HACKENSACK, N.J. – The smokestacks loom like misplaced skyscrapers above the forested banks of the Ohio River, rising 75 stories over white-hot coal furnaces. From boilers fueled by these fires, electricity flows to millions of homes and factories. From the smokestacks, a plume of soot and chemicals flows into the sky above Ohio and rises into the jet stream.

The river of air carries the pollution eastward, across West Virginia and Pennsylvania and into New Jersey, sickening children and shortening lives all along the way.

More than 30 years after the Clean Air Act targeted polluters, aging Midwest power plants continue to spew exhaust.

The Northeast is simply on the wrong end of the country’s tailpipe.

Now, it’s on the wrong end of the political process, as well.

The Bush administration last summer scrapped decades of environmental policies that told big polluters when, where, and how to clean up their emissions. Its new rules would allow hundreds of aging, coal-fired plants to operate without pollution controls that, while costly, can strip the exhaust coming out of their smokestacks nearly clean.

In place of plant-by-plant enforcement, the White House said in December that it will rely on the free market to help clean up the air, by setting national limits for pollutants and letting the electric industry decide how to achieve them. Companies could pay to pollute, or profit from cleaning up.

It’s an approach long sought by industry and conservatives. But, in states downwind of the plants, the new policy is stirring conflict – in the courts, in Congress and at the ballot box.

One-third of the air pollution that blankets the state of New Jersey, blurring the New York skyline in a scrim of haze, and moving on to Maine blows in from the Midwest.

A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., blocked the Bush administration’s changes to clean air rules right before Christmas, pending the outcome of a challenge by attorneys general from Maine, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin, as well as several cities.

According to the Associated Press, the court’s decision blocks at least temporarily one the Bush administration’s major environmental decisions. In their challenge, the states said the changes would harm the environment and public health.

Officials say the health of residents is being sacrificed for a Republican political agenda in the Midwest.

“These are matters of life and death for New Jersey’s residents,” said Bradley Campbell, commissioner of the state Department of Environmental Protection.

Campbell says the administration policy represents “a very cynical political choice: to give a gift to the Midwest utility lobbies that will be paid for by health costs in Northeastern states.”

The Bush administration – and the power companies – say the new approach is the fastest way to fix a problem that decades of litigation and regulation have failed to solve.

The administration’s plans “chart the course for achieving the most productive period of air-quality improvement in American history,” said Mike Leavitt, the former Utah governor who recently took over as administrator of the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

Meanwhile, the goal of clean air is being pushed further and further into the future – and each year that passes, more children will get sick and more people will die from the air they breathe.

Blowing east

The load of pollution carried by the jet stream takes the breath away – literally.

The W.H. Sammis plant alone – operated by FirstEnergy Corp. in eastern Ohio – spews 145,000 tons of throat-irritating sulfur dioxide into the air annually, more than all the power plants in New Jersey and Connecticut combined.

The tallest of the four smokestacks at this giant, 50 miles southwest of Pittsburgh, stands just 50 feet shy of the Chrysler Building.

The Sammis stacks were built tall because, decades ago, environmental officials believed that “the solution to pollution is dilution.” But the higher the stack, the farther the pollution traveled. Such stacks spread pollution as far as the trout streams of Nova Scotia, Maine’s woods and the Pine Barrens of New Jersey.

Sammis is just one of dozens of such behemoths fouling the air.

It’s one of 16 coal-burning plants sued by New Jersey – seven in Ohio, four in West Virginia, four in Indiana, and one in Virginia – for polluting the air. Among the others are the Gen. James M. Gavin plant, in Cheshire, Ohio, where two of the nation’s largest coal-fired furnaces produce 2,600 megawatts of electricity, and Cinergy’s Wabash River power plant, 700 miles west of New Jersey near Terre Haute, Ind.

Every year the 16 plants spew 356,000 tons of rusty yellow and brown nitrogen oxides, the main ingredient in asthma-triggering ozone. Every year, they emit 136 million tons of carbon dioxide, the leading cause of global warming.

Every year, they release more than 1 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the air, where it is transformed into tiny, lung-penetrating sulfate particles.

These 16 are among 51 aging, dirty power plants sued by the federal Environmental Protection Agency for violations of the Clean Air Act in 1999. An initiative of the Clinton administration, it was one of the largest environmental enforcement actions ever undertaken.

