The Sale, Condemnation & Destruction Of Cheshire, Ohio - NYTM

[hatrack]

"The town, in the end, proved as insubstantial as smoke. More so, really: the houses, the Methodist church and the playground seemed to drift away into the colorless Midwestern sky, while the twin columns of roiling vapor remained, sometimes gray, sometimes yellow, sometimes tinged with venomous blue. It was the blue that doomed Cheshire, Ohio. That was the signature tint of sulfur trioxide and sulfuric acid, emissions from the massive coal-burning power plant whose smokestacks and cooling towers loomed over the town. On days when the smoke was blue, locals complained of sore throats, burning eyes and strange blisters. Sometimes the smog was so thick that cars drove through the streets at noon with their headlights on.

As for the rest of the story, it's easy to imagine how Hollywood would script it. One or two plucky souls stand up at a town meeting and vow to fight. The plant's owner, a ruthless multibillion-dollar corporation, strikes back with everything its high-priced attorneys can devise, or worse. Someone has to die. And finally, good (or just possibly evil) prevails.

But that's not what happened. Instead, it was something quite undramatic, or at least uncinematic: in a series of town meetings in the spring of 2002, lawyers presented an offer from American Electric Power to buy all of Cheshire for $20 million. The 200-odd residents would have to move, their houses would be razed and their community would cease to exist -- and in exchange they would each receive about three times the assessed value of their property. Though a few dissenters stood up and said they would rather fight than leave, they couldn't sway their neighbors. Nothing rallied the townspeople to resist, to tap the stubborn courage of the American heartland, to show the company that their hometown couldn't be bought. They deliberated for a short while and told American Electric Power that, yes, they would accept the offer. They would waive their right to sue. They would take the money, and they would lose Cheshire.

Today, less than two years later, nearly all the town's residents have left. First the moving vans came, and residents loaded them up with their belongings as well as anything desirable they could pry loose from the vacated houses: doors, windows, even floorboards and plumbing. Then American Electric Power's bulldozers and track hoes followed, tearing down homes and buildings; 18-wheeler trucks hauled the debris away, and the empty lots were smoothed over and seeded, left as if nothing had ever been there at all. Most of the remaining structures await the same fate. Fewer than two dozen people, most of them elderly, have stayed on; the power company has bought nearly all their homes and is allowing them to live there until they move out or die."

EDIT

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/08/magazine/08PLANT.html