Families Against Cancer & Toxics

By Mark Ferenchik

THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

One by one, three towering smokestacks that for decades stood as monuments to government ineptitude and waste will tumble to the earth this morning.

For better or worse, the stacks of Columbus' trash-burning power plant have loomed over the South Side as landmarks for travelers heading north toward town on I-71.

That changes today. At 10 a.m., demolition crews will detonate charges in each of the 272-foot-tall smokestacks. They'll topple like trees toward the north, falling three seconds apart. Mayor Michael B. Coleman and others will push the button.

For nearby residents such as Robert Wilson, it means more than just cool explosions.

"It finally says the people have won, that this is the end of an era,'' said Wilson, who helped organize Southwest Neighbors Protecting Our Environment.

"This entire thing has been a drain. It was designed and built with plenty of problems built in.''

From 1982 until 2010 when the city pays off the debt, Columbus taxpayers will have spent $438.3 million on the plant, Auditor Hugh J. Dorrian said. The city still owes $58 million on the plant. The Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio, the area's garbage agency, owes the city $32.4 million for its lease on the plant.

Voters approved an additional 0.5 percent income tax in November 1982. It was either that or a property tax to pay for the plant.

But Dorrian doesn't see the demolition as a cause for celebration.

"Let's get this thing down, get it behind us,'' said Dorrian, who opposed the plant when it was pitched nearly 30 years ago as an innovative way to solve the city's energy and trash problems.

Crews have scrubbed and vacuumed pollutants, including cancer-causing dioxins, from the smokestacks, waste authority spokesman John Remy said. A stack test in 1992 found dioxin levels 500 times higher than what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recommended.

The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency doesn't have any concerns about the demolition releasing toxins into the air, said Craig Butler, chief of the agency's central district office.

But Teresa Mills, director of the Buckeye Environmental Network, remains concerned.

"I wouldn't want anyone standing too close to it,'' she said.

Spectators won't be allowed on the site, Remy said. They'll have to find their own vantage points.

A Tulsa, Okla., company, Dykon Blasting Corp., is demolishing the stacks.

Pushed by then-Mayor Tom Moody and others during the oil embargoes and energy crises of the 1970s, the plant never generated the income that boosters said it would. Instead, it created environmental problems leading to a lawsuit and federal orders to clean it up.

A bond issue in 1976 to provide $103 million for the plant failed.

But in November 1977, voters passed a bond issue for a $118 million plant. The issue authorized the city to impose a 2.5-mill property tax, but Moody said revenues the plant generated would more than pay off the debt.

It never happened, and before the plant even opened, Moody told voters their real-estate taxes would rise unless they approved an additional income tax.

"In November 1982,'' Dorrian said, "not only were we borrowing money to build the plant, we were borrowing money to pay the interest on the money borrowed to build the plant.''

That month, voters approved increasing the city's 1.5 percent income tax to 2 percent. City residents are still paying it.

The $200 million plant opened in June 1983.

Former Columbus Mayor Dana G. "Buck'' Rinehart recalled busloads of schoolchildren and other visitors touring what was considered a prototypical plant.

"I remember taking a group of Russians through the plant,'' Rinehart said.

Rinehart also remembered that he had to tape a public service announcement telling people not to throw pantyhose and bowling balls into the garbage.

Pantyhose would gum up the augers used to grind the trash. Bowling balls would break equipment in the crushers.

Those were hardly the only problems.

"It created political challenges because the people on the South Side of Columbus were raising some serious, legitimate questions about the emissions of the plant,'' Rinehart said.

Mills remembers more than a decade ago when a neighbor saw a yellow cloud hanging over her Grove City neighborhood.

Her organization tracked it to the power plant. They learned about cancer-causing dioxins. She remains concerned about the dioxins that could remain in the soil.

The U.S. EPA ordered the waste authority to cut dioxin levels, but in July 1994, the board decided not to install smokestack scrubbers.

In November 1994, the solid waste authority's board voted to close the plant.

Dorrian said the idea was bad from the beginning.

"If any of the pieces of the revenue stream did not materialize, we were stuck with the fixed cost,'' he said. "We had no one to share the risk with.''

But others didn't share his views.

"The mayor at the time had lots of support. The Dispatch endorsed it,'' Dorrian said.

The solid waste authority hired B&B Wrecking and Excavating, a Cleveland company, in January to demolish the plant. The company thinks it can make so much money from selling the scrap steel that it paid the solid waste authority $377,500 for the honor of tearing it down. The authority sent the money to the city as a debt payment.

Remy said demolition of the main building should begin in four or five weeks.

mferenchik@dispatch.com