Williston Observer

By Greg Elias
Observer staff

Williston residents will find a cornucopia of food and crafts, seasoned with music and accompanied by ready-to-eat meals, when a pair of farmers’ markets opens this week.

The Williston Farmers’ Market opens for the season on Saturday. It will be held weekly through Oct. 13 on the green next to Dorothy Alling Library in Williston Village. Hours each Saturday are from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.

The other market will be held Wednesdays in a grass-covered field next to New England Federal Credit Union off Harvest Lane. It begins on July 11, and will be open from 3 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. each week.

The village market will host live music some weeks, said Christina Mead, the Williston resident who organized the market. The first act booked is the Vermont Suzuki Violins, a youth group. The musicians will play in the gazebo next to the green on July 21.

Mead said she is talking with a folk singing duo called the Native Daughters and hopes to find other musicians to perform, although there probably won’t be music every week.

“The idea is just to be a showcase,” she said. “If people want to perform, I’m open to it.”

Vendors will offer an eclectic variety of Vermont-made produce and crafts. Many of the vendors listed on the market’s Web site are home-based businesses from Williston.

Among them are Beltz & Whistles, which crafts belts, decorative pillows and jewelry; Boutin Berries & Veggies, which grows fruits and vegetables; LuLu Art & Design, which sells paintings, cards and candles; and Three Brothers Bake Shop, which makes baked goods.

The market also plans a youth day at which students from Williston Central School and perhaps elsewhere will offer food they have grown and goods they have made, Mead said. It is part of a program sponsored by the Vermont chapter of the Northeast Organic Farming Association.

Mead asked students interested in participating to contact her via e-mail at [email protected]

Meanwhile, New England Federal Credit Union has firmed up plans for its market.

It will host 20 to 25 vendors in all, with offerings ranging from maple syrup to organic meat, said Cindy Morgan, NEFCU’s marketing director.

Morgan said the idea is to have a diverse enough range of products to allow one-stop shopping.

“The goal was to have a really good mix of vendors so you can actually buy everything you need for a meal in one place,” she said.

Mead said she’s both eager and a little apprehensive as her market’s opening day approaches. In particular, she hopes the weather cooperates and everything goes as planned.

“I’m very excited,” Mead said. “But I think I’m like anybody who has put a lot of work into something – a little anxious.”

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Landfill gas electricity project set to launch this summer

By Ben Moger-Williams
Observer staff

If you haven’t read “Gas Cyclones and Swirl Tubes,” you are probably not alone.

But to Ed DeVarney, who is getting ready to fire up a small scale electrical generation project in Williston using landfill gas, it is practically gospel.

“Anytime you talk to anyone in a particular discipline, you better keep your ears open,” DeVarney said in an interview at the Williston landfill last week. “Because that’s your magic moment to make up what you didn’t learn in engineering school.”

For the last five years, DeVarney, 53, has traveled – anywhere from 4-12 times a week – from his home in Milton to the site of the closed Phase III landfill in Williston owned by the Chittenden Solid Waste District to work on his project. DeVarney said the generators should be online this summer.

Beneath the lush green hill that is Phase III’s outer facade lies a quarter-million tons of decomposing trash. The landfill was closed in 1995 and has since been generating a mix of methane, carbon dioxide and other organic compounds, produced by microbes eating the garbage. For more than a decade, the gas has been burned off using flares, rated to destroy 98 percent of the greenhouse gases. DeVarney’s idea is to capture the gas and reroute it into engines, which, when operational, will produce 0.09 megawatts of electricity for at least five years. The electricity will be fed back into the electrical grid and sold to Green Mountain Power.

DeVarney, a retired auto mechanic, has a do-it-yourself philosophy about his project. He hopes to prove that a small-scale electricity generation project – using any renewable energy source – is both profitable and affordable.

He keeps the cost low by refurbishing used items purchased at online auctions, using recycled materials when possible, and by doing virtually all of the work on the project himself.

“This whole project has been: What can I buy on eBay, what can I use for off-the-counter stuff?” he said.

DeVarney estimates that by acting as his own engineer, legal team and construction crew, he has saved at least 50 percent over a typical landfill gas electricity generation project.

So far he has constructed a building to house the generators; bought the generators themselves (purchased on an Internet auction); designed the fuel delivery and engine control system for the generators; installed a backup flare to burn off excess gas or operate in an emergency shut down; and built a cyclonic moisture separator based on designs in “Gas Cyclones and Swirl Tubes,” by Alex Hoffman and Louis Stein. The device is used to separate water from the landfill gas as it comes out of the landfill, before it goes into the generators.

“The gas is allowed to enter, but centrifugal force says to the water vapor, ‘you can’t hang on any more, honey,’” he explained.

His use of the book is indicative of the types of things he’s had to learn – without the benefit of a college degree.

“I’m an avid reader and student of all things fascinating,” he said. “I have no institutionalized post-secondary education whatsoever.”

DeVarney ordered the book online, read it, but still had some questions about how to make the moisture separator. So he e-mailed one of the authors, Louis Stein, and eventually called him to ask for advice.

“In the ensuing week, I give him my rudimentary drawings, he marks them up, sends them back, and all of a sudden I have a cyclonic collector supposedly of my design, but validated by ‘the man,’” DeVarney said. “That’s the kind of help that I’ve gotten.”

Vermont has three operational landfill biogas electricity-generating projects, according to a report in “The Vermont Energy Digest,” published by the Vermont Council on Rural Development. A landfill in Brattleboro produces about 0.25 MW; the Intervale in Burlington produces about 0.7 MW; and the Coventry landfill cranks out 6.4 MW. The CSWD has been planning a regional landfill in Williston since the 1990s. If the landfill is built, it could have a capacity of 1 MW by 2015, according to the report. DeVarney’s 0.09 MW is comparatively tiny, but he estimates that is still enough electricity to power 75-80 homes.

Green Mountain Power will pay DeVarney by the kilowatt-hour, a portion of which will go to CSWD. The price is calculated hourly by ISO New England, a nonprofit company that oversees the region’s electricity market. DeVarney said he has personally pumped over $100,000 into the endeavor, but he hopes to have the project pay for itself within two years of coming online.

Dave Lamont, power planner for the state Department of Public Service, said projects like DeVarney’s, while small-scale, are a positive thing.

“This is not going to solve the world’s energy problems,” Lamont said. “But they do add up to something. Taken on an individual basis we’re creating energy from waste, which is good.”

According to the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s Landfill Methane Outreach Program, the environmental benefit of DeVarney’s generation project (compared to using fossil fuels to generate the same capacity) is equal to planting 128 acres of forest or taking 90 vehicles off the road.

After the Williston project is live, DeVarney hopes to expand. He sees this as just the beginning of a series of waste-to-energy projects.

“I want to look at what you’re throwing away, where I can park, is there electricity to it, and I want to make a project,” he said. “And I don’t care if it’s a third this size. But I do want to make 200 of them.”

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By Kim Howard
Observer staff

The recorded trumpet call that echoed through Brennan Woods and Pleasant Acres neighborhoods Tuesday night announced not the start of a horse race but the arrival of a different kind of horsepower: Dottie 2, the Dorothy Alling Library bookmobile.

A bookmobile holiday last week for the Fourth of July got some families out of practice for this week’s return of the service. The Varricchione family had been eating dinner when the trumpet call came.

“They jumped down from dinner today and ran over!” Glenn Varricchione said of his three children perusing the books on the bus.

Though some were caught off guard, kids and parents biked, walked and ran Tuesday night to the bus that can carry about 800 children’s and young adult books.

The bookmobile, driven by library staff, allows patrons to check out and return books on board Tuesday through Thursday evenings weekly during the summer months. The bookmobile visits 10 neighborhoods, with South Ridge and Pleasant Acres being the busiest stops, according to Aislinn LaCroix, bookmobile assistant. Patrons don’t have to be residents of a particular neighborhood to come aboard.

Children and teens may choose from categories like easy readers and picture books, mysteries and sports, fiction and young adult. Youth services librarian Jill Coffrin said graphic novels – books that tell stories through illustrated characters – and non-fiction are most popular.

Zachary Varricchione, 7, selected two Junie B. Jones titles Tuesday night.

“It has so many good books we can read and look at,” Zachary said after getting off the bookmobile. The service is great, he said, because “you can wait at home and you don’t need to get in the car and pack everything up. You can just wait for the bus to drive in.”

Abby Veronneau, who had four children who boarded the bus to return and pick up new books Tuesday night, said she thinks the bookmobile influences her children’s reading habits.

“I find they like to read more,” Veronneau said. “I think they enjoy seeing the woman that works on the bus. It’s like an ice cream truck, but it’s a bookmobile.”

Keeping up reading habits during the summer is in part what the bookmobile is all about, according to Jill Coffrin, youth services librarian and Dottie 2 driver on Tuesday night.

“Bookmobiles are meant to reach people who don’t traditionally go to the library,” Coffrin said of national bookmobile trends. Williston’s bookmobile visits local schools before summer starts to get kids excited about it, Coffrin said.

LaCroix, the Champlain Valley Union High School student who assists each night the bookmobile runs, said when kids aren’t in school, too often their focus is videos, games and television.

“Most of my friends don’t read at all,” LaCroix said.

The bookmobile service may help to break what LaCroix sees as a trend among her peers. Circulation of bookmobile books has been climbing according to data provided by library staff. In 2001, for example, 552 books were checked out of the bookmobile. Last year 1,311 books were checked out.

Regulars of the bookmobile have found two major improvements this year: the retrofitted retired mini school bus is new to the library, providing more space; and thanks to the effort of a CVU High School student graduation challenge project, the book check-out process is now automated.

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By Mal Boright
Observer correspondent

Until now, a leap from the Bridge Street bridge in downtown Richmond was a way to quickly get into the cooling waters of the river below.

From now on, jumpers will find the hot waters of a court citation after their leaps off the creaky spanner.

Police Chief William “Joe” Miller has said over the past week that individuals caught trying to dive off the bridge will be charged and prosecuted with disorderly conduct under Vermont law.

According to Miller there are dangers for the jumpers and also passing motorists.

“The depth of the Winooski River in the area of the bridge is unpredictable, and it is unknown what hazardous items may be under the surface of the water,” Miller said recently.

“Those jumping off the bridge are also distracting motorists traveling in both directions and thus creating the potential for a motor vehicle accident on or before the bridge,” he said.

The chief also acknowledged possible danger to pedestrians and others on the bridge.

Miller said that there have been numerous complaints from citizens about the teenage bridge jumpers. Some complaints came by phone and at least one came in a more dramatic fashion.

“I was in a line of cars waiting to cross the bridge—it has been temporarily reduced to one lane—when a woman jumped out of a car waiting ahead of me and began waving her arms. I got out and she was pointing to a youngster on top of the bridge about to leap into the river,” the chief recalled.

Miller estimates that to be a 50- to 70-foot drop.

Starting last week, Richmond police were to start issuing the court citations to the jumpers after letting them off with warnings for the past few weeks.

“We are going to enforce it,” the chief said. “This is a potentially dangerous situation so I have an obligation to do something about it.”

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