In a February column “All neighbors have stake in power-plant suit,” I discussed a lawsuit in the works against the owners of the Salem Power Plant, Dominion Resources, a giant Virginia-based energy company, for violating the federal Clean Air Act. The suit has been filed and there are even more violations listed than originally anticipated.
In that column, I reported to you that 286 violations occurred during 2005-2008 and the first three quarters of 2009. The lawsuit now lists 317 violations of the federal Clean Air Act’s opacity pollution limit in the past five years and argues that penalties of more than $10 million are due.
How many times have you drawn a breath over the past five years? Five years is of course a long time, but consider that it’s been 11 times that amount of time since the plant was built on our harbor. For over a half century, pollution from that plant has not only coated every surface along with sunlight, snow and rain, but it also creeps into our homes, our lungs and our bloodstreams.
The cost to our health is too high, and that’s why many of us have been fighting for decades to prompt the owners, currently Dominion Resources, to clean up this filthy and long-depreciated facility.
In this week’s Reporter, one of Dominion’s many spokespeople responds with a well-worn talking point saying in the plant’s defense, “Salem Harbor Power Station operates in full compliance with all federal and state regulations,’’ while declining to address the substance of the lawsuit. This response has long provided shelter for the corporation from those who have clamored for cleanup. But now that Dominion’s own records are being used to substantiate violations, this statement is more than ridiculous — it’s outrageous.
The costs to society of laxly regulated coal burning are pricey in so many ways but remain external to the bottom line. Mountaintops are removed, slurry ponds give way, and accidents at power plants and coalmines often take the lives of workers. There are less immediate but real costs such as loss of vistas, destruction of natural resources and fouling of our environment.
More obvious is when emissions pit the fiberglass surface of a boat or when our children track it into our homes. The coal waste that sat at the bottom of Wenham Lake (drinking water for 80,000 people in Salem, Beverly and parts of Wenham) for a half century took six years of work to rectify. The approximately $10 million price tag for that ordeal only further emphasizes that prevention is priceless.
This lawsuit will test in the courts the continued ability of the plant owners to ignore public health and sidestep federal regulations. Perhaps now that they’re being held to the law, they will find that burning coal without scrubbers in a dilapidated “grandfathered” plant is too expensive. That choice, after the plant’s owners are held accountable for just a few of the plant’s externalities, unfortunately, is theirs.
State Rep. Lori Ehrlich, D-Marblehead, who represents Marblehead, Swampscott and two precincts in Lynn on Beacon Hill, is a co-founder of Beverly-based Wenham Lake Watershed Association and Swampscott-based HealthLink, community-based nonprofits formed to address pollution from the Salem Harbor Power Plant.