Dear 'Links,

 

Join activists in front of the Salem Power Plant TODAY, 6/30 at 10 a.m., as distressing new findings are released on the ballooning costs of burning fossil fuels. HealthLink's Jane Bright will speak on impacts of burning coal and other fuels on our health and the environment. Environment Massachusetts will inform us of taxpayer dollars spent to keep old plants operating and why we can no longer afford to depend on dirty energy. 

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Salem woman watches plant smokestacks
June 26, 2009

By Tom Dalton, Staff writer

SALEM - Katie Giddings can see the smokestacks from her kitchen window. When she walks her little Puerto Rican rescue dog, Cocho, around her neighborhood near The House of the Seven Gables, the tall towers loom above.
A few times, she took photos of the large plumes coming from the stacks, which she e-mailed to HealthLink, a North Shore environmental group that posts "plant watch" pictures on its Web site.
Since she moved to Salem about four years ago and settled close to Salem Harbor Station, the stacks have been on her mind.
"I always noticed when there was a giant cloud of smoke coming out of the stack," Giddings said. "That looked bad to me."
It may have looked bad, but the 31-year-old graphic designer didn't know if it really was bad.
Today, she says she does, or at least can make a more educated guess. She has gone to something called "smoke school" and become one of the state's certified smoke watchers.
In April, Giddings took a training course offered by Eastern Technical Associates, the country's largest operator of smoke schools, and received what is called a visible emissions certificate. It is the same training and certification given to workers in industry and at regulatory agencies, according to the company.
Giddings is one of only a few private citizens to go through the program. ETA said it trains up to 12,000 people annually, more than 95 percent of whom are from industry or government agencies and have to be certified to comply with state or federal environmental regulations.
The Salem woman had never heard of smoke school when she got an e-mail from HealthLink several months ago saying it was looking for a volunteer to go through the training. The nonprofit group had received a small grant to pay for the course, which costs up to $375 and usually takes three days.
For HealthLink, this was one more way to be a watchdog of Salem Harbor Station, the 745-megawatt coal- and oil-fired plant on the waterfront. Giddings will be a pair of trained eyes fixed on the plant.
"We don't trust them," said longtime HealthLink member Lynn Nadeau. "We (also) know that citizen action makes a difference."
Dominion, the plant owner, says it complies with all state and federal pollution regulations, and that it electronically monitors the opacity of the emissions from its stacks and reports the information to the state Department of Environmental Protection.
"If for some reason the monitors are not working, our station's environmental compliance coordinator is trained to perform visual opacity monitoring to ensure that the station emissions are within our permit," the company said in a statement. "He is required to have this training and record his observations with state DEP."
Making a difference
For Giddings, a member of the city's recycling committee, getting this training was voluntary and, for her, just seemed like the right thing to do.
It was a way to try to make a difference. She has been growing increasingly concerned about the environment since attending a seminar on climate change and taking classes on environmental management at the Harvard Extension School.
She started collecting rainwater from her roof and taking the train to work to reduce her own carbon footprint. She saw smoke school as another small step in her personal campaign to combat climate change.
"We have a small window to make some changes," she said.
The training does not make her an expert, she said, but it allows her to make an expert judgment on the thickness, or density, of the smoke, a possible indicator of a high concentration of particulates, or tiny particles in the air that can contribute to asthma, lung cancer and other respiratory ailments.
The training course she took in Hopkinton included classroom instruction and field training. She even took an outdoor exam that involved looking at plumes of white and black smoke produced by a portable smoke generator and recording the level of opacity, based on a numerical scale of 0 to 100.
"The method is really subjective," Giddings said. "It's just a matter of training your eye to recognize the different opacities."
As a private citizen, Giddings plays no official role in the monitoring of the plant but hopes the state pays attention when, and if, she files a report. It might trigger them to come and take a look for themselves, she said.
"They would be more willing to listen to someone who's certified than someone who just calls and says, 'It looks smoky today,'" she said.
It has been only a few weeks, but Giddings has yet to file her first report.
"I haven't seen anything that seems bad so far," she said.