photo: DOE

From the New York Times:

THE Hanford Reach National Monument in the arid steppe of south-central Washington is a nature lover’s dream with the Columbia River flowing wide and free below chalk-white cliffs, an abundance of birds, and populations of deer, elk and coyotes. But there’s a twist: It surrounds the Hanford nuclear reservation, one of the world’s largest environmental clean-up projects.

There’s a nice set of photos, too.

Where else outside of the Ukraine can you get such plutonium chic?

Otherwise, there’s no news. Construction of the New Safe Confinement (the shelter for the Shelter Object) is supposed to go forward sometime in the next year or so. You might want to visit the Sarcophagus while you still can…

Well, now I really want to.

Open Sewers of the World

Interesting Drains

The list is garbage-focussed, but they all sound like excellent destinations, especially the giant trash pile floating in the Pacific. Smillie deserves special credit for not just rehashing the same lists of polluted places that everyone else has already gotten their teeth into. And he’s even got tips for how to get to each place and where to stay when you get there.

Hear that sound? It’s the zeitgeist sliding in this direction.

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Beautiful Messes: A Travel Guide to Man-Made Disasters

Congrats, Pittsburgh. Somehow, you beat out LA as the most-polluted city in America… You should probably start a public bike program, and pass some more green initiatives. In the meantime, pick up your phone. China’s calling. They have some facemasks to sell you.

Not so fast. I’ve got to put in a word for Pittsburgh here. They may be tops in “short-term particle,” but that’s only one list. The ALA also has rankings for “year-round particle” and for ozone. Anyone who wants to check it out will notice that LA still comes in first for “year-round,” leaving ozone as the tie-breaker.

And the result? In a split decision… LOS ANGELES. Sorry, suckers. Pittsburgh’s not even in the top ten for ozone. So LA pulls down two out of three lists, and therefore (if you ask me) keeps the title for worst all-around air quality in the country. Hear that, LA? You need to cool it with the “In yo’ face, Pittsburgh!” attitude. It’s also hard not to mention that about half of all the spots on these lists are occupied by cities in California.

That’s right. Anyone who goes to Disneyland is a pollution tourist.

Buried in all of this (specifically, buried on page 10 of the ALA report) is the real news:

Several cities that also reduced year-round particle pollution dropped off the “25 most polluted” list this year, including New York City…

Whoa! All this time I thought NYC was the green champ just based on per-capita carbon footprint, and that in aggregate it was still pretty bad. But in fact, we’re not even on the list. So tell me again, why don’t you live in New York City?

In other listfreak news, Newsweek has the 9 Unhealthiest Summer Vacation Destinations, which sounds great until you realize that they’re just as concerned about crime and restaurant hygiene as they are with pollution. What gives? Just because you could get robbed blind in Detroit doesn’t mean the place is unhealthy. The other problem? Newsweek seems to think you ought to stay away from unhealthy places. As if!

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Thanks to the American Lung Association for their State of the Air report, which is the source of all the ruckus. You can donate to their campaign for clean air.

This is only the second year for what everyone hopes will be a yearly tradition (can’t wait ’till the 2008 list comes out). TIME did a nice little slideshow about the list when it came out, but the seriously interested will head for Blacksmith’s site. It has a map, extra photos, and tons of information—a veritable treasure trove for pollution tourists everywhere. As Blacksmith President Richard Fuller says in the accompanying TIME article, “…we forget that ordinary pollution is still something that destroys a lot of lives. These cities aren’t on the tourist trail.”

Give it time, Rich. Give it time.

Elsewhere on the interwebs, Popular Science has put up a pretty weak list called the World’s Dirtiest Cities. Considering the amount of overlap here, and the image grabs from Blacksmith’s site, the PopSci folks clearly started with the Blacksmith list, tossed out things that weren’t cities per se, and threw in Milan, Pittsburgh, and Mexico City for popular appeal. They’re already being convincingly taken apart in their own comments. True, from a site traffic point of view, putting Milan, Pittsburgh, and DF on there is totally pro. Just think of the thousands of residents of those cities who might click through to this slideshow out of sheer, outraged disbelief.

Otherwise, lame. PopSci ought at least to link back to Blacksmith, who are the original badboys of pollution destination rankings.

And what do the badboys tell us? China, India, and the former USSR are where the action is, with Africa and South America represented by one spot each. The suggestions I’ve received from helpful friends and horrified rubberneckers in the past couple years have followed pretty much the same distribution, which only gives Blacksmith that much more credibility in my eyes.

