Storm King

Robert Boyle, Founder, Hudson River Fisherman's Association

IN THE EARLY 1960s, Consolidated Edison of New York City, the most powerful utility company in America, announced its intention to build the world's largest pump storage power plant on Storm King Mountain. It would run into opposition from residents who loved the Hudson River Highlands, and from others for whom fishing the Hudson River was a reason to live. That those two parties got together at all was something of an only-in-America miracle. That they could win was unthinkable.

THE HUDSON River rises in the northern Adirondacks and runs more than three hundred miles to the island of Manhattan and the sea. Halfway through this journey it emerges from the mountains near Albany, already level with the ocean, creating a 150- mile estuary above New York Harbor and one of the great inland waterways of the world. For two centuries, the Hudson marked the route of commerce for the American colonies and their principal line of defense. British and American armies would fight, fortify, and attack the length of it, and the very mention of Hudson River names—White Plains, Saratoga, Ticonderoga, and the treason of Benedict Arnold at West Point—is to recount much of the Revolutionary War. Dutch family dynasties as imposing as the Van Cortlands and the Schuylers settled along the Hudson and marked society with their order. In 1825, the Erie Canal finally connected the Hudson to the Great Lakes and Ohio, routing trade through New York City to every continent on the globe. There are larger rivers in America than this one, but none was so present at its birth.

There has always been more to the Hudson, however, than commerce. Ninety miles below Albany it sweeps by Storm King Mountain, guarding the entrance to the Hudson Highlands and one of the most spectacular vistas in the world. Here the river twists through a series of wide gorges flanked by bluffs and ridges that turn green in summer and gold and red with fall, backed by rolling country as far as the eye can see. Early European travelers recorded the scene in wonder. To the German globe-trotter Baedeker, it was "grander and more inspiring than the Rhine." It gave birth to its own movement in painting, whose lead artists, Cole and Church, made raw nature the principal of the play. Humans, where they appeared at all, were tiny and off to the side, marveling at the scenery as if they were seeing the life hereafter.

Marvel they did. The celebrated British actress Fanny Kemble, visiting the Hudson Highlands in the 1830s, wrote in her diary of "the shadow of a huge mountain, frowning over the height on which I stood." "Suddenly," she continued, "a shadow moved down its steep sunny side, threw a deep blackness over the sparkling river, and then climbed the opposite mountain on the far side," followed by a blaze of noonday sun. "I could have stretched out my arms and shouted aloud—I could have fallen on my knees and worshipped—I could have committed any extravagance that ecstasy could suggest." She was seeing Storm King.

The experience was sublime. The Hudson's first explorers, quartered with shipmates who rarely bathed and on ships that reeked with their own wastes, were overcome by the scent of nature that Verrazano called an "exhale" of the "sweetest odors." An early Dutch traveler to Manhattan described encountering "such a sweet smell in the air that we stood still, because we did not know what it was we were meeting." They were not simply seeing the Garden, they were in the Garden, and it seems more than coincidence that this region would produce America's first book on gardening and its foremost landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted, whose basic operating principle was that of the Hudson River painters: the more natural the landscape, the better.

All of this, then, was in the genes and the mindset of those who went into the lists to oppose the power plant on Storm King Mountain. They had little law behind them, and they faced a daunting adversary.

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The Cornwall Hydroelectric Project: Power and Beauty for Tomorrow!

[Consolidated Edison brochure for Storm King power plant]

THE CON ED PROPOSAL was, to its managers, logical and benign. The company supplied electricity for the New York City region, and faced soaring demands from residential growth, air conditioning, and rate schedules that charged less per unit the more one used, a recipe for consumption. Proud to provide the power that heated, cooled, and illuminated this giant megalopolis, Con Ed named its headquarters building in downtown Manhattan the Tower of Light. Rather than build a new coal plant or run the gauntlet of approvals for a new nuclear reactor, the company's answer was a pumped storage facility on Storm King Mountain.

The mechanism was simple. The company would take power from the grid at times of low demand, pump water from the river, and push it two miles up a tunnel to a storage reservoir on the mountaintop. At peak demand the stored water would rush back down the tunnel to a powerhouse that converted the force to electricity. Three kilowatts of juice from conventional plants would be needed to provide only two kilowatts from Storm King, but the three were cheap and the two were worth real money. To Con Ed's engineers, the Hudson Highlands were an ideal location for pump storage power, and Storm King on size alone was the pick of the litter.

They anticipated little opposition. Here was a project that produced no pollution and no risk of nuclear meltdown, and it increased service for its voracious customer base. The only regulatory obstacle was the Federal Power Commission, which licensed these kinds of plants, but over the years the Commission had become indistinguishable from the utilities it was supposed to supervise. The attitude was deferential. "We're dealing with top officials in industry," a federal official said of his agency's lackluster enforcement record, "you just don't treat these people like that." The trigger for the fight to come was a sketch by a Con Ed employee of the project that showed Storm King Mountain with a bite out of one side to house an enormous powerhouse, and transmission lines spreading like tentacles from the scene. It was a perfectly sensible engineering drawing. One look at it was all it took to push Hudson Highland residents, already nervous about rumors of the proposal, over the edge.

The residents didn't see what they were in for either. It just grew. A handful of neighbors banded together as the Scenic Hudson...