The dirtiest power plant?

These two photos were taken Sunday when I was up in Gallia County, Ohio. The day was nice, and I needed to get photos of the two power plants up there. The top one is the Gavin plant, owned by AEP. The bottom one is Kyger Creek, owned by Ohio Valley Electric Corp.

Gavin is interesting because for years it was held out as the largest contributor to acid rain (Whatever happened to acid rain? Was it put out of action by global warming?). Greenpeace even had a media protest event there in 1984. But things have changed.

A couple of weeks ago, the Toxic Release Inventory for 2006 came out. I did the math to see how bad Gavin was. Six years ago, photographer Lori Wolfe and I spent a day in the town of Cheshire, Ohio, next to the Gavin plant, after AEP said it would buy out anyone in the town who wanted to sell. Right now, there may be a dozen houses left in the old Cheshire.

But how bad is Gavin today? Well, I totalled the air and land disposal of pollutants from 10 power plants in this region. Gavin was the cleanest when it came to air pollution, but it had the highest amount of waste going to land disposal, probably because of its air pollution reduction system. If you want to see the numbers, here they are. These are for pounds of emissions into the air, and they are ranked most to least:

Amos, Putnam County WV: 19,146,001

Stuart, Adams County OH: 10,868,851

Big Sandy, Lawrence County KY: 6,858,888

Mountaineer, Mason County WV: 5,495,988

Willow Island, Pleasants County WV: 5,325,298

Kyger Creek, Gallia County OH: 4,928,765

Philip Sporn, Mason County WV: 4,650,822

Killen, Adams County OH: 2,607,275

Kanawha River, Kanawha County WV: 2,022,455

Gavin, Gallia County OH: 1,742,520

This is not to defend Gavin. There was a reason AEP bought out most of the people in Cheshire. AEP spent millions of dollars on pollution control equipment at Gavin so it could comply with new standards set by the federal Clean Air Act. But two control systems interacted and formed new pollution. On the hot, humid days of summer 2001, a blue fog of sulfuric acid descended on the town a dozen or more times, burning eyes and choking throats.

A few weeks ago, when a similar haze was reported in eastern Putnam County and western Kanawha County, those of us who remembered what happened in Cheshire figured out what had happened before WV officials determined the cause.

Cheshire is growing again. While most of old Cheshire is gone, the village has been able to annex enough land to increase its population, which had shrunk to about 21, by another 120 or so. We'll have an idea when the Census Bureau releases its 2007 population estimates for cities and places later this month.

But Gavin appears to be off the list of America's dirtiest power plants.