ALBANY, N.Y. -- Storm clouds -- real and symbolic -- are blackening the skies over New York's Adirondack Mountains.
From them falls a noxious blend of acid and rain that has left water in Sly Pond with the vitriolic tang of dill pickles, and hundreds of other lakes too acidic to support fish life.
In those same storm clouds Midwestern coal-burning power plants see the threat of legal battles aimed at preventing more high-sulfur pollutants from riding into New York state on the back of a prevailing west wind.
Robert Abrams, New York's attorney general, has filed lawsuits in the U.S. Court of Appeals involving five such electrical generating plants: the Cardinal plant, run by American Electric Power Co. in Ohio; the Avon and East Lake plants run by Cleveland Electric Illuminated Co., also in Ohio; the Campbell plant run by Consumers' Power Co. in Michigan; and the Kincaid plant run by Commonwealth Edison Co. in Illinois.
'They (the federal Environmental Protection Agency) have already allowed increases in emissions from these plants,' reports Timothy Gilles, a spokesman for the attorney general's office.
New York is appealing those decisions, and is attempting to intervene in agency proceedings on at least 17 other Midwestern power plants.
But the state's success in those actions may depend on its ability to trace air-borne pollutants back to one particular coal-fired generating plant, a task some scientists say is tantamount to bridling the wind.
Though a petition before the agency contends that 'New York suffers many serious injuries from sulfur dioxide emissions transported from Ohio sources,' officials in Maine and Canada maintain the misery is a shared one.
Lakes there are turning sour, too, and officials blame acid rain for the casualties.
In fact, one of the main topics during recent talks between President Reagan and Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was wind-borne sulfates from the United States as the cause of acid rain in Canada. In Toronto, the Ontario government has asked the EPA to reject requests by Midwestern states to ease sulfur dioxide emission regulations.
Maine's attorney general has also threatened to sue the federal government and offending industrial states if those standards are relaxed.
Acid rain also plagues the West Coast, although the primary cause is not high-sulfur coal -- it is automobile exhaust fumes. Environmentalists worry, however, that the Reagan administration may relax emission standards for cars and industry, exacerbating the problem.
In British Columbia, the government is considering building mega-watt coal-fired power plants, sulfates from which could drift on south winds into the forest areas of Oregon and Washington.
Most severely affected in New York are Adirondack Mountain lakes and ponds which, because of a natural topography that lacks neutralizing limestone, are acutely vulnerable to acid rain.
In an acidity status report issued in August 1980 by the state Department of Environmental Conservation, 264 Adirondack lakes and ponds are listed as being acidic.
A pH reading indicates how acidic or alkaline a substance is. It is a logarithmic scale. Each unit drop reflects a 10-fold increase in acidity.
A pH of 7 is a neutral reading -- not really acid and not really alkaline. Untainted rainwater has a pH of 5.6; carbon dioxide imparts to it a touch of natural acidity.
In 1976, New York's petition says, more than 100 high-elevation Adirondack lakes had pH values of below 5. 'There were no fish in 90 percent of these acidified lakes,' it says. Scores of other, lower altitude lakes have been similarly affected.
Robert Cross, an associate engineering research editor for the state DEC, put those dismal facts in terms of land area. Some 11,000 acres of Adirondack lake, pond and brook water are too acidic to support fish life. Worse, he says, about 63,000 more acres are 'close to becoming acidic. Unless we do something soon, they're going to go over the borderline.'
Beyond that, the attorney general says, acid rain born in the Midwest actually prevents New York state from meeting National Ambient Air Quality standards set forth in the Clean Air Act.
His answer is to sue the EPA, preventing it from loosening sulfate emission strictures on Midwestern coal-burning power plants. Ironically, he is using facts gathered by the EPA itself in undermining the agency's decision.
The state's petition cites an EPA study of air particles in western New York, which says: 'After consideration of wind direction data, it is concluded that 75 percent of all sulfate material enters New York state from west of Buffalo...'
The problem as Cross sees it, is this: to meet their own local emission standards, electrical generating plants in the Ohio Valley region have increased the height of their smoke stacks. That lifts sulfur dioxide -- a by-product of coal burning -- high into the atmosphere.
There, it is whisked away by west winds and, depending on the weather, is carried toward the Northeast.
Sulfur dioxide is converted by a complex process into sulfur trioxide during the ride, giving rise to atmospheric sulfates. One of them is sulfuric acid. Mixed with rainwater, it is the villain that is killing New York's mountain lakes.
Sly Pond in Hamilton County is an exemplary casualty. Its pH level is 3.54, about as acidic as a dill pickle.
Nitrogen dioxide -- also a coal pollutant -- can similarly be transformed into air-borne nitric acid. But its effect on lakes and wildlife is not nearly as virulent as the effect of sulfate acid rain, Cross said.
'We feel we have a pretty solid case,' he said of New York's appeal. In addition to a more equitable enforcement of the Clean Air Act, he said, the state wants a stack standard, regulating both height and emissions.
But just how solid is New York's case? Not very, suggest some. Among those is William Hamilton, a senior staff scientist with Conoco, a large oil company.
Hamilton, who holds a doctorate in analytical chemistry from Louisiana State University, says in a published report that evidence proving an increased dose of acid rain is killing lakes in the Northeast and Canada just isn't there.
In fact, he said, studies made at nine U.S. Geological Survey stations in New York from 1964-1973 show no trend whatever toward increased acid rainfall.
Moreover, 'the atmospheric conversion of sulfur dioxide into sulfur trioxide and sulfate is in fact enormously complicated, since the reaction can be influenced by temperature, sunlight, humidity' and other varied factors, he said.
The unpredictability of the weather, he said, 'makes life difficult for those trying to develop atmospheric transport models' that connect emissions in one place to acid rainfall in another.
'It sure does,' agrees Peter Coffey, chief of the New York DEC's Pollution Transport Section. He corroborated Hamilton's assessment, which, it would seem, weakens the attorney general's case.
'The trajectories that we use (in tracing the sources of acid rain) just aren't very good,' Coffey said. 'This chemistry is something we're not exactly sure of.'
'You can't say this came from state 'X,' or power plant 'X',' he said.
In the cases where specific Midwestern generating plants are being singled out, however, that is just what New York State is saying.
It can only be determined with assurance, Coffey said, that atmospheric sulfates responsible for acid rain come from a general, multi-state region. And then only when the weather is good. Storms can cause the best transport models to come unglued.
At best, Coffey said, that amounts to 'good circumstantial evidence.'
'We would certainly acknowledge that$(TEXT OMITTED FROM SOURCE$) emissions) is an extremely difficult undertaking,' the state law department's Timothy Gilles said. But 'you are talking about a cumulative situation.'
Each Midwestern plant that spews sulfur dioxide into the air 'makes the problem worse,' he said. Forcing New York state to prove atmospheric pollutants come from specific generating plants would be 'like nickle and diming us to death.'
Hamilton poses more questions, though. What if acidified lakes are not caused in the main by acid rain?
He points to changing forestry and agricultural techniques as one possible cause of low pH readings. The use of commercial fertilizers may be aggravating the matter, along with the replacement of deciduous trees with conifers, the litter from which is more acidic.
Whatever the reasons, though, New York's Adirondack lakes and ponds are dying. No lawsuit is necessary to prove that.
Currently, the state dumps commercial limestone into lakes teetering on the edge of acidification, hoping to counteract the process and save them.
But 'that's just a Band-Aid approach,' Cross said. New York can't lime all of its thousands of mountain lakes and ponds. And any natural limestone buffer in the Adirondacks has been exceeded.
'Now,' Cross said, 'the lakes are dying.'
