chief adversaries and the recipients of the plant’s downwash during bad weather conditions. The intricate wire web of the Pepco grid buzzed out front.

“What’s that noise?” one of the yuppies asked about the beep. “I hear it when I wake up at night.”

“Yeah, we do, too,” the young couple claimed.

Lynwood looked nervous. He put his hands in his pockets and hemmed and hawed. “I dunno actually. I’ll ‘av to ask Mike.”

The group paused and listened.

“Maybe to keep the birds away,” Lynwood concluded. “Yeah. A radar for the birds.”

“Sometimes we hear a sound like marbles at night, too. A whole bunch of marbles being turned over. Is that when they dump the coal cars?” the Asian guy asked.

“Now listen, we only dump those during the day. Not at night. It’s gotta be somethin’ else,” Lynwood started.

“I’m not complaining, I’m just saying I hear it.”

“Yeah, we’re not complaining,” the yuppies jumped in a little defensively.

We took the elevator down from the roof to the bottom floor of the plant. Here the ash from the generators was gathered, lumping into an almost iridescent gray rock of ash. Lynwood nudged a lump with his foot. “Some cities use this stuff as road fill.”

We stepped out of the plant into the yards and walked up to a hut made of steel siding, watched over by a kid in his midtwenties who looked very different from the type of employee we had encountered in the plant: grubby jeans, a T-shirt, and a battered ball cap. Mirant had partnered with a local wildlife organization to introduce sturgeon into the Potomac. Along the perimeter huge tubs contained these fish at different stages of maturity. The unfiltered water they swam in was drawn right out of the river, and so far, the sturgeon were alive, slipping around in their confinement. I imagined their bellies sliced open for black caviar to sell to restaurants and fish markets on the waterfront. I wasn’t sure I was willing to eat anything from the womb of a fish that filtered Potomac River water in and out. Any pollution the plant had added to the river over the years really was just a drop in the bucket; certainly many other companies had done their part.

Sturgeon wasn’t the only wildlife-friendly initiative on board for Mirant. “And we’re working on a project to develop a nesting area for bald eagles,” Mike Stumpf had been careful to add at the end of his presentation.