COLUMN ONE : Clearing the Air for All to See : A haze over the Grand Canyon could force a costly cleanup at an Arizona power plant. Is pollution near parks the next big environmental battleground?

What value should be put on preserving a breathtaking vision? Four hundred million dollars?

How much is it worth to guarantee that the vivid details and bright pastels of magnificent sheer chasm walls don’t wash into cold, faded blurs of blue and gray? One billion dollars? How about $1.6 billion?

Those are some of the estimates of what it could cost in just the first round of a new, more aggressive, yet fuzzily defined federal assault on dirty air. That initial battleground is here, in the vast and majestic expanses of Grand Canyon National Park.

Federal regulators stand poised to force a massive cleanup on a remote Arizona power plant which environmentalists claim is helping to foul the pristine canyon atmosphere.

It would mark the government’s first attempt to impose anti-pollution protections--heretofore enforced largely for health and safety reasons--primarily for aesthetics. And such an action could foreshadow a similar strategy at other national parks where even more serious visibility problems have been linked to particulate emissions from utilities or industry.

“Grand Canyon is truly an international treasure and it’s one of the most spectacular vistas in the world, and visitors have the right to see it clearly,” insisted Jack Davis, the park superintendent.

At issue is the 2,250-megawatt Navajo Generating Station, one of the largest such facilities in the West.

The 16-year-old plant is owned by a six-member consortium that includes the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and, ironically, the U.S. Interior Department’s Bureau of Reclamation. It is managed by another partner, the Tempe, Ariz.-based Salt River Project, a nonprofit cooperative that provides both power and irrigation water to large sections of central Arizona. Los Angeles depends on the plant for 13% of its electric power.

Located in remote Page, Ariz., only 80 miles northeast of the main visitors’ center at the park, Navajo’s three coal-fired generators currently lack state-of-the-art emission control devices known as “scrubbers.” They are, however, fueled by some of the cleanest burning coal on the market. Still, they belch up to 300 tons of sulfur dioxide a day through a trio of 775-foot stacks.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency has issued a draft proposal that, if finalized, would require a 90% reduction in those emissions. Even so, neither the EPA nor environmentalists are claiming that the fumes are bad enough to pose a serious danger to vegetation or wildlife.

Instead, they contend that a $2-million study conducted by the National Park Service in 1987 proves that Navajo is a menace to visibility at one of the world’s foremost scenic attractions. Using a chemical tracer, scientists tracked emissions from the plant to sensors in the park over a six-week period.

Based on computer analyses of those findings, the EPA claims that discharges from Navajo frequently get trapped by stagnant wintertime air. As such, the agency concluded that the plant could be responsible at times for as much as 70% of the thick haze which periodically hangs over the canyon from November through March.

It can reduce visibility at the park from an awe-inspiring 150 miles or more under ideal conditions to under 10 miles--not enough to see from one canyon rim to another--on a handful of really bad days. The park also is plagued by haze in the summer, but experts say that is far harder to deal with because it is caused by prevailing seasonal winds that blow smog all the way from Southern California.

Final action on the EPA proposal awaits a review by the White House Office of Management and Budget, which is required to take a look at the impact of expensive regulatory schemes. OMB was supposed to have completed its study by early April, but has asked for at least two delays.

Only Wednesday, sources said, OMB asked for more talks with EPA officials to discuss, among other matters, the way the agency has calculated potential benefits from pollution controls and whether a 90% reduction in emissions is a reasonable goal.

Officials at both the OMB and the EPA refused to discuss the negotiations, but the two agencies have had sharp differences in the past over the costs of environmental regulation. And they continue to bicker over such issues as the economic repercussions of addressing global warming. So any dispute over Navajo has the makings for yet another fight for the soul of self-styled “environmental President” George Bush.

Salt River officials say Navajo is at most a bit player in the canyon haze drama and is being targeted merely because it is conveniently near the park. They want the EPA to delay any enforcement order until more detailed tests can either verify or refute government claims.

But they also argue that retrofitting scrubbers to cleanse emissions will do little to upgrade park visibility while still boosting electric bills for millions of consumers, including the Los Angeles DWP’s 1.3 million customers.

“I don’t believe that 99.5% of people going to the canyon would know any difference,” said Navajo plant manager Charles Brumback when asked about the impact of scrubbers. “I don’t know if scientists would be able to tell the difference. If there is a difference, it will be one that you can see only with scientific instruments.”

Indeed, the science of visibility protection is inexact and evolving. Visibility problems can be caused by a multitude of sources, many of them natural and each having varying impacts at different times. Blowing dust, forest fires, pollen, electrical storms and light diffusing air molecules can all cause haze.

So can sulfur dioxide, itself an invisible gas. Combined with moisture in the atmosphere, however, sulfur dioxide forms tiny sulfate particles which are visible and do discolor the air.

The problem is not confined to the Grand Canyon. According to a 1988 National Park Service study, man-made pollutants obscured scenic vistas more than 90% of the time at national parks and wilderness areas throughout the lower 48 states.

The worst problems were found in the East. It was once possible to see the Washington Monument from the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, and the Atlantic Ocean was visible from the top of Mt. Washington in New Hampshire. But no more.

In fact, the Park Service study concluded that, despite problems, the Grand Canyon and other parks in the Colorado River plateau area actually enjoyed some of the cleanest air in the country. And that, oddly, appears to be why Navajo has come under scrutiny.

Christine Shaver, a supervisor with the air quality division of the Park Service, said regulators are using the Grand Canyon as a test case because they believe its visibility problems are easier to tackle than those at other parks.

