Cover Story

By Rob Holbert Managing Editor

Mary Chitty says she would like to keep a clean house, but she can’t.

It’s not that she has hordes of wild children messing things up or 75 cats shedding all over the place. No, despite efforts to regularly sweep, vacuum and mop, Chitty says the outside of her house looks like a chimney sweep’s nightmare.

Ever since the 84-year-old Chitty moved into a brand new house next door to her daughter in downtown Mobile’s DeTonti Square area, she swears coal dust has been her constant nemesis.

“I’ve been down here two years. I have two porches and I just couldn’t keep them clean. It’s just like soot on them. I don’t even sit out there anymore. I don’t want to breathe it,” Chitty said.

Since moving to DeTonti from Chickasaw, Chitty says she has been plagued by what she believes is coal dust blowing in from the Alabama State Docks’ McDuffie Coal Terminal – one of the country’s largest – which moves more than 18 million tons of coal through the port annually.

To demonstrate the problem, Chitty broke out a broom and with a few strokes swept up a fairly impressive pile of a black, sooty substance. She said the porch had been cleaned just three days earlier.

“I know it’s not dirt,” Chitty says. “I thought it might be coming from the fireplace, but it’s different. You can sweep it up in a dustpan and it’s black. But I usually just hose it off. I don’t want to stir it up.”

Chitty isn’t alone in her contention that coal dust is routinely blowing in from the port and covering houses and other buildings in and around downtown Mobile. The residents of the Church Street East district felt so certain about it, they finally decided to have the substance checked in a laboratory. With the help of District 2 City Councilman William Carroll, the Church Street residents were able to have samples from five houses in their neighborhood taken to a Chicago lab.

“Five to 40 percent of the substance on the houses was coal,” said Marie Dyson, president of the Church Street East homeowners association. “On some houses it was higher and some it was lower. The people on the east-southeast near Lawrence Street get covered pretty well.”

Complaints about the perceived coal dust problem are hardly new. Residents around downtown have been saying for several years that their houses are always covered with a black substance and power washing is a regular activity. But after the lab results came back, they felt they had the “smoking gun.” With their lab results in hand, Dyson says Carroll was able to get Mayor Sam Jones to call a meeting in his office in early September with affected residents, as well as port officials, environmentalists and members of the Downtown Alliance. Dyson said Alabama Port Authority Director and CEO Jimmy Lyons attended the meeting, as did James Oberkirch, terminal manager for Mobile River Terminal, which also moves coal through the port.

“The gist of the meeting is they pretty much said ‘it’s coming from us.’ They vowed at that point that they would improve and enhance their suppression system,” Dyson recalled. “We talked about the protocol for when the suppression system would be turned on. They had tried a computerized system, but it didn’t work. Mr. Lyons also said they were going to do some landscaping.”

Three months after their meeting, Dyson says she believes the lines of communication have been opened, but admits there has been no contact between the two sides present at the meeting that day. She said the perceived coal dust problem in her neighborhood hasn’t abated completely, although there has been some improvement.

“It’s still there,” Dyson said. “Sometimes it’s not as bad as others. It hasn’t been as bad, though.”

But, she says, having coal on or in local houses is not something her organization will accept, even if it has improved.

“I asked the analyst in Chicago if it is normal for people to have coal dust in their houses, and he just said “Noooooo!’” Dyson said.

Dyson said her group isn’t just concerned about the aesthetic issues of having homes covered in black dust, but also the potential health risks that might be present. She admits no one has shown there is a health issue there or that anyone is at risk, but says it seems a logical conclusion.

“If you’ve got it in your house, you’re probably ingesting it,” she said.

While Dyson describes the tone of the September meeting as open and positive, she says she did remind port officials of a lawsuit in West Virginia that ended up with a company being forced to build a dome over its coal pile.

“I brought that up at the meeting,” Dyson said.

While Dyson is hopeful the meeting will help end the problems, she isn’t sure what things might have changed at the Port since September.

