‘Spectra Puts Safety First’ – Time Served in the Twilight Zone
Spectra Energy says, “We Put Safety First.” Yet they are afraid to answer questions of the Jersey City public to the proposed natural gas pipelines impact on their lives. This was made evident by this week’s City Council caucus meeting.
In 2009 Spectra approached Ward E councilman Steven Fulop, and Fulop asked that Spectra have a public meeting at City Hall so they could make their presentation and Jersey City residents could ask about the dangers of blast explosions that kill, injure and damage property.
Yet Spectra Energy’s presentation to the city council caucus this week prevented the public asking questions as part of the council rules, which is why Spectra chose this forum to control how their presentation was made. So we saw a video showing construction laying pipeline with few cars, almost no people, reminding me of an old segment of The Twilight Zone, where the last man after a nuclear blast has all the time to read books from the main library in NYC, but loses his glasses.
Here I had my glasses and saw that Spectra’s videos of pipeline construction were from their world of rural, small town, people-free environments instead of the euphemistic “High Consequence Areas” the gas industry uses that describe their blast death zones such as proposed for Jersey City.
Jersey City is as dense as San Francisco, according to the 2000 Census. Ward B councilman David Donnelly made it clear to Spectra’s project manager, Ed Gonzalez, that now we have perhaps 20,000 people per square mile. Our growth downtown alone due to “Wall Street West” was threatened by the economic collapse of September 2008, now as we recover, however slowly, we find the impact of a pipeline bomb may soon lie underground. Donnelly and Ward A councilman Michael Sottolano said it simply made no sense.
Yet what they both didn’t say is that it makes many cents in the form of dividends for Spectra to go over land through Jersey City to deliver their gas pipeline to New York City’s Con Ed and further. Spectra paid out over $1 billion in dividends last year, “up 34 percent from 2009,” and our lives are cheaper than missing Spectra’s and Con Ed 2013 contract deadline.
The chambers were full of the trade union members being used as fodder as Spectra handed them green T-shirts and signs to hold. They remain the only ones who support Spectra even though the “2,300” jobs Spectra promises to create are not primarily for local jobs. Just one of LeFrak’s Newport properties, a Rutgers study projects, will provide over 13,000 jobs and over $1 billion in revenue over 20 years — unless threatened by the pipeline. LeFrak has already had clients pull out due to the gas pipeline threat.
Stephen Musgrave and I sat in disbelief as we heard the next speaker, Jay Cohen of the Chertoff Group, who stated that terrorists don’t target pipelines. As noted on our website as reason #4 to oppose the pipeline, terrorists targeted a jet fuel pipeline feeding JFK Airport in 2007, a plot that was luckily thwarted.
Mr. Cohen spoke off track for at least 5 minutes when he was asked by a councilman if they had looked at pipeline threats other than a truck carrying a bomb. He said “no, terrorists have better things to do” and “I know of no pipeline threats by terrorists.”
Apart from reminding me of the Wizard of Oz (“pay no attention to that man behind the curtain”) the council and public knew he was caught in a gotcha moment since most had probably seen the Post or Daily News headlines of the incident at JFK airport by a terrorist who planned to do just that — blow up a pipeline. I had read of over a decade’s worth of pipeline threats in the gas industry;s trade mag, Oil and Gas Journal, so it seemed ridiculous the Chertoff Group sent this person to speak.
It sadly reminded me of those who once proclaimed: “Whoever thought terrorists would use a plane as a bomb?”
Mayor Bloomberg leads the support of Spectra coming to his city, but surprisingly even upstate’s New York League of Conservation Voters (NYLCV) filed with FERC to show their support of Spectra’s pipeline. NYLCV has board members with the names of Rockefeller, Roosevelt and even Robert Kennedy, conservationists or fly fisherman, all who actively support the same Delaware River watershed which is now threatened by the proposed Marcellus Shale hydro-fracking drilling that will connect to Spectra’s upstate New York pipelines.
Yes, Spectra’s 15-mile pipeline, labeled the “NJ – NY Expansion Project,” will not only threaten us in Jersey City, but be the same gas carrier that threatens to pour toxins into the Delaware River watershed that provides water for over 15 million people. In the meantime, we get to think about why no council person asked about the EPA fining Spectra for $15 million for PCBs, known carcinogens carried in Spectra’s pipelines.
Still, the council did let Spectra know that even if they didn’t ask all the right questions, they knew enough to be credulous, to be skeptics and to forever doubt that Spectra Puts Safety First.
Dale Hardman
No Gas Pipeline
