Lights out in Cheshire

An Ohio town is about to be erased from the map. The power company bought out the residents, who now ask: Did we choose expedience over principle?

[Photo: Shaun Heasley] Almost everyone is leaving. Did they vanquish the behemoth corporation -- or play right into its hands?

By STEPHEN BUCKLEY, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published November 10, 2002

CHESHIRE, Ohio -- The blue, sulfury plumes began to descend just after dawn. Throughout the day they rolled through kitchens and over lawns, swept through the riverside park and into the playground behind the old village school.

Residents couldn't make out houses 50 feet away. They couldn't see the sun.

Some families fled to nearby towns. A suffocating stench overwhelmed those who stayed. Scores of residents came down with skin rashes, burning throats, stinging eyes, dry coughs, headaches, blisters on their tongues, blisters on their lips, blisters in their mouths.

Jennifer Harrison, village clerk: "It was like a forest fire with no flames."

The village of Cheshire, laid out in 1834, covers 16 acres. It's the size of the World Trade Center complex.

Home to 221 residents, it has the obligatory one stoplight and one of most everything else: a restaurant, a beauty parlor, a bait shop and a gas station. It has two churches and, just outside the village, a cemetery and two schools.

Tidy brick homes are framed by listing clapboard houses and lonely trailers. Autumn reds and golds set off fields of soft, shimmering grass. Just about everyone owns a tractor.

It's country, but it's hardly Mayberry. Not everyone knows everyone else. They lock their doors at night. They own satellite dishes and have Internet access, and they know when it's time to hire a lawyer.

The plume that terrified Cheshire that mid July day was "sulfuric acid aerosol mist" emanating from the power plant that towers over the village.

Similar plumes touched down a dozen times or so that summer of 2001. There was talk of filing a class-action lawsuit against the American Electric Power Co., which owns the plant. By last fall, the townspeople had contacted lawyers.

The lawyers started talks with the company, and rumors rippled through the village: Everyone was going to get $1-million. The power company was going to buy everybody's property.

The latter turned out to be true: American Electric Power offered to buy their houses for far more than they're worth. There was just one catch: By accepting the deal, they would be voting their community off the map.

Residents packed the old village schoolhouse last April to hear lawyers detail the proposal. Some were recent arrivals who hoped to retire here; others had lived here for decades. Many wept.

That same night, when supporters were asked to stand, most of the room was on its feet. Many villagers felt they had no choice.

They have since been left to wrestle with relief mixed with anger, anxiety tinged by regret. They wonder:

Was the power company being a good corporate citizen? Or did it play them for suckers?

Did they sell out their town? Or are they simply getting out before it's too late?

Ron Hammond stood up that night. He had helped lead the village's campaign against the power company, but he was ready to move on. "We were tired of the plant being the focus of our lives."

His morning ritual used to go like this:

He would gaze into the sky to gauge where the smoke was blowing. Would he wear a bandana over his face that day? Would the family flee the village? Would they have to shut themselves inside?

Now his house is stacked with moving boxes. He and his wife, Lori, have found a new home, out of sight of the plant's towers.

Though the Hammonds are at peace with their decision to go, they're already mourning things they'll leave behind. Out front is the lustrous dogwood Ron planted to celebrate Lori's first Mother's Day. In back are the spruces he planted when his daughters were born.

His daughters are 10 and 8. Emily, the firstborn, suffers from asthma.

"We're tired of telling our daughter she couldn't go outside to play on a beautiful, sunny day."

Residents in and around Cheshire rejoiced when the James M. Gavin power plant was built in 1974. They saw economic stability, jobs, customers for their handful of businesses.

The plant services 2.5-million homes, including the city of Columbus, 110 miles north. Its towers are visible miles away, the steam and smoke hanging like permanent thunderheads over the village.

Toxins weren't a problem because the 1,100-foot stack floated pollution over to the East Coast. That changed in the mid 1990s, when the power company switched to two 830-foot stacks.

Acid rain corroded cars. Mysterious, quarter-sized fallout speckled the ground. It turned out to be pieces of algae, which townspeople called "green cornflakes."

In early 2000, American Electric Power announced that it wanted to use anhydrous ammonia, an antipollution chemical. Some residents were furious when they learned that if tanks of the lethal chemical spilled, they would have six minutes to escape.

One protest sign from that period was remarkably prescient:

Beneath the words "Cheshire's Future, Thanks to Gavin," was a gravestone marked, "R.I.P."

The blue plumes came a year later.

Beulah Hern still bears a scar from that time. It started as a blister and hardened into a black scab on her lower lip. Her dull headaches started.

She abandoned her beloved garden in the summer of 2001. After the plumes, the skin fell off her tomatoes, and her zucchini and bell peppers turned black.

Boots, as she likes to be called, is 82. She boasts blazing red hair and a blade-sharp mind. She still fixes her own pipes, still climbs aboard her tractors to mow her 2 acres by the river.

She has lived in Cheshire 64 years. And she's not going anywhere.

"There's too many memories here," says Boots, who lives in a simple, three-bedroom Cape Cod. "Of course, they don't count memories."

She's a widow and most of her friends are leaving, but she says she'll be fine. She's got Midnight, her hulking black Labrador, for protection. Along with her pistol and her .22-caliber rifle.

"I put 11 shells down it," she says of the rifle. "I used to practice shooting rats down by the river. I'm a pretty good shot."

At first, she signed up to move. She changed her mind when the utility offered $242,700 for her prime real estate. She thinks it's worth $1.2-million.

"I'm not being greedy," she says, but right is right.

She would rather live in the plant's noxious shadow than die feeling cheated.

