Yesterday I glanced out the window and saw a huge line of smoke.
It was rolling down the valley towards Fincastle.
At first I thought it was a forest fire!
But upon closer inspection, I saw that the black dust was billowing from the area of a smoke stack.
Sometimes the smoke rolls out of this local industry.
That black line of dust stretched for miles.
*These photos were taken February 18, 2013.
Wow! Do you have something like our Environment Agency which you can alert about this sort of thing? It has to be breaking all kinds of environmental regulations, surely. What a horrid thing to do to a pristine and beautiful day.
ReplyDeleteI want to choke just looking at that stream of scooge in the air. ack. And we all wonder why there is so much lung and asthma related disease... just ugh.
ReplyDeleteWould that be the cement plant? If so, there's really no need to worry. They follow very strict EPA guidelines over there. With a start-up, such as they had on Monday, there will sometimes be some opacity in the smoke, which is basically made up of lime. The gov't allows up to 10% opacity, so even a few minutes on a breezy day will look bad, even though it's not. The dark smoke usually shows up when they shut down or start up the kilns. Also, when they do have operational problems, they are required to FAX their statistics to the oversight agency every day that they are out of compliance. The fines are huge for any companies remaining out of compliance, so obviously they try to avoid that at all costs.
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