Industrial Landscape

I’d like to offer a few thoughts on having a huge, industrial, power-generating facility in our neighborhood.

This facility, when in full operation, generates enough noise that you can’t have a normal conversation anywhere in its vicinity. Even at idle, it produces a steady background noise that can be heard throughout town. The health effects of this background noise have never, to my knowledge, been properly studied.

It also has a permanent and widespread effect on the landscape, changing the visual character of the town in profound ways. And this is not to mention the effect on the local environment, particularly the salmon migration.

Salmon migration, you say? Well, yes. I’m talking about the dam in Shelburne Falls. What did you think I was talking about?

Seriously, last Thursday night, I heard a lot of objections to the possibility of bringing wind turbines to Ashfield. It occurred to me that many of them would also apply to the Deerfield #3 power generating station in Shelburne Falls – the Shelburne Falls dam.

This station, in operation for about a century now (producing 7MW of electricity, by the way – more or less what the wind towers would produce), is everything I described. A water release is not only noisy, it is also dangerous to anyone who might be downstream. Since there is no fish ladder at the dam, it does interrupt any possible salmon migration.

And yet I would bet that, when you look at the dam, with the pooled water behind it and the potholes beneath, you don’t say, “What a huge, ugly industrial complex.” I find it beautiful. Given the number of postcards of the dam for sale around Shelburne Falls, I gather I’m not alone in that.

A lot of clear-thinking, intelligent people are worried about how the towers, which are admittedly huge, would affect the way the town looks. This is a reasonable worry. These things are new, and no one knows how we’ll feel about them twenty or thirty years down the road.

But a century down the road, the dam in Shelburne Falls is integral to the beauty of the town, to the point that no one thinks of it as a functioning power generating station. The iron bridge and Bridge of Flowers, both of which were doubtless considered industrial-age eyesores when they were new, now attract tourists from all over the northeast. Having a view of them actually enhances property values.

When I see pictures of the huge turbines springing out of the woodland, spinning lazily, I’ve got to admit, I find them beautiful. Even if you find them strange at first, they may well grow on you until, a century from now, it will be impossible to picture Ashfield without them.

David King