What’s happened to Georgia Power’s close-in-2002 Coal Plant Arkwright
that
Putnam County Manager Paul Van Houte used as a bad example?
According to
Georgia Power’s own online history:
In 2002, the company retired 11 generating units at three sites including
all of the units at Plant Atkinson and Plant Arkwright and two units at
Plant Mitchell.
Southern Company has online a
press release from 15 May 2002: Continue reading
Lowndes County is not
“the only community in the country with a MAZ”:
Houston County has very similar zones of encroachment protection around
Warner Robins Air Force Base (RAFB).
As we’ve already seen,
Houston County is buying up houses around RAFB
using $7.5 million from the state of Georgia.
That’s in addition to $6 million from Bibb County and
some unspecified amount from the Defense Department.
Plus Houston County
allocated $7 million from SPLOST funds,
and their SPLOST won by a landslide, apparently partly for that reason.
But what are
those encroachment zones around Warner Robins AFB
depicted on the buyback map?
I called Houston County to find out.
Their Community Planner, Jacob Cox, said yes, Houston County
has crash zones, and noise attenuation zones in which they can
have businesses but not residences.
He pointed me to
The Robins Air Force Base and Middle Georgia
2004 Joint Land Use Study,
which notes:
The 2004 JLUS examines land issues as they relate to RAFB flying
missions and suggests measures to ensure compatible land use in the
Base environs now and into the future. The 2004 JLUS process
utilizes information provided in the 1998 RAFB Air Installation
Compatibility Use Zone study (AICUZ) to evaluate land use
compatibility and regulatory adequacy in areas subject to air hazard
potential and noise impact. Additional considerations related to air
navigation, including air protection surfaces are examined. Clear
Zones and Accident Potential Zones are all considered compatible
with AICUZ guidelines. Incidences of incompatible development are
predominantly restricted to a limited number of non-noise attenuated
residences built prior to 1994.The results of the 2004 JLUS demonstrate that previously adopted
land use regulations have been effective in limiting incompatible
development within the Base environs. The 1994 adoption of the Base
Environs Zoning District (BEZD) model by the surrounding communities
has served to check most encroachment-type development. Only a very
low number of sporadic, isolated examples of noise-related
incompatible development was observed to have been built since
implementation of the BEZD land regulation strategy. Consistent
local government implementation of adopted provisions must be
maintained in order to continue to provide the protection necessary
to prevent incompatible development from restraining Base operations
in the future.
So as far back as 1994 the communities around RAFB were using zoning
to limit base encroachment.
The 1998 AICUZ recommended further
Clear Zones and Accident Potential Zones.
Why?
Mission changes at RAFB.
So the 2004 JLUS made recommendations and the local governments, including Houston County,
decided to go ahead and do something about it.
Penny-wise, pound foolish, that's coal and coal ash, we're all discovering.
S. Heather Duncan wrote for the Macon Telegraph 14 April 2012, Plant Scherer ash pond worries neighbors as Georgia Power buys, levels homes,
The home among the trees was supposed to be Mark Goolsby's inheritance. His 78-year-old mother now lives in the large, white, wood farmhouse that his family built before the Civil War.
But Goolsby says he'll never live there now.
That's because across the street and through those trees is one of the largest coal ash ponds in the country. It belongs to Plant Scherer, a coal-fired plant that came to the neighborhood considerably later than the Goolsby family. In the mid-1970s, Goolsby said, “when (Georgia Power) bought 350 acres from my dad, they told him we'd never know they were there.”
Those acres are now part of an unlined pond where Georgia Power deposits about 1,000 pounds of toxic coal ash a day. Neither federal nor Georgia rules require groundwater monitoring around the pond. The federal Toxic Release Inventory shows that in 2010 alone, the pond received ash containing thousands of pounds of heavy metals and radioactive compounds including arsenic, vanadium, and chromium.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that up to 1 in 50 residents nationally who live near ash ponds could get cancer from the arsenic leaking into wells. The EPA also predicts that unlined ash ponds can increase other health risks, such as damage to the liver, kidneys and central nervous system, from contaminants such as lead.
A massive 2008 spill from a Tennessee coal ash pond led to greater scrutiny of the dams that hold these ponds in place, and the EPA promised new rules for storing coal ash. The process led to broader awareness of a more long-term health threat: groundwater contamination from the ponds.
So what's Georgia Power's solution?
Monroe County property records show Georgia Power has spent about $1.1 million buying property near Plant Scherer between 2008 and the end of 2010. But the true number may be higher.
They're going to have to keep doing that until they buy up a lot more property, I predict.
Wouldn't it be cheaper for the future bottom line of Georgia Power and its parent the Southern Company to invest in solar and wind power?
-jsq
How to get a biomass plant approved in Georgia:
tack it onto an existing business.
Remember to get an industrial authority to use a public bond issue
to expand the private business.
Carla Caldwell
wrote in the
Atlanta Business Chronicle 7 June 2011,
Graphic Packaging gets $140M bond deal
A deal OK’d by the Macon-Bibb County Industrial Authority provides
revenue bonds for a $140 million expansion of Marietta, Ga.-based
Graphic Packaging
International’s Macon, Ga. mill. Improvements will include the addition of
a biomass boiler and a 40-megawatt turbine generator geared to reduce
emergency cost and improve profitability, reports Macon Telegraph
website macon.com.The authority approved the deal on Monday for the provider of packaging
for food, beverage and consumer products. The biomass system, which
is scheduled for operation by mid-2013, is expected to generate power
from about 400,000 tons of logging materials, mostly the tops of trees,
the Macon newspaper reports. Graphic Packaging’s (NYSE: GPK) Macon mill
makes an estimated 1,600 tons of paperboard daily.
Maybe we should put some
parameters on the types of industry we want around here to avoid this
happening with the bonds the Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority
(and the Lowndes County Commission) floats.
This rationalization is precious: