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CHESHIRE, OHIO

By Eve MORGENSTERN

Documentary - Completed 2015

For the most part, Cheshire, Ohio is a ghost town. In 2001, residents suffered through several "blue plume" sulfuric acid clouds. Shortly after, the company that owns the coal-fired power plant there bought out and bulldozed the homes. Now over a decade later workers at the plant are getting cancer.

- Year of production
- 2015
- Genres
- Documentary
- Countries
- USA
- Languages
- ENGLISH
- Budget
- N/A
- Duration
- 75 mn
- Director(s)
- Eve MORGENSTERN
- Synopsis
- “I’m not selling out. That’s all there is to it. I’m not afraid. I’ve got my dogs, I’ve got my guns, they’re loaded and I know how to shoot ‘em.”
  
  -Boots Hern, resident for over 64 years who refuses to move.
  
  A gun toting 83-year old woman refuses to sell her house to the power plant next door. But despite her refusal, the plant has moved ahead with their 20 million dollar deal to buy out most of Cheshire and bulldoze all the homes. What happened in this Ohio River town overrun by one of the largest coal-fired power plants in the world? A story of money, power and the increasingly difficult choices we face surrounding coal and the environment, Cheshire, Ohio makes us think twice about home.
  Filmed over a decade, Cheshire, Ohio offers the unusual opportunity to follow a community devastated by coal, starting with American Electric Power's buyout and bulldozing of this Ohio River community after exposing them to years of harmful emissions, and then returning several years later to the now almost emptied town as we follow the case of 77 plaintiffs who have filed a lawsuit against American Electric Power for cancer and other diseases they developed from working unprotected at the plant's coal ash landfill site.
  As the cycle of pollution from coal continues, we see how one town continually suffers from our continued reliance on carbon energy.