In May’s issue of Buffalo Rising Magazine, we discussed the progressive new additions to Route 5 just outside the city in Lackawanna. Amidst the remnants of our once-mighty steel industry, large white wind turbines spring from the dejected land of the former steel plant, beckoning our city, with each natural rotation, to embrace a greener future.
Yesterday, people across the nation heard their story. Buffalo Rising contributor and New York Times correspondent Dave Staba penned a piece for the Times about the incredible transformation that has taken place at the site of the former Lackawanna Steel Plant.
On the shell of a wasted industrial giant, a new industry has emerged in Steel Winds, the country’s largest urban wind farm. But the story Staba is telling the country isn’t about a dozen new jobs and it isn’t even about renewable energy per say. It’s about a city and a region striving to reinvent and revitalize itself by using what it has always had to its advantage–the Great Lakes, barren land, infrastructure, a workforce, and creative minds searching to better their world.
Staba writes:
The economic effect of the wind farm on this city will never rival that of the steel giant. Mr. Mitskovski estimated that Steel Winds will ultimately employ a few dozen people, compared with the tens of thousands who punched the clock at Bethlehem. And though there are incentives for clean energy production, taxes generated by the wind farm will never match those paid by the steel mill, which at one time subsidized most of Lackawanna’s government.
The greatest effect of the eight windmills, however, may have more to do with attitude.
“A community that has had difficulty moving forward has accepted a technology that leapfrogs other forms of energy generation,” Mr. Mitskovski said. “Decades of steel-making created this environmental legacy. But that also created the opportunity to take this fallow, contaminated land and reuse it.”
Read the entire article here, in the New York Times.