CARBO, Va. – The coal-fired power plant under construction outside St. Paul, Va., was not the first to promise jobs, economic development and prosperity for Southwest Virginia. The same promises were made here 50 years ago when the Clinch River Plant was built.
“The coming of the plant into Southwest Virginia will stimulate other plants to locate in the area and to utilize the vast natural resources. It will mark the beginning of a new era,” said American Electric Power President Philip Sporn at the plant’s groundbreaking on May 16, 1956.
“New industries will increase the population of not only Russell County but the entire area. Salaries to the employees and taxes by these companies will definitely change this section into one of prosperity – the greatest it has ever known.”
Sporn, in words echoed by elected officials and other industry leaders, said at the $55 million coal-fired power plant’s dedication on Nov. 18, 1958, that industries soon to locate in the Clinch River Valley would employ “additional hundreds – perhaps thousands – of people.”
In half a century, the jobs have not materialized, and there is a sharp difference in opinion on whether the company has kept its promises.
The people who live here in the shadow of the smokestacks say the plant’s negative effects go beyond dust and noise. They say it has destroyed their community’s spirit and reduced its numbers, and many claim that there are high numbers of cancer cases among Carbo residents.
In the county seat of Lebanon, however, elected officials say taxes from the plant have paid to educate the county’s children and provide other needed services, as well as jobs and economic development.
Many of those who live in between have mixed feelings – they’re glad for the jobs at the plant, in the mines and on the railroad, but they also wonder about the effect the power plant – one of the state’s top polluters – is having on their families’ health.
A New Era Begins
Those who remember the January 1956 announcement that the plant would locate here recall the excitement surrounding the project.
It came without controversy, and many believed the $150 million total investment being made by Appalachian Power, American Electric Power’s subsidiary, the Norfolk and Western Railway and the Clinchfield Coal Co. division of Pittston marked the dawn of a new era for the region.
“This was very well received,” said Ricky Chafin, who manages the Clinch River Plant and looked into its history for the plant’s 50th anniversary. “Even most of the families who lived really close by here were really excited about the plant coming in.”
Residents old enough to recall the plant construction remember an influx of people who came here to work. There were few places to rent, they said.
After the plant opened, the immediate effect on the surrounding areas was the ash that covered the ground, gardens and homes. Longtime residents say it was a nuisance that damaged tobacco crops and dirtied clean laundry hanging out to dry.
“All of the emissions that came out of Carbo, it went as far as Spring City [several miles away] and it was on your apple tree leaves. It was all black-looking stuff like coal dust or something,” said Marion Smith, a retired school bus driver.
“It didn’t bother me after they fixed it where that black dirt wouldn’t get on your house and all the food that you raised in the garden.”
The fix came in 1975 – 17 years after the plant opened – when electrostatic precipitators were installed to collect the ash instead of sending it up the stack. Still, Smith said the plant’s coming was “a good thing.”
“I can remember when we first got electricity, and we bought a new refrigerator and could go in and turn the lights on and how wonderful it was,” she said.
Carbo’s Curse
But longtime residents of Carbo, an unincorporated community halfway between Lebanon and St. Paul, do not describe as “good” the era of the power plant that towers over their community.
“I think when they first built it … they thought it would be a great thing, but over the years, it hasn’t turned out so great,” said Shirley Parrott Purcell, who grew up here.
Carbo, which now has just a handful of homes and residents, would be a peaceful community except for the constant roar of the plant, the clang of rail cars, the rumble of coal trucks and the shrill screeching that jolts people out of bed every once in a while when steam is released during a plant malfunction.
Purcell said her family’s farm was sold to make way for the plant in the 1950s, and the price the power company paid for the land wasn’t even enough to pay for indoor plumbing for their home.
She talked about the way life was in Carbo before the plant – the children roamed free through the surrounding hills, and the adults could turn anything into a party, from canning peaches to the arrival of the mail.
