Our New Twins

The Brayton Point Power Station Towers in Somerset are difficult to ignore. You could say these babies stick out …497 feet out. In addition to being tall, they’re wide; each is over 400 feet across. A small football stadium could fit in each.

They would look like volcanic aftermath if they looked at all natural. They don’t.

Mixed feelings

I know the towers were constructed to fix a problem: too much hot water was running from the power plant into Narragansett Bay and screwing up the bay’s ecosystem, so the towers were erected to cool the water before it hits the bay. Something inside of me says, “You should appreciate these things.”

The towers are a Band-Aid on an old technology which we probably held on to for too long. But sometimes Band-Aids are the best fix, and besides, we should only need the towers for a hundred years or so.

Our welcome sign

Twenty-eight million cars a year cross over the Braga Bridge. Think about the first impression our area makes when someone is travelling in from the West (Providence).

First the towers ominously appear, then the bridge gets one thinking about the structural strength of rust, and – God forbid – then un-forewarned turns off the bridge onto twisting decayed ramps seem like something from a post-apocalyptic disaster film.

Part of the difficulty is the image draws ominous memories of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. And, we refer to them as “the twin towers,” – what else would we call them? …The name isn’t going to conjure comforting feelings.

And the color. I have never heard anyone say “concrete gray” is a pretty color. It might be a fine color for sidewalks or driveways, but not for huge structures by a lovely bay. In fact, it might be the only color drabber than “drab green.”

As they are, these towers are not going to win any beauty contests

If we are going to warm up to these things, then they need a new identity.

They need a makeover....

Maybe, just maybe, if we placed design ideas online on our www.coastalmags.com site, perhaps someone at Dominion will pay attention. And maybe, just maybe, someone from the area will get commissioned to do a design for a couple of pretty large canvases.

Send us your ideas and we’ll post some on our website at www.coastalmags.com.  And if we get lucky, maybe someone will come up with a design which inspires the Dominion folks.

Send jpegs or PDF files with your ideas to editor@coastalmags.com

get all of the details on page 24 in the September edition of the South Coast Insider