Remembering Trojan

Trojan, 1978

The Oregonian is the largest newspaper in Oregon:

To the Editor:

I get most of my news from the Oregonian, but my roommates and I pulled out our geriatric television to catch KATU’s live coverage of the Trojan cooling tower implosion. I grew up in Oregon in the 70s and 80s, in a subculture that regarded the cooling tower as a menacing threat—and demonstrating at the site as a worthwhile way to spend a weekend. Later, as an adult, I lived in Columbia County and saw the other side of the issue: the power plant had been a major source of jobs, and the surrounding communities were hit extremely hard by its closure.

I didn’t give much thought to the Oregonian’s treatment of the story, which reflected the ambivalence, nostalgia, and changing attitudes that Trojan has prompted through the years. To see that massive cooling tower—so beautiful and so ugly—come down, has meaning to anyone who ever loved the power plant, or hated it—or wished for a safe, clean alternative to fossil fuels. The Oregonian touched on all these things to some degree, although it did gloss over some newsworthy details (perhaps I missed them): that Matt Groening took Trojan and its numerous safety violations as the inspiration for the power plant in the Simpsons; or that the profits PG&E’s would have lost upon its have been subsidized for years by the ratepayers. Those tidbits I found online, during a fruitless search for a live webcast.



So to the television it was. On KATU, there was nothing in the way of nuance, no acknowledgement of the complexities of Trojan’s life and death. A sound bite from a former worker, but no mention, however momentary, of Trojan’s political or economic history. This pointed ignorance, in favor of a “Dude, that’s way cool!” approach to the event, turns the actual story into a banal curiosity, and does the public no service at all.

Now, as Trojan fades into memory, I’m left with a new respect for print media, and a disappointment in the overall level of public discourse in society. I know curmudgeons young and old (I’m 32) have always muttered along these lines, but a television station’s refusal to do anything other than trivialize this event seems like a purposeful act of oversight. That’s no way to watch years of history neatly collapse away.