{"id":2701,"date":"2016-11-08T02:16:09","date_gmt":"2016-11-08T02:16:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mattralston.net\/?p=2701"},"modified":"2016-11-21T20:29:41","modified_gmt":"2016-11-21T20:29:41","slug":"aurora-energy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/politics\/aurora-energy\/","title":{"rendered":"Aurora Energy LLC and Corporate Privilege"},"content":{"rendered":"
*This article is pretty long, that’s why it’s broken up into seven parts. The last part explains in detail how Aurora Energy is lying to the public about the toxins they’re exposing the city of Fairbanks to.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n PART I<\/strong><\/p>\n The Origin<\/strong><\/p>\n When I started writing this article I was seeking the answer to a simple question: Why doesn’t the Chena River, in my hometown of Fairbanks Alaska, not freeze downriver from the Chena Power Plant when the temperature is 50 degrees below zero? The ice is naturally thick enough to easily drive a semi-truck across. Or a dozen semis. Or a thousand. Or for 20,000 people to stand on it and watch the Iditarod sled dog race, as has happened in years past.<\/p>\n Downriver you can now splash a rock into it in the dead of winter. The short answer is that the plant is permitted by the State of Alaska to pump 14,000 gallons per minute, 20,000,000 gallons per day, of warm water discharge into that narrow river. That’s thirty Olympic sized swimming pools each day. And they’re doing a lot worse than that, and they lie about it, and it doesn’t matter because nobody’s watching.<\/p>\n From the time I was born until I hastily left Fairbanks at the age of 18, the Chena River was my backyard. It’s the backbone of the town, a lazy, snaking, murky brown\u00a0river dotted with houses and flanked by overgrowth and the occasional muddy bank or beaver dam. Depending on rainfall it can stretch over a hundred yards across although it is much narrower in most places. It feeds into the Tanana River a few miles out of town,\u00a0which feeds into the Yukon, which flows all the way to the Bering Sea. I mostly took it for granted, which upon reflection, was completely appropriate. In the summer boats would travel up and down it, mostly people barhopping the four or five places\u00a0on the river that offered beer and a small dock to tie off.<\/p>\n My dad bought a used Jet Ski\u00a0from some redneck guy one summer,\u00a0<\/span>which we docked outside the house and I had an\u00a0amazing time exploring the river on it. Because it was souped up it didn’t steer when pressed full throttle. I learned this the hard way. As did the guy who sold it to us, the guy who sold it to him, and the guy we sold it to. From my house in the middle of the city to downtown Fairbanks was about five\u00a0miles, and then another five up to the mouth of the fast moving Tanana, at which point you’d either turn back or become driftwood. Being a man behind the wheel of his own watercraft, while fleeting,\u00a0was truly awesome.<\/p>\n We stopped trying to swim in the river around junior high, as we decided it wasn’t worth the pain involved. Even when the temperature touched 90 degrees above zero, the water\u00a0was freezing. We’d flail\u00a0to a sandbar fifty\u00a0feet out and climb up on it shivering. We were forcing it. This wasn’t practical. The\u00a0parents encouraging\u00a0us were thinking of somewhere else.<\/p>\n For a few days every summer the king salmon would run through on their way to spawn several miles upstream. Hook nosed and fast moving, we were a bit intimidated, as the river would turn from brown to pink. We wouldn’t dare set foot in the water. It was like we were being invaded by an alien species. They were fast!\u00a0Once I saw a huge three footer caught in some roots\u00a0on the bank, swimming relentlessly, robotically, dead eyed against the current. I told my mom we should grab it with a net and barbecue it. She disagreed and helped me free it from its\u00a0trap. It swam with a head of steam, undeterred. Later she said I was right, we should have eaten it. We didn’t know what to do. We aren’t all\u00a0outdoors people. That’s a misconception.<\/p>\n Around Christmas one year\u00a0our family was sitting around the house watching TV, when we saw a moose enter our backyard. We would\u00a0see moose all the time, so it wasn’t that big of a deal. Yet, it’s still a moose, so from behind our sliding glass doors we were able to creep up and watch it move about\u00a0our rather small yard. It then turned to cross the river. Our whimsical expressions turned to horror within a split second as its bony legs began to poke at the ice to test it. Before we knew it, the poor guy had broken through the ice and was submerged in the freezing water. He tried to pull himself out using his front legs, as a person would use his arms, but he\u00a0was too bottom heavy, and each time his\u00a0legs tried to grip the ice it broke off more and more and he\u00a0got deeper and deeper, instinctually trying to continue crossing\u00a0and not retreat. We called the fire department and they came out with a winch but said there was nothing they could do. They wouldn’t\u00a0let one of their guys get into the river to put a rope around the moose. It sounded reasonable to me, and I wrote the whole thing off stoically as nature taking its course. Unless your definition of nature includes the coal\u00a0industry running amok, it turns out I was wrong.