Editorial: Clearing the air over closed plant

Wednesday, Jan. 4, 2006 | 7:32 a.m.

When operations ceased at a Laughlin coal-fired power plant this week, it left hundreds of workers jobless in Southern Nevada and on the Navajo and Hopi reservations. The closure also stripped Southern California Edison of 7 percent of its electricity output.

The four utility companies that operate the Mohave Generation Station have known since 1999 that if they didn't complete $1 billion in required pollution control upgrades by the end of 2005, the plant would have to close Jan. 1, which was Sunday.

The plant, which supplied power to about 1.5 million homes, created electricity by using coal mined on the Hopi and Navajo reservations. The coal was mixed with water, also drawn from tribal lands, and sent to Laughlin through a 273-mile-long pipeline. Three decades of that process has dried up springs and depleted drinking water sources on the Indian land.

The decree to clean up or close down stems from a lawsuit environmental groups filed against Southern California Edison that sought to end emissions of thick, black smoke that threatened the health of people who lived downwind and fouled the air over Arizona's Grand Canyon and Utah's Bryce Canyon national parks.

The Mohave plant was the sole buyer of coal taken from the Black Mesa Mine. So the plant's closing means not only the loss of about 300 jobs in Laughlin, but also nearly as many on the Hopi and Navajo reservations, where jobs are scarce.

Now-jobless workers, who were quoted Sunday in The New York Times, blame environmentalists and tribal members who raised the issues of air pollution and groundwater depletion. But the fault lies squarely on the shoulders of well-paid power company officials who refused to take appropriate steps to clean up the filth their operations created.