its gonna be really sad when rockaway and Brooklyn get blown off the map... At this very moment, work is underway on the Rockaway Lateral Project, a giant 26-inch diameter pipeline that will bring 647,000 dekatherms per day of fracked natural gas from the Marcellus Shale, under high pressure, beneath the beach, under a golf course, under the Marine Parkway Bridge, through Floyd Bennett Field, and into a new meter and regulator station in an old hangar at the airfield before connecting to distribution lines running up Flatbush Avenue into Brooklyn. After all the noise about the Keystone XL and the Spectra Pipeline, the Rockaway Lateral is the pipeline no one has heard about. That’s partly because it doesn’t run through the back yards of any private property owners, whose NIMBY opposition often make up the majority of the popular resistance to new pipeline construction. Instead, this pipeline runs exclusively through federal property—specifically, the Gateway National Recreation Area. Ordinarily, it’s pretty hard for gas companies to lay pipe through taxpayer-protected parkland. But less than a month after Sandy, ethically embattled and all-around-reasonable guy Rep. Michael Grimm pushed a law through Congress granting an energy company the right to do just that. At the time, the giveaway went mostly unremarked in the Rockaways. “People had just been flooded,” says Clare Donohue of the Sane Energy Project, which opposes the new pipeline. “They were displaced. They had more immediate fish to fry.” That’s an appropriate phrase for shooting flammable gas through the ocean, because pipelines like these have an astounding tendency to explode. Over the last five years, transmission lines like the Rockaway Project have had 17 “serious incidents,” the federal regulator’s term for cases involving death or in-patient hospitalization. Add in the “significant incidents,” those involving an explosion, damages of more than $50,000, or the release of a significant amount of liquid, and you’re looking at 367 incidents in the last five years, causing 82 injuries and more than $684 million in damages. How bad can it be? To date the most spectacular explosion of a pipe like this is probably the 2010 San Bruno explosion, which flattened 35 houses in a suburban subdivision, killing eight people and carving out a crater 167 feet long and four stories deep. The explosion registered with the U.S. Geological Survey as a 1.1 magnitude earthquake. More specifically, the company building the Rockaway pipeline, Williams Transco, and its parent, Williams, have a troubling safety record. Without reaching back too far, some of Williams’s most galling mistakes include: ◾In 2011, a Williams subsidiary was fined for neglecting to inspect its own pipelines in Louisiana. ◾That same year, a Williams pipeline in Alabama caused an “explosion that could be heard for more than 30 miles while shooting flames nearly 100 feet in the air for over an hour, according to local reports. ◾In 2012, Williams was fined $50,000 for failing to follow its own policies for preventing corrosion in its pipelines in Staten Island. ◾In March of 2012, a Williams facility leaked 10,000 gallons of hydrocarbon liquids into the soil and groundwater of Parachute Colorado, contaminating them with unsafe levels of benzene. ◾Last June, a Williams plant in Louisiana exploded, killing two and injuring more than 100. ◾Two weeks before that, a pipeline Williams was building in New Jersey exploded, injuring 13. ◾In March of this year, an explosion at one of the company’s liquefied gas storage facilities in Washington led to another mass evacuation. ◾Two months ago, a fire at a Williams plant in Wyoming led to a whole town being evacuated. gothamist/2014/06/19/rockaway_beach_gas_pipeline.php
Posted on: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 22:06:00 +0000
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