So far, I’ve only gotten to one of the ten listed sites. Got a lot of traveling to do.

Yes, overseas travel is great. But let’s not neglect the virtues of places a little closer to home. Me, I live in New York City—a story of its own—and I’m dying to spend a day biking around that part of New Jersey on the other side of the Hudson that is so aggressively nasty-smelling. Exactly what are those guys brewing up?

For those of you who might be living in the fair environs of Houston, I point you to Port Arthur, TX. In today’s New York Times, Adam Ellick reports about a proposed deal that would bring PCBs from Mexico to Port Arthur to be incinerated. PCBs don’t usually get imported to the US, because they’re wretchedly toxic, and it’s hard to tell when they’re being incinerated completely. So, naturally, the people living in Port Arthur would prefer that these Mexican PCBs be let alone.

To me, the PCB thing is a bit of a sidebar to the real story, which is the town itself:

This downtrodden chemical town on the Gulf of Mexico has no shortage of nicknames: Cancer Alley, the Armpit of Texas, Ring of Fire.

Built on a gush of oil wealth, Port Arthur eventually wooed chemical and waste plants as well. But since the 1970s, this city, which is majority African-American, has complained that it has become a dumping ground for the nation’s toxic waste.

In addition to the print article, Ellick put together a video report that has some great images of what looks like a very depressed town dominated by oil and chemical plants. You know there’s good spots to drink in this place.

I also want to point out that Port Arthur may be the Armpit of Texas, but we all have them. Armpits, I mean. And I’m not planning on getting rid of mine any time soon.

Thus is born the Destinations section of our humble site. (If you can think of a name that sounds even more like a section of Parade magazine, please let me know.) These will be the posts that explore the pollution tourist’s dream vacations. And though I fully intend to visit all these places myself in the months and years ahead, I’ve got special prizes for any person out there who first gets to any of our featured Destinations and sends me some photos and a report.

Anyway. There’s been a heat wave in New York City. A sultry (or, if you like, oppressive) closeness hangs in the air, and whatever you’re doing, you find yourself suddenly sweatier than you had expected. The spring is out of Spring’s step. Actually let’s face it, Spring isn’t stepping at all anymore. It’s stopped in its tracks, stunned and overtaken, undone by the heat. The euphoria that came with the end of Winter is long gone, and there’s a bit of dread about the hot months unfolding before us, a yin-dread that fits perfectly hand in hand with the yang-dread you get on a cold November day when you see Winter stretching out in front of you.

In short, it’s Summer. And so unless you’re a communist or something, it’s time to think about the beach.

The main problem with the beach, aside from all that sand and water and sun, of course, is the presence of so many other people. And for some reason, beaches just shouldn’t have too many other beachgoers around. No beach, whether it be on Long Island or in the Caribbean, is ever advertised as having more than, say, three people on it, and one of those people is supposed to be you, looking much better than you actually do in a bathing suit. (The other two people allowed on advertising beaches are attractive, sexually available members of the opposite sex.) These idealized beaches are completely pristine, their sands virginally white, their waters a supernatural indigo unseen even in Oliver Sacks’s weirdest acid trip.

Reality usually diverges from this ideal, naturally, and the crowded, trash-strewn mediocrity of most beaches is the counterpoint to every magazine ad you’ve ever seen for the Bahamas. The idea of the pristine beach depends for its allure on our memories of sullied beaches, in the sort of structuralist codependency that used to turn college students on. I once saw a beach that managed to be both pristine and sullied at once. It was near Pondicherry, on the southeast coast of India. It was perhaps the most beautiful beach I’d ever been to, with miles of smooth sand and warm water. But then I noticed it was scattered with all kinds of shit. Literally shit. Maybe not all kinds, though—it was pretty much just human shit. The beach, though coveted by foreigners for its picturesque beauty, was valued locally for its usefulness as a toilet, and there were little bowel-ziggurats everywhere you looked. It was a nasty disappointment, unless you understood that the shit was actually guarding that beach, driving the crowds away like a little army of plucky brown sentinels. Standing there, surrounded by the morning bowel movements of an entire community, I realized that the problem with dirty beaches is not that they’re dirty, but that we wish they were clean.

Ok, I’m digressing. This whole post could have read, “Screw Cancun, I’m going to Sitakunda.”