The pollution has exacted a heavy price from communities both near and far. In Ohio, it has transformed river valleys into ozone alleys. The tiny village of Cheshire was engulfed in the Gavin plant’s noxious plume so often the local power company bought out the town.

As the exhaust from the power plants travels, the tiny particles it carries begin to settle. Gas molecules – heated by sun or moistened by cloud water – combine to form new substances. They bake with other chemicals to make ozone. They dissolve into raindrops to make acid rain.

Many miles away, they come back to earth. They settle over playgrounds and pastures, streams and ponds, cities and suburbs. They scour the face of the Statue of Liberty. They taint reservoirs with mercury.


Four hundred miles from the Sammis plant, the particles drift down in places like Ringwood, N.J., where 10-year-old Chris Rosedale pulls up panting beneath a backyard basketball backboard.

He cradles the ball, his shoulders shaking, his breaths quick and shallow. Diagnosed with asthma at 18 months of age, he suffers the effects of an irritant he cannot see, produced in a place he’s never heard of. Last year, he quit a local basketball league because of asthma. He considers a Ridgewood hospital his second home.

“I hate it,” he says. “I just can’t do certain things. What I really want to do is run around.”

But he can’t escape the air.

Air, unlike water, can’t be bottled and bought.

“With air pollution, you can run but you can’t hide,” says Dr. Paul Lioy, deputy director of the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute of Rutgers and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. In New Jersey alone, 612,000 children and adults suffer from asthma.


Pollution from coal-burning power plants causes an estimated 30,000 deaths a year in the United States – more than drunken driving, AIDS or homicides, according to one analysis. That analysis was done by Abt Associates, an environmental consulting company, for the Clean Air Task Force, a national non-profit advocacy group. Abt has been used by the EPA to quantify the health effects of federal policies.

Irritating soot and oxygen-blocking gases from burning coal contribute not only to asthma but also to heart attacks, emphysema, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Recent studies link fine particles to lung cancer. And research suggests that pollution may contribute to permanent “remodeling” of the lungs of young children – and lifelong problems.

The acid rain makes its way into drinking water and causes lead to leach from pipes. The mercury particles sent up through the smokestacks fall into lakes and streams and make fish unfit to eat – the Food and Drug Administration warns pregnant and nursing women not to eat some freshwater fish.

New Jersey’s DEP blames as many as 1,200 deaths, 6,000 emergency room visits, and 68,000 asthma attacks a year on fine particulates. Some of those particulates come from out-of-state power plants. Some come from a variety of other sources, including diesel engines.

By cleaning up power plants, “we could avoid more premature deaths (in New Jersey) than if we could prevent every traffic fatality or homicide,” Campbell said.

The statistics don’t begin to measure the suffering. The struggle to breathe is terrifying for those caught up in an asthma attack, and for those who watch.


Michelle Dorsett, a former Park Ridge resident, recalls staying up nights during her daughter’s harrowing attacks.

“I would lay in bed next to her, listening to her breathe when she was small,” said Dorsett, who now lives in Guttenberg.

The analysis by Abt blamed the fine particulates emitted by the plants for 600,000 asthma attacks nationally, 5 million lost workdays, and 26 million days of restricted activity every year – days when children like Chris Rosedale don’t go out to play ball, teachers at Passaic’s School 5 mark pupils absent, and nurses at a Paterson hospital brace for an onslaught of gasping patients.


“We feel, quite frankly, that the Bush administration has taken the side of the coal lobby against the parents who are waiting in the lobbies of ERs after asthma attacks,” said Jeff Tittel, president of the Sierra Club in New Jersey.

New Jersey’s homegrown air pollution has been significantly reduced in the last 30 years – thanks to cleaner cars, the exodus of industry, and a shift to nuclear power. And the state has been tougher on factories and power plants than Ohio.

Still, every New Jersey resident breathes unhealthy air at least part of the year. The EPA says all of the state fails to meet national standards for ozone. On high ozone days, emergency room visits and hospital admissions are 28 percent higher, according to pioneering research by Clifford Weisel, a professor at the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute in Piscataway.

New Jersey will never reach its goals for healthier air unless distant polluters do their part, state officials say.

