Damage Control

 On a Friday evening in late May, telephones were ringing in Atchison, Kansas. They rang all over the small industrial and farm towns of Platte County in Missouri, too. Folks got the call in Parkville and around Platte Woods.

The phone rang at Jody Jones' place, a fenced-in house with yellow siding on a street paved with Atchison's nostalgic red bricks. She answered, then spoke for 20 minutes with a surveyor from a Las Vegas market-research company called IHR. As soon as she hung up, she dialed her neighbor across the street, Beatrice Shisler.

"You'll never believe what just happened," Jones told her. "I just took a survey all about those power plants, and you have to be really careful how you answer."

She was talking about plans by Kansas City, Missouri-based Great Plains Energy Inc. -- the parent company of Kansas City Power & Light -- to plop two massive, coal-fired power plants on farmland just outside her town. Shisler had been concerned since she read about the company's plans in the Atchison Daily Globe. It was one of the issues that peppered her conversations with Shisler, which also revolved around their kids, their dogs and Shisler's efforts to get her long-neglected three-story house into historic-register condition.

Jones and Shisler had each moved to Atchison within the past couple of years. Shisler had fallen in love with the old architecture and the bridge named for hometown hero Amelia Earhart. The small-town life made Atchison seem like a good place to raise a family. Or it did, anyway -- the prospect of an 800-megawatt power plant nearby raised some doubts.

Half an hour after calling Jones' house, IHR called Shisler's, too. By dusk, the two women were standing on either side of Jones' waist-high chain-link fence, comparing their answers to the survey's questions.

People who took the survey recall that the questions forced them to choose which was more important: creating jobs or protecting the environment. One question asked whether they'd be willing to pay 20 percent, 10 percent or 5 percent more on their energy bills for cleaner air. The survey also asked about economic growth, political affiliations and opinions on political figures such as Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius and Kansas City, Missouri, Mayor Kay Barnes. But for the most part, the questions were about power plants and mercury pollution.

Shisler, and all of her neighbors, felt sure that the callers were working on behalf of Great Plains Energy. "It makes me mad that they're going to use my answers to misrepresent me, because of the way the questions were worded," Shisler would say later. "They'll think, 'Oh, people in Atchison, they think jobs are more important than the environment. OK, let's just put that coal-fired power plant in Atchison. They don't know much about the environment. They're not going to come out and protest.'"

Across the river in Missouri, the Ozark Chapter of the Sierra Club had been the first to discover Great Plains' plans to build a plant 4 miles outside picturesque and historic Weston. Last May, the Missouri Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued a public notice that Great Plains had applied for permits to build the 800-megawatt coal-burning unit.

Such a plant would power roughly 640,000 homes, and with it would come serious health risks. Burning coal releases nitrogen oxide, which contributes to low-lying ozone. Ozone damages respiratory tissue and increases the incidence of lung diseases. Burning coal also releases airborne contaminants that have been linked to asthma, bronchitis, emphysema, lung cancer, heart disease, strokes and birth defects. One byproduct of burning coal is mercury, which can cause deformities in developing fetuses and damage the liver and kidneys. In recent years, studies have postulated that mercury could be linked to autism and learning disabilities.

The Environmental Protection Agency has just lowered its limits for acceptable ozone levels, creating another cause for concern when it comes to major polluters like power plants. Observers expect that Kansas City's air quality will fail to meet federal standards by late this summer.

By the time Jones and Shisler took the telephone survey, lots of northland residents knew about Great Plains' plans to build one 800-megawatt power plant on land it already owned in Weston, next to its 630-megawatt Iatan power plant. They also knew that Great Plains wanted to build a second 800-megawatt plant 10 miles from the Weston site, in Atchison. Combined, the plants would have the capacity to produce energy for about 1.3 million households -- more than three times the number of households in the Kansas City metro area today, according to 2000 U.S. Census figures.

"What bothers me the most is that they're lying," Shisler said after the phone survey in late May. "This is the Bible Belt, where people are trusting. And they're lying to us."

People in Atchison could smell two things a mile away: the fermenting of grain alcohol at Midwest Grain Products (which is made into cheap vodka at McCormick's Distillery in Weston) and slick corporate spin.

Corporate spin No. 1
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