Salem’s winds of change
SALEM — Here, on a finger of land jutting out into Salem Harbor, is an antidote to the pitched battles over development playing out elsewhere in the Commonwealth — and a glimpse of the future we’ll all need to embrace, if we’re going to make it.
For over six decades, this part of Salem was home to one of the country’s dirtiest coal-fired power plants. Folks suffered through the filth that plant generated, the wind blowing dust off the giant black piles onto their houses and cars and everything else. Clunky mechanical conveyors carried the fuel up into the plant at all hours.
“It would make this noise, ‘Da-da-da-da-da,’ day and night,” recalled Barbara Kelly, who lives nearby. For years, Kelly, her neighbors, and an army of environmentalists fought to get rid of the coal plant. It finally closed in 2014.
Now the future will rise in its place. Part of the site will become the Salem Offshore Wind Terminal, a hub for storing and assembling the components for wind turbines installed up and down the coast of New England.
It’s a massive project, and for a time it will be pretty disruptive for neighbors who have already put up with a lot. But the residents — many part of the Salem Alliance for the Environment — who fought to shut down the coal plant were always going to back using the site to support the offshore wind industry.
It’s not just because they directly suffered from proximity to fossil fuel power. They are also being confronted regularly by the effects of climate change, with more frequent high tides and storm surges bringing water flooding into their neighborhoods from Collins Cove and elsewhere. Threats that imminent can get a community to YIMBY quickly when it comes to clean energy.
“Salem is a community aware of the climate crisis,” said Mayor Dominick Pangallo, who grew up a mile from the coal pile. “The sea can sink us, but it can also save us.”
But overwhelming support for the new plant did not make residents here pushovers. In addition to environmental benefits clean power would bring, they were looking for direct community benefits, too, even though they had less leverage than opponents might have enjoyed.
“Community benefit agreements are set up for people who don’t want a project,” said Bonnie Bain, offshore wind program manager at SAFE.
Despite that, SAFE refused to be sidelined. They gathered a phalanx of neighborhood groups, united in a way they hadn’t been before, and backed up by heavy hitters like the Conservation Law Foundation. Its members had helped Pangallo get elected. He agreed to give them a seat at the negotiating table with Crowley Maritime Corp., the company developing the site.
“It’s going to happen, so let’s make it happen to the best of our ability,” Kelly said, standing at the water’s edge on a recent frosty morning.
They demanded, and got, increased funding for climate resiliency, pathways for local students and workers — especially women and minorities — into clean energy jobs, funding for affordable housing, and, importantly, a working group to make sure Crowley keeps its promises.
Community and environmental activists didn’t get everything they were seeking. But they got enough to make activists in Maine and California take notice, and seek out their advice on negotiating with companies bringing wind power plants to their communities.
Salem residents deserve every concession they’ve gotten, and more. Clean energy is vital to our survival, but comes with costs for those who host its infrastructure, as opposition to wind farms off the Cape and islands shows. And we are going to need a lot more of it, including in places unaccustomed to hosting infrastructure.
In Salem, the neighborhoods around the staging facility will see more traffic and noise, especially between the time the project gets underway in April and its expected completion in 2026. It’s only right that Crowley soften the blow for a community that has, after all, already suffered more than enough.
Now, this city that epitomized our dirty past will be a beacon for Massachusetts, a symbol of how we can all move forward — courtesy of the same wind that once blackened its homes.