At 8:15 p.m., Greg Pirio heard the generators start. By dawn, the lung pain he described had pushed him out of his Sterling home and sent him 15 miles down the road to his daughter’s house in Vienna.
The source was VA2 campus in Sterling, where dozens of diesel backup generators ran for nearly 24 hours after a failure knocked out the facility’s onsite natural-gas turbines. The timing compounded the problem: a Code Red air-quality alert was already in effect, driven partly by Canadian wildfire smoke drifting across the region.
Virginia DEQ Director Michael Rolband told local officials his agency had no authority to stop the generators under current regulations. Vantage’s air permit allows generator use during emergencies, and the turbine failure qualified. DEQ said inspectors would review the facility afterward and take appropriate action if they identified a permit violation.
A Facility Unlike Its Neighbors
VA2 operates entirely on onsite power, which made last July’s turbine failure a much bigger problem than a typical data-center outage.…