But, she says, it all changed when the plant came.
“The power company and the railroad, they just came in and bought everything and instead of people staying here, they just moved on,” she said. “Absolutely, it killed the community.”
She said most of the people here don’t say anything about it because they don’t like to rock the boat, even though many feel they’ve been slighted in large and small ways over the years by the plant and the railroad.
“I think they took away a lot more than was gained from it,” Purcell said. “We can’t stop progress, so if it’s progress, fine. But I wouldn’t say it was progress, or at least not to this area.”
Even now, the porches here have a gray tinge, and residents say particulate matter from the plant is still an issue.
“You can see little cinders when it snows, on the snow,” said Tamma Settle, who lives in Carbo with her husband and children. “And the porch, every time you wash it, it just gets extra dirty. You can’t keep it clean.”
Rose Sutherlynd says it’s more than just dust that settles over her home – she and many others in the community say they suffer from terrible allergies. And many say there are high numbers of cancer cases and deaths among Carbo’s residents.
“Everybody that’s died in Carbo has died of cancer, one form of cancer or another,” she said. “All kinds of cancers.”
She said every death she knows of in the area in the last 25 years has been from cancer, and people all over this part of Russell County agree that cancer rates are extremely high near the plant.
“There’s a lot of people over here that’s died of cancer that’s 20 years old and 25, never smoked, never drank, went to church every Sunday,” said Tim Bailey, who lives within a mile of the plant.
“My mother died of cancer, her neighbors died of cancer on both sides of her, the lady right here in the cinderblock house died of cancer. Right here in this tiny community there’s been so many people die of cancer,” said Settle. “I’ve often wondered if it had anything to do with the power plant or if it’s just coincidence, if it’s common.”
Michael Hendryx, associate professor in the Department of Community Medicine at West Virginia University, has studied cancer rates in Appalachia. He said it’s well documented that power plants can cause premature death.
However, Hendryx’s research has focused on high cancer rates associated with living in coal mining areas. He said even when data is adjusted for other factors like age, poverty, education and access to health care, coal mining counties have more cancer, especially among women.
People in Carbo live in an area with both mining and a power plant.
In passing, Carbo residents mention other changes they’ve seen over the last 50 years: the trees don’t look healthy, most of the fish are gone from the river, the air leaves a gritty dust on things and the well water tastes different, they say.
Meanwhile, some say few locals work at the plant.
“My dad tried for 30 years to get a job,” said Bailey. “Me and my brothers, ain’t none of us got a job at this old power plant at Carbo. If you didn’t know somebody, you didn’t get a job there.”
James Settle said he was denied a job for another reason: a policy against hiring relatives that doesn’t allow him to work there because “a second or third cousin” already does.
Still, many people in the area have relatives who work at the plant, and the general opinion in Cleveland, the nearest incorporated town, seems to be that the jobs have benefited the area.
“The coal mines and the power plant, that’s really all we had for years and years,” said Cleveland Mayor Geraldine Dotson, whose town has about 260 people, according to a recent fire department survey.
“Most other jobs around here are minimum-wage pay and that’s it,” said Virginia Dotson, who lives in Cleveland. “It’s [the plant] helped keep the economy all around here and the industry alive.”
She said the power plant and its associated industries have helped keep the community afloat in Cleveland, a one-time boomtown that’s fallen on less prosperous times in recent decades.
“I worked there for a while,” Stanley Barton, who also lives in Cleveland, said of the plant. “It wasn’t healthy.”
The Countywide Perspective
With its varied individual tales of employment and unemployment, sickness and health, bother and lack of concern about the plant, county officials say Russell County as a whole has benefited over the last 50 years from the plant.
“I’d love to have this new one in Russell County,” said county Industrial Development Authority Chairman Harry Rutherford, who said he was disappointed when he learned the power plant now under construction was going just over the line in Wise County.