“A third of our air pollution comes from upwind sources.” said Campbell. “We’re really caught in a vise.”

Dirty, but cheap

If coal is so dirty, why burn so much of it?

The answer is simple: Coal is cheap.

The same amount of heat is generated by burning 80 cents’ worth of coal, $3.24 worth of natural gas, and $4.61 worth of crude oil. In fact, coal consumption has tripled since 1970, the vast majority used by the nation’s electric utilities.

But when the total cost of the energy is reckoned – including hospital bills, lost wages, and sheer suffering – the cost of this “cheap” energy looks steep indeed. The EPA estimates that it would cost $6 billion to bring the nation’s old coal-burning power plants up to modern standards for sulfur dioxide, and that the savings in health-care costs would top $100 billion.

“The benefits so far outweigh the costs that any economist would tell you this is the right thing to do,” said Chris Recchia, executive director of the Ozone Transport Commission, a multistate group that studies the interstate flow of pollution. Each year of delay, said Recchia, means another year “of additional people dying.”

It doesn’t have to be that way.

The technology exists to make the air cleaner. More than three-quarters of the harmful sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides could be eliminated through the use of low-sulfur coal and machines that scrub or vacuum the dirt from the air before it leaves the smokestack, according to several analyses based on the pollution rates attained by newer plants. Those machines already are used at newer coal-burning plants.


To take just one close-to-home example, New Jersey negotiated an agreement last year with PSEG Fossil LLC – owner of two coal-fired power plants here – to install state-of-the-art pollution controls that will reduce emissions of sulfur dioxide by 90 percent and nitrogen oxides by more than 80 percent. This $337 million investment will benefit not only those living around the plants, in Hudson and Mercer counties, but downwind states such as Connecticut and Maine.

Similar efforts at all the dirty power plants, according to Abt Associates, would save at least 18,000 lives a year.


Congress took dead aim at air pollution in 1970. It set standards for air quality, created the EPA, and ordered the air cleaned up by 1975. Under the original Clean Air Act, all new power stations or factories would have to install costly pollution-control devices specified by law.

But at the same time, the lawmakers created a legal loophole that allowed some of the country’s worst air polluters – power plants built before the Clean Air Act – to continue polluting.

Congress assumed that the existing plants would soon be obsolete, and be replaced with new plants. They allowed the old plants to operate, “grandfathered in” under the law.

Scientists knew much less in 1970 about what pollution does. They hadn’t analyzed how fast microscopic particles fall to earth from prevailing wind currents. They didn’t know that pollution creates acid rain hundreds of miles away. They hadn’t seen the soaring rates of asthma among children yet, or understood how deeply into the lungs microscopic particles can penetrate.

Nor did the lawmakers of that time anticipate that the coal-burning power plants could be rendered virtually immortal by a process of piecemeal refurbishment.

In 1977, Congress tried to deal with the problem of the older plants. It amended the Clean Air Act, requiring that new pollution controls be added whenever a major upgrade was done at an older plant. This led to disagreements about the definition of “major.” Twenty-two years went by before the EPA, at the end of the Clinton administration, tried to enforce the new regulation by suing the 51 plants.

During those years, some of the biggest beneficiaries of the loophole in federal law were the old plants along the Ohio River Valley and in Appalachia – power stations built at the mouths of mines in America’s historic Coal Belt.

Sammis is one such plant.

Situated on a shelf of land between a wooded hill and the Ohio River, Sammis is a city unto itself, served by a rail line, a shipping lock, and a barge dock. Its four stacks rise 500 to 1,000 feet into the Midwest sky.


To Kevin Auerbacher, one of New Jersey’s lead lawyers against the power plants, this stretch of the Ohio River “looks like a scene out of Dante.” Up and down the river, from Stratton, Ohio, past Wheeling and Moundsville, W.Va., to Cincinnati, the fires of steel refineries, chemical factories, and power plants pump soot into the air.


At Sammis, fields heaped with coal – it burns more than 14,000 tons a day – lie on one side of the plant, cooling ponds on the other. Heavy trucks cart ash away on roads dampened to keep the gray powder from flying.

Under EPA orders in the 1980s, the company added pollution equipment that cost more than the original plant. But the federal Justice Department now says the company needs to do more. Eleven projects to upgrade the plant’s boilers should have triggered higher pollution-control standards, the government said in filing suit against Sammis in federal court.