“Nobody’s called us and said, ‘Come over and see what we’ve done,’” Dyson said.

Port side

Port CEO Jimmy Lyons take on the situation is decidedly different. Lyons said the port commissioned its own study on the substance soiling so many structures downtown and the results pointed to some coal dust escaping the mounds in the port, but not the levels reported by the Church Street group. Lyons said they had far more locations tested and came up with a 10-to-15 percent measure of coal dust.

“We’ve taken the data they gathered and the data we gathered and determined that a relatively small amount of what they found is coal dust,” Lyons said.

Despite downplaying the amount of coal dust floating around downtown, Lyons said the port is currently taking some of the steps agreed to in the meeting with the Church Street homeowners. He said they spent $250,000 on landscaping around the coal pile last year and will spend another $250,000 on more landscaping. Lyons also said they are looking at additional water suppression systems that will help keep coal dust from leaving the McDuffie Terminal area. Still, he thinks the complaints are a bit overblown.

“We’ve spent a lot of money so far. Our goal is zero (coal leaving the terminal), but we’ve got bigger problems than coal dust,” Lyons said. “For someone to say coal is a problem is not accurate. They are claiming they have huge coal problems, but the data does not support that.”

For her part, Dyson says the Church Street study was more controlled in that they followed specific instructions from the Chicago laboratory that was to do the testing. She says they made sure the samples were only taken from certain directions and from places that had been washed within the past six months to avoid collecting something that had been sitting of a long time. She said the port’s samples came from a wide variety of places, which could have led to a more diluted report.

“Our study is our study, and we’re standing by it,” Dyson said.

Conversely, Lyons feels the port’s study that used more samples provided a clearer picture of what’s really happening.

“We took substantially more samples. The average that came back is about 15 percent coal dust,” he said.

Lyons said efforts are underway to find better and more cost-effective ways to suppress the coal dust at McDuffie Terminal, but some of that is going to require a more substantial and cost-effective water supply. Currently, the port spends $360,000 a year on water for coal dust suppression, Lyons said. He said they had looked into going to well water, but the salinity is too high for use in suppression.

Other changes, he said, have been going away from a computer system to regularly moisten the coal pile. Lyons admits that did not work given the sometimes volatile nature of Gulf Coast weather.

“The few times we have been caught was when there is a sudden thunderstorm. It’s been a long time since that happened, but there were times when it had been dry and suddenly we’d have a 40-mph wind,” Lyons said. “Water pressure is also an issue. We’ve got to get more water supply.”

Lyons says the coal business is booming right now, due mostly to the high costs of other fuels. The port’s coal business was up about 2 million tons this year over the last, he said. But even with the increase, Lyons doesn’t believe coal dust is a big problem for the city, and he says the situation Dyson mentioned in West Virginia has no relevance to Mobile.

“I don’t see a parallel between them,” he said.

Lyons says there is plenty of particulate matter in the air locally and to blame coal from the port is unfair. He said his home six miles away in Spring Hill also gets dusty, but that isn’t from the coal terminal.

“I’m not going to sit back and be falsely accused,” Lyons said. “They (Church Street homeowners) took the highest reading they could find. We’ve provided our readings and no one has disputed the numbers. We are going to be a good citizen, and we’re proud of our record.”

Councilman William Carroll said he has looked at both studies and met with both interested parties. He said the best way to get a true reading is to set up an air monitor in the areas around the port, but he wanted to give port officials a chance to implement improvements before going that route. As for the studies, he said the readings “weren’t astronomical.”

“There were a couple of places that were high, but that could have been from accumulation,” Carroll said. “There were going to be some additional measures taken to keep the coal from aerating, and we were going to let those take place before we went further with it.”

Meanwhile, Mary Chitty says she is resigned to having a dirty front and back porch at her beautiful new DeTonti digs.

“You can’t keep up with it. No way,” she said, sweeping up yet another small pile of soot on her porch.

Rob Holbert is Lagniappe managing editor. Contact him at rholbert@lagniappemobile.com.

Archives