<\/p>\n My parents were not especially proud Alaskans, rarely identifying with the pioneer culture, so I don’t know how to\u00a0hunt. They’d moved to Fairbanks\u00a0in the mid seventies to find work on\u00a0the Alyeska Pipeline. They saw\u00a0Fairbanks from\u00a0an outsider’s\u00a0perspective, often distancing themselves from local customs with a wry nod of respect, appreciating the absurdity of the place. A\u00a0drunk driver leaving the Badger Den\u00a0would level\u00a0the stop sign at\u00a0my school bus stop on our dirt road at least once a month. My mother met this with a roll of the eyes. Once\u00a0it was replaced, it would again be facing the ground at a 30 degree angle within a\u00a0week or two. I once drove 200 miles down the Parks Highway checking\u00a0every road sign and there were bullet holes in every single one. Though my parents\u00a0moved around, most of the\u00a030 years they lived in Fairbanks were spent within a few miles of the Chena plant. My dad told me about\u00a0their arrival into\u00a0town:<\/p>\n “Your mom and I rented this house from\u00a0a\u00a0crazy old lady. She was an alcoholic and given to incoherent fits of rage. The house was in bad shape and filthy.\u00a0Housing was in very short supply at that time, difficult to find, and exorbitant rents were the norm. We rented this place sight unseen in a neighborhood a couple of blocks from the city’s coal fired power plant. This area was characterized by black snow. Soot from the power plant’s chimney was constantly sifting down, covering everything within range with a thick, black coating.\u00a0The house was, of course, grimy, with carpeting coated with coal soot and so ingrained it was impossible to remove. Kate [my elder sister]\u00a0was a baby then, and it was impossible for her to be on the floor, which made being a baby much more difficult. That was a horrible place to live, but gave us a roof and four walls while we looked for something better.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Once when I was about seven\u00a0I was out running errands with my mom in the freezing ice fog\u00a0and she took me on a shortcut. It was locally known as the “ice bridge”, and was a place you could drive across the river.\u00a0It\u00a0was located between two boat launches, one at\u00a0Pike’s Landing, a local bar and restaurant, and on the other side,\u00a0a residential neighborhood.<\/p>\n As we crossed\u00a0the river I felt a nervous excitement. “Are we going to sink?” She held her hands out, spaced two feet apart. “The ice is this thick,” she said, as we plowed through the existing tire tracks, seemingly floating over the river, saving\u00a0a whopping four minutes of travel time.\u00a0We were bored. As a child, the concept of driving over a river was a pure unbridled adrenalin rush.<\/p>\n It became a recurring joke for us each spring when\u00a0Daily News Miner<\/em> would report that someone’s truck fell\u00a0through the ice. Usually it was some drunk trying to avoid the cops. He’d get out of his truck and walk across the ice, leaving his pride and joy\u00a0to\u00a0sink (and hopefully be fished out by a tow truck later.) When this happened, it signified the unofficial end of winter. It began to happen earlier and earlier every year.<\/p>\n As I neared graduation, I’d become jaded to the entire town and surrounding wilderness. The extent of my interest in nature was finding a secluded place\u00a0to drink beer outside with my friends. Sitting around a bonfire, I\u00a0brought up the ice bridge and realized it was a thing of the past.\u00a0Nobody really cared.<\/p>\n I asked my mom about it, and she said something about a “thermal plume” that she’d read about in the paper. A natural current. A truly one of a kind geological phenomenon. It sounded implausible,\u00a0but I let it go\u00a0because I was focussed on becoming the first below average Alaskan high school athlete to make the NBA.<\/p>\n If it’s your first time meeting someone from Alaska, think about what you’re going to say, then say the opposite and you’ll more likely be right. If you superimposed Alaska onto a map of the contiguous United Sates\u00a0it would reach from Atlanta to Fargo, with an arm stretching up to northern California. That’s a vast area to remain homogenous. Fairbanks is in the middle, and most people never go to the middle, as there are no orcas, and yes in the summer it’s light all night. But I’ve got one for you, it’s just way dirtier than you’d think!<\/p>\n Driving the streets, Fairbanks is indeed an observably\u00a0dirty\u00a0town. As a child, you’d try\u00a0breaking a black tinged icicle off the house to suck on before a concerned adult batted it out of your\u00a0hand. Gravel pits,\u00a0sprawling junkyards, the ubiquitous barbed wire and chain link, beat up pickup trucks, ratchety teens in hoopties throwing makeshift gang signs\u00a0at\u00a0intersections. Hooded drifters walking for miles. The garbage dumps. The train tracks running through a blackened corridor in the heart of town, on which railcars deliver uncovered cars of coal (from the Usibelli Coal Mine, a\u00a0few hours south) to be burned\u00a0in the five power plants they feed in\u00a0the Fairbanks area, the only coal plants\u00a0in all of Alaska. The rail yard is a\u00a0scene most would associate more with the rust belt than the last frontier. A five minute drive from that blackened soot and\u00a0you’re on your friend’s porch removed from the whistles of the trains\u00a0and the trees are completely still and the view stretches for a hundred miles and it’s hard to conceive of what you’ve just seen.<\/p>\n