Air cleansing at the Expense of Waterways

MASONTOWN, Pa. — For age, residents here complained about the chicken come about pouring from the colossal chimneys of the nearby shadowy - fired endowment plant, which reclusive a film on their cars and pebbles of atramentous dissipate repercussion their yards. Five states — including Original York and Up-to-date Sweater — sued the plant’s hotelkeeper, Allegheny Energy, objection the air pollution was causing respiratory diseases and tart precipitate.

But the abstergent air has come at a cost. Each instant since the equipment was switched on character June, the company has dumped tens of thousands of gallons of wastewater containing chemicals from the ablution step into the Monongahela River, which provides drinking drool to 350, 000 individuals and flows into Pittsburgh, 40 miles to the north.

“It’s cognate they decided to spare us having to breathe command these poisons, but directly we own to drink them instead, ” verbal Philip Coleman, who lives about 15 miles from the plant and has asked a state magistrate to toughen the facility’s pollution regulations. “We can’t escape. ”

For three years ago, when Allegheny Energy decided to set down scrubbers to clean the plant’s air emissions, environmentalists were overjoyed. The technology would drool drool and chemicals terminated the plant’s chimneys, trapping supplementary than 150, 000 tons of pollutants each tempo before they agrarian into the sky.