“The cleaner the air is, the more sensitive it is to even a very small change in the composition of particulates,” Shaver explained. “. . . Since we’re closer to being clean there (at the Grand Canyon) than anywhere else, we have a better chance of dealing with the problem.”

The next target for action could be the large Centralia Power Plant, about 30 miles southwest of Mt. Rainier in the state of Washington, Shaver said the Park Service will be conducting a field study this summer to help determine the impact on park visibility in the Pacific Northwest of sulfur dioxide emissions from Centralia, owned by PacifiCorp.

An EPA move in the Grand Canyon case would mark the agency’s first attempt to enforce a 1977 congressional mandate to crack down on polluters who impair park visibility. The action was triggered only after the Boulder, Colo.-based Environmental Defense Fund sued the EPA for failing to enforce that law.

The 13-year-old statute also required the EPA to issue regulations for protection of such areas. It has so far failed to do so. However, Congress is considering legislation sponsored by Rep. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) that would force the EPA to write the visibility rules within two years or to require every large sulfur dioxide producing utility or plant located near a park to add anti-pollution gear.

Environmentalists have long suspected that Navajo emissions might be a threat to canyon visibility. Even while still on the drawing boards, then Interior Secretary Walter J. Hickel expressed concern about a project in which the Interior Department would be a part owner.

“We must not allow anyone to pollute the environment there, and it would be unthinkable for us to pollute it ourselves,” Hickel wrote to an assistant back in 1970. Similar misgivings were expressed by state environmental officials in Arizona.

The plant was built before scrubber technology was perfected. At the time, however, Salt River promised to eventually install scrubbers and even set aside a large parcel of space adjacent to the plant in anticipation of the day effective cleansing equipment would be added.

Once in operation, however, company officials convinced the EPA that scrubbers were not needed because the plant was meeting existing federal and state air quality standards.

Recently, Brand L. Niemann, a one-time private weather consultant on the Navajo project, charged that he warned Salt River officials a year before the first generator fired up in 1974 that the plant would cause problems.

Niemann, who joined the EPA after he first made the allegations last fall, said that smoke released from skywriting planes was detected deep inside the canyon on sensors placed by professional mountain climbers. Pollutants were sucked into the park by cold air that drained from high plateaus and settled into the canyon, Niemann said he concluded at the time.

But, Niemann said in an interview, Salt River officials allegedly rebuffed his findings. Both Jack Pfister, the general manager of Salt River, and Jerry Shapiro, a San Francisco-based engineer who has been the utility’s chief consultant on both Navajo’s construction and operation, insist they have no recollection of Niemann’s version of events.

Whatever the truth of those claims, the EPA believes it found the smoking gun to link Navajo to canyon haze with the 1987 Park Service study called WHITEX, short for Winter Haze Intensive Tracer Experiment.

WHITEX, ironically sponsored in part by Salt River as well as the EPA and other institutions, was not specifically designed to look for haze in the canyon but rather simply to perfect haze detection techniques. If any impact was found from Navajo, it was expected to be downwind of the plant in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park.

Over the 60-day run of WHITEX, sensors placed in Canyonlands did record evidence of the special chemical that had been injected into Navajo’s flue gas stacks to mark the flow of sulfur dioxide emissions. The tracer even turned up on a sensor placed upwind of the plant, at Hopi Point on the south rim of the Grand Canyon.

Shapiro admits he was surprised by the finding. But he also contends that the conclusions drawn from it by the EPA were hasty and based on a misapplication of scientific data now being used to justify a “bewildering and frightening” rush to judgment against Navajo.

Haze has been recorded at the Grand Canyon for at least a century, Shapiro pointed out. As such, he said, it is premature to conclude from WHITEX that the problem is worsening or that it is not primarily due to natural causes or a mix of polluters from a broad region of which Navajo represents only a small contribution.

Salt River recently concluded its own $12-million study of Navajo emissions which company officials insist will provide a more comprehensive analysis of the situation. They want the EPA to delay any final order in the case until a review of the new study is completed, probably by October.

Officials at the EPA and the Park Service say they welcome any new data Salt River can offer, but also insist the company is stalling.

Molly Ross, the assistant chief of the Park Service’s air quality division, said confidence in the validity of WHITEX had only increased with more analysis. “We feel we have now answered all of the criticisms, and we continue to feel very good about it,” she said.

That confidence, she said, was bolstered by a follow-up study that recorded pollutants associated with power plants deep inside the canyon at levels far in excess of anything measured at the rim during the WHITEX study. Though experts could not say definitively whether the pollutants came from Navajo or some other generating station, they regard the finding as strong circumstantial evidence against the plant.

The studies became the underpinning for a preliminary EPA finding that Salt River must outfit Navajo with scrubbers. The agency said such equipment could make at least a “perceptible” change in visibility up to 100 days during an average winter and a “very apparent” change on up to 21 days.

Salt River officials disagree. Initially, they said it could cost $1 billion to add the equipment. Later, they upped that estimate to $1.6 billion, about twice the plant’s original construction cost. The EPA has set the construction price for the scrubbers at around $400 million.

Salt River says adding scrubbers would force member utilities to raise rates by 3% to 5%. In Los Angeles, Department of Water and Power officials estimate that could add nearly $22 a year to residential customers’ annual bill when coupled with the cost of other anti-pollution programs the utility is already committed to.

To date, DWP is standing by Salt River’s call for a delay in final action until the company’s new test results come out. But the municipally owned utility has also been directed by Mayor Tom Bradley to consider what leverage it has to force a resolution of the controversy.