FirstEnergy, the owner of the plant, argues that all the repair and rebuilding work it has done at the 40-year-old facility is simply routine. The work – costing $135 million and spread over 15 years – was not substantial enough to trigger higher pollution standards, said spokesman Ralph DiNicola. Moreover, the EPA knew about the company’s plans all along, and never expressed concern, he said.

“The bottom line is that the plant operated for many years under the impression that everything it was doing was in compliance with the EPA,” he said. “Then in 1999 it was determined retroactively that we violated the Clean Air Act. That was a surprise to us and everyone else in the industry.”

Judge Edmund A. Sargus Jr. of the U.S. District Court in Columbus, Ohio, delivered an even bigger surprise to FirstEnergy and the industry on Aug. 7, when he declared that Sammis had violated the Clean Air law.


The judge had harsh words for the EPA, as well.

“The enforcement of the Clean Air Act with regard to the Sammis plant has been disastrous,” he wrote in a decision that also noted the loss of Ohio’s coal-mining jobs.

“From a public health perspective, 33 years after passage of the act, the plant to this day emits on an annual basis 145,000 tons of sulfur dioxide, a pollutant injurious to the public health,” Sargus wrote, underlining “tons” for emphasis. “The air is still not clean, tens of thousands of jobs have been lost, and enforcement by the EPA has been highly inconsistent.”


The decision marked the first court victory in the fight to get the coal-burning plants to clean up. It was hailed as an important precedent for New Jersey’s pending cases against two other big Midwest power companies, American Electric Power and Cinergy Corp., scheduled for court hearings in 2004 and 2005.

Judge Sargus ordered both sides back into court in spring 2004 to determine what FirstEnergy should do to fix the problem and compensate for years of violations.


In New Jersey, the decision was lauded.

“This victory sends a strong message to corporate polluters that they cannot defy the law and profit at the expense of our environment and the health of New Jersey residents,” Gov. McGreevey said.


FirstEnergy is considering an appeal, DiNicola said. He pointed to another Clean Air case, in North Carolina, where the judge came to a different conclusion about what constituted a major renovation. Some think the power plant cases may end up in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, power companies warn that the consequences of such lawsuits will extend beyond what comes out of the smokestacks. Costly cleanup equipment will raise the price of electricity, they say. It will make their companies uncompetitive, cost jobs, and fuel inflation.

“Would you be willing to pay double or triple for your electric bill? For cleaner air?” asks Greg Cybulski, a union president at Sammis.

FirstEnergy might choose to close the Sammis plant, DiNicola warned. And where, he asked, would a replacement be found for the 2,300 megawatts of power it produces annually – enough to power about half the homes in New Jersey?

That’s a question that commanded more attention after last summer’s blackout darkened a large swath of the Northeast and Canada. Coincidentally, the blackout started in FirstEnergy’s territory, and shut down most of the power plants along the Ohio.

Changing the rules

Now, however, the Bush administration is trying alter the rules of the game, shaking the legal foundation of the enforcement cases.

Shortly after Bush took office, his administration questioned the need for the 1999 lawsuits. In late August, the EPA announced a further retrenchment. The agency has made it much easier for older power plants to stay in operation without investing in more pollution controls.

“The old regulations undermined our goals for protecting the environment and growing the economy,” President Bush told workers at a Detroit Edison power plant this fall. “Therefore, I wanted to get rid of them. I’m interested in job creation and clean air, and I believe we can do both.”

Under the new regulation, as long as plant owners spend less than 20 percent of their value annually on repairs and upgrades, they won’t have to meet the higher standards of new plants. Since these plants are worth billions of dollars, the announcement would be a green light for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of repairs each year – work that could keep the plants operating for generations to come.

The change is not expected to increase or decrease air pollution from the plants, said John Millett, an EPA spokesman. What it does is eliminate lawsuits and cumbersome permitting processes, a Bush priority.

This “will help plants to modernize – to produce the same or more power by burning less fuel,” Millett said.

In response to critics, the Bush administration in December unveiled the details of a strategy it says will improve air quality while sidestepping legal battles with the big coal-power companies.

