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Sat: The sound of power
posted at 2010-04-10 23:26 | Last modified 2010-04-10 23:26
Yesterday, for a story I'm working on, I visited a coal-fired power plant constructed in 1923. It's going to be mothballed by Progress Energy sometime in the next 7 years. The bean-counters say retrofitting such an old plant with scrubbers doesn't make sense economically. They're probably right. But it was one of the most paradoxically beautiful places I've been in years.
When you drive in, over the green fields and past a row of old cooling towers, you see a faded red brick building Steichen would have killed to photograph in the morning light - tall and solid and pretty, with floating cornices, soaring ceilings, and clerestory windows. It practically shouts early 20th-c optimism about industrialization.
Inside, the high windows filter sunshine onto the green enamel of a 1923 General Electric generator. It still works. (Take THAT, planned obsolescence.) The airy space is still and bright and empty. Except for the hum.
A power plant is an amazing sonic landscape. You can hear the hum before you get there. At the Cape Fear plant, it's halfway between a B-flat and a B, and it's actually kind of pleasant -- faint enough that you can still hear distant birds and the occasional static sizzle of the transformer stations near the door.
Walking through the plant, you hear the deep thrum of the coal pulverizers, and the tinny skitter of rejected rocks, tumbling down chutes, plinking into waste containers. And then there are the fans and condensers that feed air to the furnace. You can sense their rumble at the front door, but up close, it’s a roar so dense it seems material. Almost as dense as the growl and shriek of the fire tornado when you open the hatch to look inside the furnace.
But the grand finale is on top, seven stories up, where two 1950s Westinghouse generators spin under the open sky. They sing the biggest, sweetest, most extended major chord you can imagine, rolling through octaves you didn’t even know existed.
You can feel the low harmonics more than hear them, a tension in the gut like a plucked wire. Your feet tingle from the vibration in the steel grate floor, and the top notes ring softly in the crown of your skull. High above the ground, it’s the closest you can get to being literally afloat on sound, encased in it, shrouded in the most perfect chord you’ll ever hear.
I know there’s good reason to mothball these old power plants. My brain gets it, and my lungs will probably be grateful. But when the turbines slow and the harmonics fade one last time, the world will be a little darker for the end of that chord.
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