Towns take pride in the things they make. For decades, New Richmond made power. The kind that kept the lights on in Cincinnati and other places throughout the state.
For the Dufaus, it was a family vocation.
"My brother, me, my father here, my uncle Dave, my cousin Dennis," says Timmy Dufau. "We've all been in and out of these power plants."
On a recent Saturday evening, he sits with his father Tim and his brother Keith at a campground on the western edge of New Richmond that used to be power company land.
They're reminiscing about working at Beckjord Power plant, which sits just a stone skip west down the Ohio River.
A rusting network of steel beams and concrete piers that comprised one of its massive cranes is all the structure left from the coal-powered Walter C. Beckjord plant, which opened in 1952. It was built on the site of a tiny town called Blairsville, named for a brick factory established there in the 1870s. Cincinnati Gas & Electric purchased the land around the town and demolished its small collection of buildings to build the plant. More than 200 people worked at Beckjord at its peak.
A family tradition
Tim Dufau started out in the late 1970s as a maintenance man and worked his way into management at Beckjord. Keith followed in his footsteps as a maintenance technician there. Timmy became an operator, part of a crew responsible for keeping the massive generators running. He remembers a time when he was 10 years old and his father took him to work with him. He got to drive a coal dozer and a tugboat that was usually used to tow barges. He was hooked.
"They had marble throughout the building," Timmy says. "They had accents that were made to be aesthetically pleasing. It wasn't like today's buildings that are just cold and slapped together to make money. It was so loud and I had no idea what was going on, but it was amazing."
David Wylie, Tim Dufau's brother-in-law, also worked at Beckjord, following his dad and two older brothers when he was fresh out of high school in 1973. He recalls the plant as a tight-knit and interesting place to work in those days, when it was owned by Cincinnati Gas & Electric.
"You couldn't work for a better company," he says. "They were about employees and about the community. It was a lot of mechanical work, a lot of welding, things I found a lot of fun. People got along great. They were like a family."
Shifts were long and demands were high. Wylie says he worked 90 days in a row at one point. But the work was worth it.
"Being a part of supplying something people really needed, it made you feel really good," he says.
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A change in energy
But the plant's days were numbered. There were mergers and ownership changes. Deregulation came to Ohio in 2001, changing the economics of energy production. Deregulation expanded the choices available to energy consumers, but it also made it harder for coal plants to be profitable.
At the same time, natural gas had become more prevalent. And new environmental regulations to combat the increasing realities of climate change made coal plants somewhat cleaner, but more expensive.
Scientists warn the global emission of gases like CO2 is causing irreversible change to the world's climate, and energy production from sources like coal is a huge part of that. Recent research suggests the world has about six years to drastically curtail carbon emissions to keep global temperature increases below 1.5 degrees Celsius in order to avoid more dire outcomes.
Tim Dufau was in management when new EPA rules and market forces converged at Beckjord. He saw the writing on the wall as the power company stopped investing in the plant.
"I could walk by a steam line and not worry about it blowing up on me because I knew we were maintaining it right," he says. "Then things get older and start to degrade, and they start taking money away and inspections don't occur as often, and you start getting this fear in you."
Duke Energy finally pulled the plug in 2014. Tim Dufau says there was a definitive moment he knew it was over: an accident that spilled 9,000 gallons of diesel fuel into the Ohio River.
"The final nail in the coffin at Beckjord was that a guy was doing a job that used to take three people to do," he says. "He ended up overfilling the tanks and they flooded the river. The vice president at that time said 'Shut it down,' and that was it. That was the death of Beckjord."
By that point, Tim Dufau and Dave Wylie had already moved over to another plant east of New Richmond in Moscow, Ohio, called Zimmer. Timmy and Keith followed afterward.
Zimmer was designed as a nuclear plant in the 1970s, but after revelations about lack of quality control in its construction, it was converted to operate on coal. Faced with the same headwinds, it shuttered suddenly in 2022 — five years ahead of its scheduled closure.
