Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 4, 1992 TAG: 9202040228
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BUENA VISTA LENGTH: Medium
PROPOSED POWER PLANT PANNED
If Louisville Gas and Electric builds its 60-megawatt coal-fired cogeneration plant here, it would "significantly threaten" wilderness, water and fish in the nearby James River Face Wilderness, Jefferson National Forest officials have warned state officials.Hundreds of Rockbridge County residents and critics from elsewhere in Virginia packed a school auditorium here Monday night to plead with the state's Department of Air Pollution Control to block construction of the power plant.
Staffers representing the U.S. Park Service, the Jefferson Forest and the Shenandoah National Park came to the hearing armed with documents warning of the plant's sulphur and nitrogen oxide emissions.
Jefferson Superintendent Joy Berg said in a paper dated Monday that the power plant's emissions would increase sulphur dioxide concentration at the James River Face, nine miles from here, by 3 percent over background conditions. She praised the company for lowering potential emissions in the years of planning, but she said it has not gone far enough.
The state's own air regulators concluded a few weeks ago that the cogeneration plant meets state air standards. The plant, under development for four years, would generate steam for the local company, Georgia Bonded Fibers, electricity for Virginia Power and hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes for this industrial city.
Critic after critic stood before two regional officials of the air agency and questioned their reliance on computer modeling, not raw local data, for their calculations and on their computer use of weather data from Greensboro, N.C., instead of Buena Vista.
Robert Kennel, a senior vice president with Louisville Gas & Electric and this project's chief advocate for years, seemed confident his company could withstand criticisms from the park service. "We've been working for four years here," he said. "We've been trying to be good neighbors."
Local scientists like Edwin Goller, head of the chemistry department at Virginia Military Institute, said the state's analysis does not adequately address Buena Vista's susceptibility to thermal inversions, the frequent dead calms in its air.
In this three-college county, citizens obviously had pored long over the high stacks of project documents sitting in the public libraries for their inspection.
"I have found lots of paper filled with technical jargon and an endless series of computer-generated numbers that predict [sulphur dioxide] concentrations," said county carpenter and farmer Steve Richards, "but nothing confirming field conditions that would back up these numbers.
"I consider this comparable to attempting to build a skyscraper without a foundation," he said. "I can't decide whether this represents poor science or poor policy, or both."
David Carr with the Southern Environmental Law Center in Charlottesville, representing environmental organizations with 50,000 Virginia members, said the Buena Vista plant, along with 19 other new generation sources proposed in the last five years, would seriously raise Virginia's air pollution.