Wednesday, 17 Apr 2002

Cheshire Fat Cat

Here's a whole new meaning for the phrase "company town": The village of Cheshire, in southeastern Ohio, will be purchased for $20 million by American Electric Power Company. Last year, the town was plagued by clouds of sulfuric acid drifting in from a nearby AEP power plant, Ohio's largest coal-burner. Notwithstanding a recent $175 million investment in pollution controls, chemicals from the plant clouded the city more than a dozen times last summer. The town's 221 residents reported stinging eyes, headaches, sore throats, and burns on their lips, tongues, and the insides of their mouths. AEP agreed to buy the town wholesale on the condition that residents give up their rights to sue over personal and property damage from the emissions. The company is none too sad about the purchase agreement, which will also free up property on which to expand the power plant.

Let It Allard Hang Out

The plot thickens in the controversy over the federal government's decision to ship weapons-grade plutonium from Colorado to South Carolina for temporary storage. Arms-control advocates and Democratic politicians in South Carolina allege that the Bush administration is backing a shipment plan in order to improve the re-election prospects of Sen. Wayne Allard (R-Colo.). Allard, who is in a close race against Democrat Tom Strickland, has made getting rid of the plutonium central to his campaign. Jim Hodges, the Democratic governor of South Carolina, opposes the shipment plan and yesterday accused the White House of blatant politicking: "It seems like the concerns of South Carolina voters are somehow secondary to the concerns of Colorado voters. I'll leave it to your imagination as to why that is." We'll spell it out: The administration doesn't want to lose a Republican seat in the Senate.

The Best Offense Is a Bad Defect

In a groundbreaking decision, a San Francisco jury determined yesterday that gasoline containing the additive MBTE is a defective product and that two major oil companies were aware of but did not disclose the additive's dangers when they began marketing it. The lawsuit was brought by the South Tahoe Public Utility District after it discovered that MBTE had seeped into groundwater and polluted a third of the district's drinking-water wells in the late 1990s. MTBE, which causes gas to burn more cleanly, is thought to be a carcinogen. The jury found Shell Oil and Lyondell Chemical (formerly Atlantic Richfield Chemical), as well as Tosco (now part of Phillips Petroleum), guilty of placing a defective product on the market, and said Shell and Lyondell acted with malice by withholding information about MBTE. The verdict, which is the first of its kind, could set a precedent for dozens of similar cases pending in other parts of the country and result in billions of dollars in damages and cleanup costs for the nation's largest oil companies.

Ski-don't

There's good news and bad news for environmentalists on the personal-watercraft front. On the up side, the National Park Service announced yesterday that it would permanently close five national parks to personal watercraft. Park officials and much of the general public object to personal watercraft in parks, saying Jet Skis and their ilk disrupt wildlife and are noisy and polluting. In less thrilling news, the Park Service ordered eight other parks to re-open their review processes for banning motorized water scooters, potentially setting the stage for the craft to reappear in those parks in the future. Both decisions came one day before a court hearing in Texas in a potentially precedent-setting lawsuit by the personal-watercraft industry against the government. The suit contends that park administrators imposed bans on motorized water scooters without conducting adequate reviews, and seeks to overturn the prohibitions in virtually all national parks.