‘Bureaucratic Mind’ Still An Oxymoron

Demonstrating anew that no good deed goes unpunished, state and local air quality police have ticketed Spokane’s waste-to-energy plant for some insignificant air quality violations that occurred as the plant struggled, briefly, to burn debris from last winter’s ice storm.

How absurd. The ice storm created an emergency the likes of which the city had never before faced. It took thousands of hands to clear fallen trees and get the community back on its feet. People improvised. People took chances. People did the best they could.

That being the case, it is revealing indeed that officials at the state Department of Ecology and the Spokane County Air Pollution Control Authority have sat for 10 months in their well-heated, brightly lit offices, poring over records from a few days of the waste-to-energy plant’s disaster response, searching for regulatory missteps.

Clearly, people in these agencies have too much time on their hands.

Yet, they’re only getting started. They have cited the incinerator for exceeding limits on carbon monoxide emissions during a nine-day period after the storm. Next, the state will decide how severe the penalties ought to be.

Possibilities include a $100,000 fine. Who would pay it? Spokane residents would, through their utility bills.

And since the ice storm was a fluke, what will the citation achieve? Exactly nothing - other than busy-work for bureaucrats and lawyers.

Eric Skelton, director of the county Air Pollution Control Authority, concedes that the carbon monoxide the plant released into the winter winds did not pose the slightest risk to public health. He also admits that the plant contacted his agency promptly about difficulties encountered in burning the wet waste.

The problem, he says, is that the plant kept burning the waste for several days after the difficulties were discovered.

There’s a simple explanation: Cars and trucks by the thousands were hauling debris to the plant. Emergency officials directed it to burn the stuff. With major power lines down, the plant’s electricity was needed to help light the city.

The plant’s fuel hopper quickly filled with icy debris. There’s only one way to empty the hopper - burn what’s in it. Plant operators tried every trick in the book, and then some, to make the debris burn cleanly. They superheated the air and added natural gas and coal. This helped, but not enough. The stuff just wouldn’t burn well. So, plant operators immediately stopped accepting it and did their best to burn what remained in the hopper.

What the plant did was reasonable.

What the clean-air bureaucrats have done is not.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board