A couple of weeks ago, there was a power outage in my part of the People’s Republic. It knocked out electricity through at least my cluster, as well as the empty corporate HQ next door. That was on a Monday.
Evidently the outage triggered the backup generator at the
building and no one—security guards, electricians, whoever—could figure out how
to turn it off. (One story was the manufacturer was out of business and no
technicians knew how to get it to shut down.)
I didn’t hear the generator from my house, but one of my neighbors
informed me that they were going day and night. I’d stopped walking through the
corporate campus when the developers started doing prep work for building 82
three- and four-story townhouses in about two acres, but on the Saturday (six days after it started) I swung by
to see what was going on. Here’s what I found:
You could smell the fumes before you could hear the
generator, which was actually pretty loud. This frankly looked like a
caricature of a 19th Century Midlands England industrial site.
I noodled around the internet and found two agencies I
thought should be informed of this, Fairfax County’s Division of Environmental
Health and the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality. Former was an
email, with one of these videos attached; latter was a website that wouldn’t
allow me to upload files.
On the Tuesday, I got a call from Sean at Fairfax County to
inform me that they don’t handle pollution; that would be the state. Sean said
that the state agency would investigate, but so far (a full week later) I’ve
heard exactly bupkis from them, which is pretty much what I expected from this
lame-ass Confederate-mentality crowd.
Actually, I checked their portal yesterday and discovered that they've closed the case. Because by the time they apparently showed up, "no pollution observed."
Oh—the developers finally figured out how to turn off the
generator. Or maybe it ran out of fuel. But at least it’s stopped spewing
carcinogens into my back yard.
For now.
©2024 Bas Bleu
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