The new federal policy would allow companies to buy and sell the right to pollute. The same approach reduced sulfur dioxide, a key contributor to acid-rain, by one-third when it was adopted as an amendment to the Clean Air Act in 1990.

The Bush proposals would set nationwide caps on the amount of nitrogen oxides and mercury, as well as sulfur dioxide, that coal-fired plants could emit. Each plant would be given credits, allowing it to produce a certain tonnage of pollutants. A plant could pollute more, but only if it bought credits from another plant. Pollute less, and it could sell its credits.

Over 15 years, the national caps would be lowered, ensuring overall emissions would decrease.

The idea is that producing dirty air will cost more, so plants will have a financial incentive to clean up. It’s a quicker, more efficient way of reducing pollution compared with the current maze of regulations and litigation, supporters argue.

In theory, environmentalists like the cap concept. But they have savaged the details of Bush’s plan, as have officials in downwind states such as Maine. The caps are far too high, the critics say. The scheme goes easy on coal-fired plants, they say. It requires smaller reductions than if Bush simply enforced the current plant-by-plant rules, and extends the deadline for compliance.

In particular, they criticized the mercury proposal. Waiting, they say, is dangerous with known hazards like mercury. Power plants produce nearly half of the mercury pollution in the nation.

In addition, critics argue that industry caps won’t necessarily decrease pollution at plants that matter the most to people hundreds of miles away. The trading system allows power companies themselves to decide where to cut pollution and where to continue to pollute.


The Sammis plant, for example, is one of the country’s biggest producers of sulfur dioxide, the pollutant already under caps designed to reduce acid rain. Yet it has always “stayed underneath” those EPA limits because FirstEnergy buys pollution credits. “We have never violated the Clean Air caps,” said Cybulski, the Utility Workers union president.


Last month, in concert with its policy shift on renovations at plants, the EPA called off investigations of 70 power plants suspected of violating the Clean Air Act. And it dropped 13 additional prosecutions that had been referred to the Justice Department.

In fact, none of the original 51 cases could have been prosecuted if the new rule had been in effect.

John L. Kirkwood, president of the American Lung Association, accused the EPA of “throwing in the towel to industry” just as its enforcement was proving successful in court. “EPA policy should be based on protecting public health, not bolstering industry profits,” he said

New Jersey, meanwhile, has joined with a dozen other states and 20 cities in going to federal court to block the new regulations on repair work at power plants. A federal appeals court agreed with the states in late December, temporarily blocking implementation of the rules until the legal challenge is heard.

“No work done on a power plant is going to end up triggering requirements to install updated pollution controls,” said Sam Wolfe, New Jersey’s assistant DEP commissioner.


The conflict over power-plant pollution pits densely populated downwind states in the Northeast against the economically depressed industrial heartland. It sways voters such as longtime Democrat Cybulski, who says he’ll vote for Bush. Unlike New Jersey, Ohio and West Virginia delivered Electoral College votes to Bush in 2000, and the president would like to count on them again in 2004.

While Chris Rosedale is gasping for air in Ringwood, the power companies are adding to the Republican Party’s campaign coffers.

In the last three federal election cycles, the industry contributed $45 million, more than $30 million of which went to Republican candidates, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. Contributions by FirstEnergy, American Electric Power, and Cinergy totaled $3.8 million and mirror those proportions.


And so, the quality of the air we breathe is caught in the crosscurrents of regulatory change from the Bush White House, challenges from the states and environmental groups, lawsuits from the Clinton era, and old-fashioned, big-money politics.

The result is gridlock – confusion about what is required, and reluctance to invest in what is needed to clean up the air. Everything is at a standstill – except the dirty air.

Jane Bullis, an environmentalist in Warren County, where researchers are studying high asthma rates among children, called Bush’s plans for the Clean Air Act “tragic.”

“It sends a message that we’re willing to make concessions to these power plants,” she said. “We are willing to sacrifice all or some of our health – for what? For the almighty dollar?”


In coal country, the smokestacks of the Sammis plant are visible from the door of Greg Cybulski’s office. He has headed Utility Workers of America Local 457 for four years.

“I guess you could call me the man in the middle,” he says. “On the one hand I support the company, because I fear for my members.” On the other hand, his national union wants him to support a Democratic candidate for president.