New Richmond, post-power plants
The losses rippled through New Richmond.
Keith Dufau says he and his family were more fortunate than some. They'd developed skills they could use in other industries.
"I'm really thankful I got to do that," he says. "It's offered me some opportunities doing some really amazing jobs."
Other workers struggled, and the broader economy around the plants suffered tremendously — restaurants, truckers and boat workers shipping supplies, independent contractors who made their livings serving the plants.
Tim Dufau is a long-serving member of New Richmond's school board. He says the fallout from the closures left a hole the district's $32 million budget is still struggling with.
New Richmond Village Exempted School District Superintendent Tracey Miller says the district lost more than $8 million a year when Beckjord closed. An extremely rare tax levy filled some of the gap, but there were also hard decisions.
"It's not a large budget to begin with," he says. "What that meant in reality was they had to close an elementary school. There was a tremendous reduction of staff. A couple dozen teachers, some additional paraprofessionals, custodians, all the things that go along with running a building — those people lost their jobs. It was terrible. Devastating."
The district lost another $3 million a year when Zimmer closed. That led to more cuts.
"We squeeze very nickel," he says. "But inflation continues. At some point in the coming years, we're going to have to ask our community for another levy request. We're trying to stave that off as long as we can."
Environmental legacy
As the Dufau family talks about the plants at the campsite, Timmy points down river and mentions another lingering legacy. Its demolition toppled part of the plant into the river. And the land where the plant was is full of millions of tons of coal ash — and the heavy metals and other pollutants that come with it. Right now, it's buried in pits near the river.
"For my children — not even my children, just anyone who lives 100 years from now — I want those dug out and I want them removed," he says. "That water is what we drink. The reason it's not being removed is because it's going to cost someone a lot of money. It's greed."
When and how it all gets cleaned up is in question. Duke transferred the land Beckjord occupied to a company called CLP in 2018. Under the agreement between the two, CLP agreed to do the environmental remediation on the property in exchange for access to roughly $105 million in funds available for the cleanup and ownership of the property when it was finished. In exchange, CLP took over liability for the coal ash from Duke.
A group of 100 residents around New Richmond — first formed in the 1980s called Neighbors Opposed to Pit Expansion, or NOPE — filed a federal lawsuit to have the ash removed four years ago. That suit cites a 1986 agreement around environmental cleanup between NOPE and Cincinnati Gas & Electric. U.S. District Court Judge Michael Barrett last month issued a ruling allowing the lawsuit to move forward.
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What fills the gaps?
There's a broader question still unanswered 10 years after Beckjord's closure — one as big as climate change and as personal as family tradition.
What fills the void left by coal-fired plants like Beckjord and Zimmer as they blink out one by one up and down the Ohio River?
Efforts to curb emissions from coal plants continue. The U.S. Supreme Court last week upheld an Environmental Protection Agency rule that would require coal and gas power plants to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 90% or close within eight years.
Wylie is one of four remaining employees working at Zimmer on cleanup duties. He says he'd like to see renewable energy at both sites.
"They talked about putting solar panels there," he says of Zimmer. "No one could see it because of where it's at. People were fighting against it, and I just don't understand. You're talking about land that can't be used for anything else. It would be great to get renewable energy there and at Beckjord."
The Dufaus say they're not against renewable energy, but they also wonder whether current technology can fill the demand for power all on its own.
"If we want to balance into new energy, it's going to have to be able to handle the capacity we need," Keith Dufau says. "It's not going to be like, flip a switch and everything is going to work."
As the future of the Beckjord and Zimmer sites hang in limbo, the village of New Richmond is moving toward retooling its economy for tourism. But school officials like Tim Dufau and Superintendent Miller say redevelopment of the sites will be key to economic resurgence.
"The river is a great resource for transportation," he says. "I'd love to see something come in that would benefit the kids of this school district again."