A couple weeks ago K. and I were on vacation, and we headed down to Washington DC, my old home. Originally we had been thinking of going to Costa Rica, maybe Bogota, but then I thought of how many good friends we have in DC, and what nice guest rooms they have. So I thought I’d treat my gal to something a little more… free. She loves free. Right, sweetie? Sweetie?
Within the first couple of days, we had hit a good range of my favorite places, and Katie was tiring of hearing me say thing like, “This is the spot where I used to catch the bus in October ‘94,” and “Well I’ll be! That building wasn’t there before!” For my part, revisiting my old haunts was pleasantly nostalgic, but I was getting a little worn down by how it also reminded me of how long it had been since I first moved to DC, and how long since I left, and of how much things had changed, and of how even if I live to be a hundred, I’m still the better part of four fifths of halfway into the grave.
It was time for something new‚ and a little environmental degradation is always a pick-me-up. Pollution tourism in Our Nation’s Capitol!
DC offers a number of attractive destinations for the pollution tourist‚ but where to start? Superfund never seems like a bad idea, and the EPA website does list eight sites. But there was nothing that struck my fancy. Sure, American University may still have WWI-era chemical weapons buried underground somewhere–but who can find them? And while Cardozo Senior High School students have proven themselves impressively resourceful in turning their school building into a Superfund site with only a few ounces of merucry, that situation has long since been cleaned up. I mean, I assume.
We turned to local knowledge, which is always best. Zach Lyman–entrepreneur, solar magnate, freelance swimming pool cleaner–had some ideas. The Anacostia River, for starters. Rivers are some of the most reliable spots, year in and year out, on any self-respecting pollution tourist’s itinerary. And the Anacostia (sometimes called the “other” river while people are off worrying about the bigger, sexier, whiter Potomac) has a goodly load of problems: toxins, garbage, sewage, sediment…
And yet. A river is a big job, pollution-tourismwise, what with miles of riverbank and all. Who wants to spend the whole day? Surely there was something more touristy… maybe something near the National Mall? Maybe in view of the Capitol dome itself?
Yes, indeed! And it’s called the Capitol Power Plant.
The Capitol Power Plant is nestled into the landscape not half a mile south of the Capitol Dome, just east of South Capitol Street, like a big baby cradled in the elbow of the arm formed by highways 295 and 395. A big old baby with smokestacks. About a hundred years old, it hasn’t produced electricity since the fifties; instead, it makes great volumes of steam and cold water, which get pumped north through underground pipes to heat and cool the Capitol and a host of other government buildings. Half the energy for this comes from coal, and indeed the plant is the only one in the District that burns the stuff.
In the last decade, some eager beavers in Congress have tried to do away with the coal in the mix, maybe figuring that DC’s air doesn’t need the grief. But people in coal states are proud of their resource, or at least their elected officials are, or at least they have no problem saying they are. Let’s just say it’ll be a while before the honorable senators and representatives from Kentucky and West Virginia let the Capitol Power Plant switch completely over to wimpy natural gas. Not while there are still mountains of virile coal to burn. And Nancy Pelosi will have a hard time offsetting that, no matter how many compact fluorescents she screws in to the Capitol’s light fixtures.
The plant complex is bordered on the east by one of those leafy neighborhoods that makes DC so nice for people who aren’t snobs from New York. We parked there and strolled down North Carolina Avenue. Halfway down the block and—-voila!——we could already see the smokestacks poking up behind the trees.
At the bottom of the hill, you come out into the open and get your first good view of the plant in all its coaltastic glory.
But fossil fuels are never quite as grungy in the burning as one hopes, are they? The smokestacks failed to be smoking. For all I know, they only burn coal on the weekends; I couldn’t see any kind of exhaust, not counting a goodly plume of steam rising from somewhere inside the plant. In fact, as embarrassing as this is for a pollution tourist, I don’t even know what the exhaust from a coal burning power plant is supposed to look like these days. It could be transparent and odorless, for all I know.
For olfactory sampling, I had planned to rely on K., who has an eerily sensitive nose (coupled, fortunately for me, with a positively enthusiastic appreciation of strange and horrible smells). But today she had a cold. She calibrated her nose on some petunias adorning a low wall by the sidewalk and found her superpower greatly diminished. Now she knows what it’s like for the mortals. We’ll just have to take the Washington Post’s word for it when they tell us this is the number two spot for sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide emissions in the district.