His members are plant operators – those who control the fires that heat the steam higher than 1,000 degrees and send it throttling toward the turbines at 3,600 pounds of pressure per square inch. They’re proud of the work they do to generate electricity, and proud of their work to clean up stack emissions.

“We spend as much effort controlling pollution – more – as making power,” he says.

Cybulski says power plant operations are much cleaner now. Miles of vacuum bags and scrubbers, which remove particulates, cover a platform built over a highway in the mid-1980s. Trucks cart off the waste as fill. Cybulski can remember when that ash from those stacks rained down over the countryside.

“Nobody wants to see the environment get hurt, but it’s got to be a balanced approach,” he said. “We’ve seen a lot of environmentalists come down here with just crazy ideas. They would like to just lock the gates, and put us on the street, and claim a victory. Well, people have to eat, too.”



In the Ohio River Valley, everyone knows a coal miner or steelworker who’s lost work in the last few years. Cybulski’s own father lost his pension this year after the steel mill where he had worked for 40 years went bankrupt. Most of the mines have played out, and fewer plants burn Ohio’s high-sulfur coal now.

Twelve miles down the Ohio River from Sammis lies Steubenville, Ohio. Once a thriving commercial and cultural center for coal, steel, and power workers – and the birthplace of Dean Martin – it has become a depressed monument to past prosperity. Every other block, it seems now, sports a thrift shop or check-cashing store.

Steubenville was the most polluted of six cities that were compared by the Harvard School of Public Health in a landmark study over a 15-year period beginning in 1974. A few in town still remember the researchers asking them to blow into machines that measured lung capacity, and to chronicle their medical conditions.

The study, launched shortly after the Arab oil embargo led to greater use of coal power in the United States, tracked the respiratory health and death rates among residents of Steubenville and five other cities.

It found that those in Steubenville had a 26 percent higher mortality rate than those living in the least polluted city, Portage, Wis. – which the statisticians translate into an average loss of two years of life. Children in Steubenville also suffered from more coughs, bronchitis, and chest illness – and their reduced lung function persisted into adulthood.

That doesn’t surprise Amy Bailey, a young mother who has lived most of her 24 years in the Ohio River Valley. Her toddler, Faith, was hospitalized for three days last year with asthma.

“You could put your ear to her chest, and hear it whistle, like she wasn’t getting any air,” said Bailey. Two months ago, Bailey herself started wheezing, and now she takes asthma medication, too.

“People around here are sick all the time, with this deep chest cough,” said Bailey, who lives in Marietta, farther south in the valley dubbed “ozone alley” by environmentalists. Six of the 18 children she cares for in a YMCA after-school program have asthma inhalers, she said. A widow, she spent $400 to buy air purifiers for her small house.

Bailey’s concerns led her to join a local environmental group in Marietta.

The group, Recover, doesn’t want the plants closed – in fact some of its members are employees of the power and chemical companies. Recover tries to educate the public and push elected officials from mayor to the congressman to support enforcement of the Clean Air Act.

“These older power plants are a serious issue here,” said Tina Trombley, the group’s president. “We’re just as concerned about them as they are in New Jersey.”

Bailey thinks of moving from her home in Marietta to a place where the air is cleaner, but needs to be close to her family. “I worry about the future,” she said. “If my daughter has asthma now, what’s going to happen? I’m worried it’s the air and nobody’s doing anything about it.”

In her fear, she echoes the concerns of Chris Rosedale’s mother, hundreds of miles away in Ringwood. Elizabeth VanDugteren, also a single mother, has thought of moving to make her son’s life easier.

When Chris is hospitalized, VanDugteren struggles to hold things together at the business she owns in Clifton – while staying at Chris’ bedside. Last March, when Chris spent four days in the hospital, her fianci told her, “You’ve got to get him out of here.”

But to where?


To people in New Jersey concerned about the health consequences of pollution from Sammis and the other plants, Cybulski has a ready answer: “Turn your electricity off!

“We can’t produce it if you don’t use it,” he explains. The computer, the air conditioner, the television, the lights – the demand for electricity increases constantly, and the power companies are happy to supply it.

People flip the switch, never thinking where the power comes from, Cybulski said, laughing. “That’s the American way.”

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(c) 2003, The Record (Bergen County, N.J.)

Visit The Record Online at http://www.northjersey.com/

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

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