Biomass Profiteering Trumps Children’s Health in Rothschild, Wisconsin

For many peo­ple, noth­ing typ­i­fies the Amer­i­can Dream more than buy­ing a house in a small town to start a fam­i­ly. Five years ago school teacher Robert Hugh­es and his wife pur­chased a home in Roth­schild, Wis­con­sin, pop­u­la­tion 5,000 and had two chil­dren, now three years and three months old. Today, the Hugh­es’ dream is about to lit­er­al­ly go up in smoke with a bio­mass pow­er incin­er­a­tor under con­struc­tion direct­ly across the street, a facil­i­ty that would add more asth­ma-caus­ing par­tic­u­late mat­ter and car­cino­genic volatile organ­ic com­pounds to the air per unit of ener­gy than a coal plant.

The Hugh­es fam­i­ly, their neigh­bors, and many Roth­schild res­i­dents fear for their health and the health of their children——the incin­er­a­tor is a half mile of a 2,600 stu­dent ele­men­tary school—as the 50 megawatt Dom­tar and WE Ener­gies wood-burn­ing pow­er facil­i­ty comes clos­er to com­ple­tion. Devel­op­ers aim to have the incin­er­a­tor oper­a­tional by the mid­dle of 2013, smack dab in the mid­dle of this low income and mid­dle class community.

When Hugh­es first heard about the pro­pos­al back in 2010 he decid­ed to inves­ti­gate, know­ing next to noth­ing about bio­mass and its impacts on pub­lic health or the envi­ron­ment. He attend­ed a meet­ing held by the devel­op­ers, but “didn’t real­ly learn any­thing” from their pre­sen­ta­tion. Upon leav­ing the build­ing, Hugh­es passed a few peo­ple hand­ing out infor­ma­tion with some ques­tions about the facility.

As soon as Hugh­es got home he sat down with his wife to look at the lit­er­a­ture and right away came across some “red flags.” Before long, Hugh­es joined Save Our Air Resources (SOAR), a grass­roots com­mu­ni­ty group that was look­ing into some of the pub­lic health and envi­ron­men­tal con­cerns from indus­tri­al-scale bio­mass ener­gy. They asked ques­tions of the devel­op­ers and town offi­cials but it end­ed up being the “high road to Chi­na to get an answer.”

Hugh­es first major con­cern arose after research­ing the valid­i­ty of a radio ad claim­ing that the new bio­mass facil­i­ty would make the air 30% clean­er than it already was—which seemed too good to be true for a com­mu­ni­ty with­in forty miles of four coal burn­ing plants. In fact, accord­ing to Hugh­es, it turned out that Rothschild’s local lev­els of par­tic­u­late mat­ter 2.5—a byprod­uct of com­bus­tion so small that par­ti­cles can lodge deep into the lungs, into the blood­stream, and enter organs—were already extreme­ly high. The developer’s announce­ment regard­ing local air qual­i­ty was sim­i­lar to the claims made by devel­op­ers across the US: that their incin­er­a­tors not only won’t pol­lute, but will actu­al­ly improve air quality—despite basic sci­ence and com­mon sense point­ing to the contrary.

Accord­ing to Dr. William Sam­mons, a pedi­a­tri­cian from Mass­a­chu­setts who helped edu­cate Roth­schild com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers about the health risks to both chil­dren and adults from bio­mass incin­er­a­tion, “the project will emit diox­in, dead­ly par­tic­u­lates, and oth­er pol­lu­tion that con­tributes to asth­ma, heart dis­ease and more.”

On top of the air pol­lu­tion emis­sions from the facil­i­ty, which, aside from par­tic­u­late mat­ter and volatile organ­ic com­pounds include car­bon monox­ide, nitro­gen oxide, sul­fur diox­ide, and oth­er tox­ic air pol­lu­tants, Roth­schild res­i­dents will soon have to breathe in the diesel fumes from “120 in and 120 out semis bring­ing in wood” to the facil­i­ty. “When it rains, when the air’s not mov­ing that crap stays local.” Hugh­es not­ed. “Talk about a local com­mu­ni­ty get­ting ham­mered by air pollution.”

SOAR, with Hugh­es as a mem­ber, along with the ded­i­ca­tion and hard work of oth­er Roth­schild res­i­dents such as Paul Schwantes, fought back against the impend­ing incin­er­a­tor in the media, on the streets, and in the court­room. “We kept push­ing for wind or solar. Solar would’ve saved $60 mil­lion,” accord­ing to Hugh­es, not­ing that Wis­con­sin is at the same lat­i­tude as Ger­many, the world’s leader in solar power.

SOAR even­tu­al­ly hired on a team of attor­neys to try to obtain an Envi­ron­men­tal Impact State­ment (EIS) for the bio­mass incin­er­a­tor in the hopes that “if they did a review, it wouldn’t be approved because of the impact on air qual­i­ty.” Due to sev­er­al unfore­seen obsta­cles that ulti­mate­ly proved too much for the oppo­si­tion, SOAR was unable to get the EIS.

“It’s a marathon not a sprint,” is how Hugh­es described the grass­roots oppo­si­tion to bio­mass, “doing it for the next generation.”

Despite con­sid­er­able effort on the part of SOAR mem­bers, the com­mu­ni­ty resis­tance was ulti­mate­ly over­come by the influ­ences of big busi­ness, a local media who labeled the bio­mass oppo­si­tion as NIMBY’s (after receiv­ing adver­tis­ing mon­ey from devel­op­ers), and even some envi­ron­men­tal groups—the Sier­ra Club sup­port­ed the facil­i­ty as the result of a pri­or court set­tle­ment. Devel­op­ers broke ground on the facil­i­ty ear­li­er in 2012.

The devel­op­ers “sold the com­mu­ni­ty in with beau­ti­ful posters,” though the final facil­i­ty added more stacks than were orig­i­nal­ly pre­sent­ed to the pub­lic and moved the pow­er source to the “front, next to res­i­den­tial hous­es.” Hugh­es specif­i­cal­ly chose to build his home in Roth­schild because he refused to live under pow­er lines due to con­cern for his family’s health. Now Hugh­es, his wife, and his two young chil­dren live direct­ly across the street from a high volt­age yard, “three foot­ball fields away from fifty megawatts of pow­er lines,” accord­ing to Hugh­es. “We don’t want to expose our kids to that.” 

“I wish I had the option to move, but I don’t,” said Hughes.

Jobs were the main sell­ing point for the incin­er­a­tor in a com­mu­ni­ty in the heart of Wis­con­sin suf­fer­ing from the eco­nom­ic down­turn. “What they don’t tell you is where the jobs are going to come from,” Hugh­es said, point­ing out that many of the cars he’d seen recent­ly in the incin­er­a­tor park­ing lot have license plates from Michi­gan and Minnesota.

One unex­pect­ed boon from the anti-bio­mass effort in Roth­schild, though ulti­mate­ly unsuc­cess­ful, was that so many mem­bers of the com­mu­ni­ty band­ed togeth­er: “The great thing is a lot of us are still friends,” said Hughes.