Sitakunda, in Chittagong, in Bangladesh, is the premiere spot in the world for shipbreaking. You see, ships have to go somewhere to die. But unlike people or dogs, the corpse of a dead ship can be quite valuable, from a recycling point of view. So valuable, in fact, that long before it becomes unseaworthy a ship may find itself worth more as raw material than as a useful boat, no matter how well it plies the ocean. We should be happy this isn’t true for humans, by the way, or people would be killing you for your bones before you even got to retirement age. A bit like having too much life insurance, I guess.

Anyhow, when they can no longer resist the idea of a quick payout for an old boat, the owners of these ships—tankers, supertankers, ubersupertankers, cruise ships, what have you—sell them to shipbreaking companies. Shipbreaking companies, which are… companies that, um, break up ships. See? The shipbreakers drive the ships up on the beach at high tide, and when the water recedes, the ship is left high, dry, and ready to be ripped to pieces and melted down to make new stuff.

I know what you’re thinking. “Hey, this is the twentyfirst century. Shouldn’t they be doing that in a dry dock?” That is what you were thinking, wasn’t it? Unless you’re my girlfriend, who may be this blog’s only reader. In which case, you’re thinking, “How did it come to this?”

Anyway, drydocks are expensive. So is cleaning up all the crud that spills out of a ship (especially a tanker) when you cut it apart. Just the cutting apart of a ship is expensive, if you want to make sure people don’t get cut up along with it, or crushed by falling sections of hull, and so on. So, naturally, shipbreakers spring up where the costs are the least, where you don’t need a drydock, where you can just let the toxic crud spill out on the beach, and where a few crushed workers or severed limbs are all part of the trade. Namely: Sitakunda.

Sitakunda is one of the few places in the world where coastal conditions, lax worker protection, and casual environmental regulation all come together to create a shipbreaking mecca. (Ambon, in India, is another.) The result is truly something to be seen, and I hope to get there soon. Thousands of people trudging around, taking gigantic ships apart with nothing but their hands and the occasional blowtorch. (What, you’ve got a better way?) The beaches have long since become something of an industrial shithole, and—just as you might expect—that tends to keep the tourists away. But why should it? Is it really so much better to sit on the white sand and gaze at the azure perfection of the water in some unspoiled cove in the South Pacific, when you could be here in Sitakunda watching a hundred guys pull the side off a supertanker with a rope?

Cmon! Easy question!

Anyone who has doubts should check out the photography of Edward Burtynsky, the post-industrial Ansel Adams, who has taken some mindbending pictures of shipbreaking beaches. You can also check out this segment from 60 Minutes, though you should ignore the haughty “hell on earth” attitude and the holier-than-thou approach they take to the Bengali scene. After all, the whole world—that includes us—is selling their ships to the shipbreakers. It’s not like we as consumers are leaping out of our barcaloungers to pay more for our shipping or our fuel, just so the ships that provide it can be taken apart more cleanly. We’re all in this globe thing together, guys, so let’s be a little less shocked and show a little more ownership when we find out that our commerce creates a lot of trash, and shit.

Vacationwise, Sitakunda seem absolutely ripe. In the positive sense. I doubt that the shipbreaking companies get a lot of tourists, especially ones who aren’t there to cluck their tongues at their environmental practices. (I might cluck my tongue, but not so specifically at the shipbreakers. More at the world in general.) I would imagine that, once they figure out you’re not an activist, a friendly beachgoer could set up his chair and umbrella largely unharrassed. What’re you going to do, steal a propeller off an old Carnival cruise ship? And tourguides must be cheap, since they probably won’t realize they are tour guides until after you have ask ed them to guide your tour. Just make sure you don’t get crushed or killed or burnt or stuck in toxic quicksand or something, ok? If you do, it’s not my fault.

And it doesn’t have to be all about sludge and falling steel plates. It looks like, as you get away from the shipbreaking beaches, Sitakunda is an interesting region to visit even from a more conventional point of view. Proper tourists would surely skip it, but then, they would probably skip all of Bangladesh. There are a bazillion mosques and temples and shrines (and a few ashrams) in the area, and even an eco-park and some alternative energy projects, for chrissakes. What’s not to like about this place?

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UPDATE: In the comments, Mark says he has recently been here, and that most of the yards are actually in a place called Bhatiary, about 20km to the south. Thanks, Mark!

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

Google maps

More pictures