“The gigantic impact has been the tax base over the years as far as providing better schools and that type of thing for the county,” Rutherford said of the Clinch River plant. “We used to call it the goose that laid the golden egg.”
Rutherford, who also lives near the plant, said he has not suffered ill health effects from it. Social trends, not the power plant, are to blame for the economically distressed state of towns like Cleveland, he said.
“The mobility of the people in the last 20 years has changed the shopping habits,” he said, noting that the trend has killed small towns across the nation.
Delegate Bud Phillips, D-Sandy Ridge, said he also grew up near the plant and remembers the ash that used to rain down. But, he said, “I’m 58, and I’m not dead, and I don’t have any lung problems.”
He said construction of the plant brought a “temporary surge” to Cleveland and Lebanon back when it was built, and he’s already seeing the same type of economic boost in Castlewood and St. Paul related to the construction of Dominion Virginia Power’s Virginia City Hybrid Energy Center, a new, controversial coal-fired power plant.
He said the Clinch River plant, in addition to paying good wages, has indirectly supplied hundreds of coal mining jobs over the last 50 years. He said it also has generated a lot of tax revenue that has paid to educate Russell County’s children.
According to the State Corporation Commission, the plant in 2007 was valued at $192.36 million, enough to produce more than $1.2 million in property tax revenue based on the county’s tax rate of 64 cents per $100 of assessed value – increasing the county’s total tax revenue by more than a fifth.
Without the plant, the county’s total real estate value was assessed at $970.20 million, according to county records.
The tax benefits of the plant are one 50-year-old prediction that came true.
“I like this project because it is not built with tax money,” former Gov. John S. Battle said during the plant’s 1956 groundbreaking. “To tell you the truth, it is built mostly with Yankee money, but it is going to pay taxes to the County of Russell.”
According to a photo caption printed in the Lebanon News on Dec. 17, 1959, the company had presented Russell County officials with the biggest tax check ever received in the county’s history, for $581,135.51, or 71 percent of the county’s property tax receipts that year.
“The overall impact has been favorable, and I think it has enabled the county to do things that it would not have otherwise been able to do,” said Russell County Administrator Jim Gillespie.
Phillips called the plant “an economic development success.”
“I believe the plant will continue to be an integral part of our region, Phillips said. “I think that plant’s going to be around for probably at least another 20 or 30 years.”
He said he believes the Virginia City plant will have a similar impact.
Chafin, the plant manager at Carbo, said that to see its positive impact it’s necessary to look beyond Carbo and Cleveland to the surrounding area.
He said he believes his plant will be around for a little while longer. Though he said he thinks the equipment could last another 50 years, he doubts the plant will see its 100th birthday.
“I still think we’re a reliable plant. I’m hopeful that we’ll be around for a few years longer, but with the changes in the environmental regulations … I am a part of the 600 megawatts that has to be either retired, retrofitted or repowered,” Chafin said. “I don’t think the company’s decided yet what their approach is going to be.”
American Electric Power, Appalachian’s parent company, is operating under a $4.6 billion settlement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that requires it to drastically reduce emissions at 16 power plants.
But Chafin said he believes the difficulty of permitting new power plants of any type is going to make it more difficult to retire the old ones.
And 50 years after the Clinch River Plant opened, AEP spokesman John Shepelwich said it remains “one of the workhorses of the AEP and Appalachian Power fleet.”
dmccown@bristolnews.com | (276) 791-0701
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RussellCoHeritageSeal
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CarboGroundbreaking – Clinch River Plant Groundbreaking Ceremony, May 16, 1956
http://static.mgnetwork.com/tri/media_path/-temp/CarboGroundbreaking.pdf
RussellCoElectricHistory
http://static.mgnetwork.com/tri/media_path/-temp/RussCoElectricHistory.pdf
OpeningDedication – Clinch River Plant Opening Dedication, Nov. 18, 1958
http://static.mgnetwork.com/tri/media_path/-temp/OpeningDedication.pdf
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