Reversing acid rain’s dirty work
For several months, 760 bags of pulverized limestone sat waiting in the woods with a sheet of paper stuck to a nearby tree that said:
“DO NOT DISTURB”
In late February, a group of state workers and college students came to the pile of 50-pound bags, now frozen together and covered by still-falling snow.
They pulled off green tarps and pried the bags apart, loaded the bags into plastic sleds and hauled them down a small hill and out across Benz Pond, a 25-acre fishing spot in the northwestern Adirondacks.
Then, with pocket knives and box cutters, they gutted bag after bag until they’d dumped 19 tons of lime onto the frozen pond.
All this because, for over a century, Americans burned coal to make power, steel and cement.
Smoke from the coal fire drifted into the clouds, across the country, up through the state of New York, then fell back down as acid rain.
The acid
