Custer's Last Stand

Just when most farmers are settling down for a winter's rest, Virgil Steyer Jr. is usually working hardest. Steyer grows Christmas trees on large tracts near secluded Mount Storm, W. Va. (pop: 160); every December he serves droves of customers attracted from miles around by the high quality of his crop. But this year business is bad. Not that the Yuletide spirit has suddenly evaporated; rather Steyer's livelihood has been threatened by air pollution.

Mount Storm's air is being fouled by emissions from the smokestacks of two huge coal-burning power plants owned by Virginia Electric and Power Co. Since the plants were fired up in 1966, harvests of Mount Storm's tree farmers have tumbled by as much as 90%. Steyer had hoped to sell 20,000 trees this year. Instead, customers have been driving away in empty trucks, unwilling to take the stunted and mis-shapen trees. "I think I'm out of business," Steyer says sadly. Dr. Franklin Custer, the other principal tree grower near Mount Storm, used to cut 10,000 trees a year. This season he expects to chop fewer than 1,000. One scraggly group of trees, only two miles from the belching smokestacks, may well be Custer's last stand on that site.

"The place is a disaster area," says University of Montana Botanist Clarence C. Gordon, who was called in with other scientists by the National Air Pollution Control Administration to study the problem. The scientists found that sulphur dioxide in the fumes kills the tips of some trees and causes others to lose their needles or grow buds in unsightly clusters.

Government officials are now looking into the power company's argument that insects--not pollutants--are to blame. Whatever they decide, Virginia Electric and Power does not seem unduly concerned: it is proceeding with the construction of a third Mount Storm plant, scheduled for completion in 1973.

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