Walking around to the west side, we came to what I have since learned is the West Refrigeration Plant. It’s only a year or two old, and doesn’t show on Google Maps’ satellite photo. The satellite had promised a picturesque mountain of coal, which was to have been the black cherry on top of our power plant sundae. Instead, we took a gander at the latest in refrigerator plant architecture: a landscaped hillock leading to a rampart of concrete panels pierced at intervals by angular steel gutter-spouts. Above all this loomed what looked like the first three stories of the new New York Times building. Through the metal slats of this structure we could see several large, squat exhaust towers. What are these things called? They’re like smokestacks, but much squatter, much easier to hide, and not nearly as cool.
Not only is this structure much, much less fun to look at than the giant pile of coal I was hoping for, it also represents—-in its modernization of the plant’s refrigeration equipment–an incremental devaluation in the site’s allure for pollution tourists. We’re here to see the dirt, guys. It’s a coal fired plant! I could forgive them if they would let us hang around on the grassy hillock, maybe play a lazy round of handball against the concrete walls of the plant. But no, it’s all surrounded by steel and chain-link fencing. In fact, chain-link was running amok all around the plant, cordoning off even parts of the sidewalk.
But the spot started to grow on me. After all, over by the Capitol itself, tourists are still waiting for the new Capitol Visitor Center to open, and it’s years behind schedule. But over here at the West Refrigeration Plant, you can already enjoy the facility that will cool that Visitor Center. They’ve even put in a bench and a couple trees. We should have brought a picnic lunch. Always be ready to picnic.
To the south, you can see what looks like some coal-moving infrastructure. Can someone tell me what that tower-thing is called?
Otherwise, on this side, there’s a blocked-off service road across the south side of the plant, which a friendly construction worker said we’d have no luck trying to enter, and a fenced-off access point to the CSX railroad tracks, along which coal is presumably delivered. Or does it come by truck? In any case, there are something like eighteen or twenty thousand tons of coal delivered to this spot every year. It seems unfair not to get to see any of it. Instead, after passing under the very grungy overpasses of the railroad and highway, the only things you’ll find are a nasty chain-link fence with both razor and barbed wire, and a bizarrely nice stretch of isolated sidewalk, complete with street lamps.
It was a hot DC spring day, the kind that would do nicely for summer. We retraced our steps, circling back around the plant, heading towards the east side of the plant to finish our tour. We noticed a couple small townhouses for sale across the street. Anyone? Anyone? They didn’t look too shabby. You could probably buy three for the price of a decent Manhattan 1BR.
At the northeast corner of the plant, a truly American vista: a sign for the new baseball stadium, a security fence, Old Glory, and a couple of coal-fired smokestacks. Yeah!
As you walk south along the east side of the plant, you get a really nice view of the old part of the building. K. kept saying, “It looks just like my high school.” Guess she had it rough growing up.
Further south, we saw what the impressive West Refrigeration Plant is augmenting… a much more down-home east refrigeration plant. Similar to its high-tech cousin, but on a much more human scale, it had a large volume of water cascading down behind its slats. Clearly part of the refrigeration/evaporation/trickle cylce. Or something. There was a strange, sweet smell of mildew or mold that I found vaguely sickening. A bird perched for a moment in one of the slats. The sound of rushing water surrounded us.
Continuing on to the south of the plant, underneath a high section of the overpass, we encountered the fabled horse people of DC. I don’t know if they are truly the subject of fable, but Zach had hinted at them darkly. “Look for the horse people,” he had said with great mystery. “Under the highway… the horse people!” He refused to clarify. The way he said it, it sounded like there was a strange race of human/horse hybrids living in DC’s underworld.
Fortunately, but somewhat disappointingly, there were no horrible mutant horse/humans to be seen. Instead, two regular, non-mutant horses lingered inside a paddock abutting the railroad tracks. A pair of pickup trucks and a horse trailer were parked to one side. It was perfectly incongruous, at once pastorally beautiful and industrially bleak.
Turning around, we had a view of the entire power plant complex, with the Capitol dome rising out of the trees directly to the north. There was a certain visual rhythm to the combination of tall smokestacks, squat refrigeration towers, and looming dome. Not to mention the satisfaction of seeing the points of production and consumption at a glance.
But the crowning moment of our tour was yet to come. Looking west from our vantage point, to a spot beyond the overpass, next to a stack of railroad ties, we finally saw it. The fuel. A two-storey hill of coal, of sweet black manna from Earth, piled against a concrete retaining wall.
I desperately wanted to get over there and get my hands on a little chunk of the stuff, but there was no obvious ingress for tourists. When will these people learn? I would happily buy the ticket to go trudging around on a giant pile of coal. Hell, at least let me kick around on the little training pile next to it!
Instead, we settled for a little fossil fuel ogling, shading our eyes from the sky and gazing out at the lonely black mountain, it’s little rounded peaks glistening in the midday Washington sun.
Additonal Links
Washington Post: “Reliance on Coal Sullies ‘Green the Capitol’ Effort
Wikipedia
