As I look toward a master’s degree in UConn’s science program, I often find myself reveling in admiration of my start at Housatonic Community College. For three years I gained increased appreciation for the growing facilities and outstanding faculty at this gem in the heart of the city of Bridgeport. That is why I am consumed with a deep bitterness when I hear that the striped smokestack-boasting coal plant merely blocks away has had over 700 air pollution violations in my time there. The same city where myself, my parents and their parents were born in is now the major source of the state’s smog and soot—making kids in Bridgeport ten times more likely to die of an asthma attack.
With considerations of beginning my own family in the future, I cannot play ignorant to these increasingly fear-warranting facts, and will avoid any risk of these implications by remaining outside of the thirty mile wide radius of the coal plant’s effects. Hopefully, as the community becomes increasingly educated with the degenerative effects of the last coal-burning plant in CT, we will realize that nothing is worth the risk of our future. Let us remove the black film from this city of opportunity by finally closing the doors to the coal plant.
Susan Smith
Guilford