Out of the 'Dark'

Compelling new film sheds light on Potrero Hill power plant and its effect on nearby residents

By Rachel Brahinsky

"One by one, we've just been wiped off this earth."

Marcia Sims speaks these words in solemn tones, telling the painful story of her family members who have died from cancer or other rare diseases: a brother, father, mother, and soon, her younger sister, Cindy. The 50-year-old Sims is on camera at a very intimate moment. Her sister is in the last stages of breast cancer, with just a few months to live.

The camera pans across the Potrero Hill housing projects, where Sims lives, and where expansive eastward views include the bay, the shoreline, and one of the city's two largest stationary sources of air pollution: the Potrero Hill power plant. Although there is still no definitive evidence linking power plant emissions to breast cancer, Sims and her neighbors fear the plant is in large part to blame for the unusually high incidences of that disease as well as the disproportionately high rates of asthma and heart disease that have been documented in the community.

Sims's tale, which is central to In the Dark, a documentary by Giant Productions (also known as Sleeping Giant), premieres at the Red Vic Sept. 17. In addition to showing how Sims's personal loss has helped motivate her work to stop the proposed expansion of the Potrero plant, the documentary links her story to the larger California energy crisis and the market manipulation that principally created it. The film assesses those issues and analyzes the health risks of power plant emissions. It then turns to the city of South Gate, near Los Angeles, which has the highest rate of juvenile asthma in the nation. Residents successfully fought a proposal to build a new power plant there.

That community, like San Francisco's Potrero and Bayview neighborhoods, is largely low income, and most residents are people of color.

As In the Dark shows, it's no coincidence. Power plants have historically been situated in low-income communities, where residents have traditionally had less political power. That's still the case today. As Karen DeGannes of the Latino Issues Forum says in the film, at one point during the power crisis 80 percent of the sites that the governor's office selected for expedited permitting of new gas-fired power plants were near poor communities of color.

The Giant video collective felt that this side of the story was sorely missing from mainstream news coverage of the energy problem.

"It was clear to us that the whole question of what the effect of building all these power plants would be [on the people] was left out of the whole discussion," Sasha Magee, codirector of the documentary, told us. "It was clear that the people who were going to end up paying for the failures of deregulation were the same people who were already paying the price: almost exclusively poor, and by and large black and Latino. We wanted to bring that voice into the discussion."

One of the last sections of In the Dark focuses on the 2001 public power campaign and how activists involved in it hoped that by taking control of the energy system, they could right the historical injustices of the power plants. The campaign narrowly lost, and public power supporters are trying again this year by working for Proposition D's passage this fall. Prop. D, advocates argue, would allow the city to take over PG&E's system, would speed the long-promised closure of the Hunter's Point plant, and would provide stricter controls on where new power plants can be located.

As a film, In the Dark isn't perfect. Jon Kaufman of Solem and Associates (the lobbying firm that has worked for PG&E and against public power for years) comments in the film that the urge to vote for a public power measure is purely emotional and not fact-based. The film crew doesn't do enough to counter that sentiment by showing, for example, that public power agencies nationally charge less than private power companies. Also, the computer manipulation of charts illustrating how power plant pollution forms and the graphics showing which other states are considering deregulation of energy markets sometimes move so quickly that they're confusing.

Still the overall message is conveyed with solid sources, evocative images, and important information you won't hear on the evening news.

The point is clear: California deregulation meant a tremendous loss of control for citizens and an increase in the potential for tragedies like the Sims family's. Giant Productions member Saskia Traill told us she hopes viewers walk away from In the Dark with a sense of responsibility. "Energy policy, like any public policy, is something that people can craft and can change," she said. "It's their right to do that."

‘In the Dark’ shows Sept. 17-18, 7:15 and 9:15 p.m. (also Wed/18, 2 p.m.), Red Vic, 1727 Haight, (415) 668-3994. Power alert: Come to an important hearing on the city's final energy plan, Sept. 19, 1 p.m., City Hall, Room 263, 1 Carlton B. Goodlett Place, (415) 554-5784. Bay Guardian editor and publisher Bruce B. Brugmann and associate publisher Jean Dibble are contributors to the Yes on D campaign. E-mail Rachel Brahinsky at rachel@sfbg.com.