[Photo: Shaun Heasley] Pollution from the power plant became such a nuisance that people took to calling Cheshire, with its one stoplight, "Brown Town."

When residents hired their Washington-based environmental lawyers for talks with the company, they never expected this. They expected token compensation for tumbling property values and more promises to clean up Gavin.

American Electric Power, the nation's largest utility, instead offered three and a half times the assessed value of their property. Most homes in Cheshire are worth between $50,000 and $150,000.

"It looked like a good solution for all involved," says AEP spokesman Pat Hemlepp. "It's not a health issue. It's a corporate responsibility issue."

All but about a dozen of the town's residents agreed to the deal. If everyone eventually accepts the offer, the utility will have paid $20-million for the village's property.

The company says it will expand the plant and workers will use some of the houses and commercial buildings.

It is the first corporation ever to buy out a town. The federal government has done it in a score of communities, most famously in Love Canal, N.Y., in 1980. Other companies have bought some homes in a community, but never most or all. Never enough to make a town disappear.

Harold and Odella Mack are moving only 15 miles away, but it feels like the moon.

They're not moving because of the plant. They're selling, Odella says, "because we don't want to be the last ones to leave."

They've lived in or near Cheshire all their lives. Harold is 84, Odella, 82.

She is friendly and relaxed and plainspoken. He is tall and slim and frail.

"The power plant has been here 25 years, and it has not bothered us, not one little bit, right honey?" she says.

They have been members of the Cheshire Baptist Church for 63 years, as long as they've been married. Harold, a former mayor of Cheshire, helped incorporate the village in 1953.

Now the village has hired a lawyer to help "disincorporate," a process that should be complete by early next year.

The Macks are angry at the Village Council. They say they didn't attend last spring's meetings because they didn't know about them. They read about the deal in the newspaper.

"They didn't do it in a democratic way," Harold says. "They didn't even do it in a legal way, to my thinking."

They sit in the living room in the house they've shared for decades. They built the house mostly by themselves, put up the awnings, installed the wiring and plumbing, laid the knotty pine over the fireplace.

Soon it'll probably be gone.

"They (AEP) told us earlier that if they were going to keep our house, they'd let us know," Odella says. "And they haven't let us know."

Cheshire is caught in a circle of blame. Residents who voted to move blame the power company, saying it left them no choice. The few who are staying blame the "johnny-come-latelys" for signing on to leave. Those who feel like they're being forced to move blame the Village Council.

The six-member council and mayor did little but hold meetings and call for a vote in April. That didn't stop people from being mad.

They're mad at Mayor Tom Reese, who got 80 calls the day after the vote, some from confused and angry residents. Now he makes himself scarce to his neighbors, and to the press.

They're mad at Jennifer and Steve Harrison. She's the village clerk; he's a councilman.

Sometimes the Harrisons can't sleep at night. Since spring, Steve says, it has been one long season of "humongous amounts of stress."

The night of the vote, they were angry at the power company. Jennifer wept. They couldn't believe the company wasn't "going to fix the problem," she says. "We were going to have to leave."

"It's a horribly sad thing. We're torn. But we had a summer of hell in 2001," says Jennifer, who is 42. "When I think of continuing to live like that, and then I think of the long-term effects, then a house is not worth it."

At school, their daughters suffered relentless teasing: "Can I shake your hand?" classmates would say. "I've never shaken the hand of a millionaire before."

No one sat near the family at high school football games. Once, someone in the stands called Steve "Judas."

The Harrisons' four-bedroom home is 101 years old. They're taking big chunks of it with them -- the new windows, the custom-built kitchen cabinets, the new furnace, the carpeting.

The other day, Jennifer noticed a window sill pocked with tiny indentations. One of her girls had made them as a teething toddler.

She was so moved, she plans to cut out the sill. They'll take that with them, too.

The agreement was supposed to be secret, but this is, after all, a village. People talk. The specifics have begun to dribble out, and they've surprised no one.

It forces residents -- and their children -- to sign away the right to sue. They receive money for their property, as well as a chunk of nontaxable money. They can leave their houses intact or strip them.

"In essence," says Chuck Reynolds, a 57-year-old retired policeman who accepted the deal, "they're buying us off."

Chuck and his wife Teresa wanted to retire in their riverside home, but he worries that the plant will harm their long-term health. The decision has crushed his wife; two weeks ago, the stress of it all sent her to the hospital.

He is sad but unapologetic. He doesn't understand the hand wringing, the second thoughts.

"If you feel so strongly about selling out your town," he says, "why did you sell out?"

State and federal environmental protection agencies say the power plant's emissions of major air pollutants fall within national standards. (There are no standards for sulfuric acid, the main chemical in those fearful blue plumes.)

In January, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry reported that the presence of sulfur dioxide and sulfuric acid threatens residents, especially asthmatics. The report added that the pollutants "appear to not be life-threatening."

Charla Evans, superintendent of Gallia County schools, isn't so sure. Two of her schools sit in the shadow of the plant, just outside the village limits. That means they weren't included in the agreement.

"If we don't care for the least of us, we have a problem. I have to be their voice."

"If it's not safe for the village," she told AEP officials, "it's not safe for the kids."

On a warm, sunny day on the last weekend in September, Cheshire began its goodbyes.

It was the annual picnic, the first time residents had been together since striking the agreement, the last time they probably would be together as a village.

There was an Elvis impersonator, hot dogs, chili in a huge cast-iron pot.

About 70 people showed up. Some who were there recall it as relaxed and pleasant. Others remember it as sad and bittersweet.

Everyone remembers this: Just as the picnic began, the day grew cloudy as a familiar blue haze hovered over the village.

© 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111

Contact the Times | Privacy Policy
Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright