Last month extreme fossil fuel extraction and I were both recipients of an accusatory outburst by my 13-year-old.
“I hate fracking!” he said, half yelling, half sobbing. “Fracking turns you into a crappy mom!”
And he is right. Because of my ongoing efforts to halt both fracking and fracking’s metastasizing infrastructure from invading New York State, I have not chaperoned a school trip in three years. I missed Elijah’s opening-night star turn in Romeo and Juliet. I did not attend the high school girls’ cross country state championship, in which his sister competed. In fact, I missed all the races of the whole season, and, as such, am the only parent of a varsity runner who can make that claim. I know that because my 16-year-old periodically reminds me of my exceptionalism on this front.
Filling the jails with mothers as a kind of collective SOS signal is only one tool among many in building a climate change movement.
I seldom help with homework. I sometimes pull all-nighters in order to finish up fracking-related writing projects and am barely functional while scrambling eggs for breakfast. This is also my excuse for why I signed a permission slip for my son to travel to a concert performance as a member of the school chorus, not noticing that the date conflicted with the opening night of the play—the one I wasn’t going to be attending due to a fracking-related lecture—and so brought the wrath and annoyance of the middle school music teacher down upon our heads.
And when my daughter called to say that she needed to stay after school to make up a chemistry test and could I please arrange a ride for her, I was at that exact moment staring at a line of blue and red flashing lights screaming toward me and a group of fellow civil disobedients standing on a blockade line.
“Honey, I’ll do the best I can, but we’ve got arrests going on here.”
It’s hard to dial a cell phone when your hands are cuffed behind your back.
It’s even harder when you’re in jail without a cell phone. Which is where I am now. I’m inmate number 20140190 of cell block 5C in the Chemung County Jail. Happily, I’ll be out in time for Thanksgiving—although through no good planning on my part. As near as I can see, jails are short staffed and don’t like doing releases on holidays. But I don’t know for sure. Explanations are short to come by here. I do know that, because no higher-rung members of the jail administration work on weekends, I won’t be released from keep-lock until Monday even though my TB test was verified as negative on Saturday. Ergo, except for daily showers, I am confined to my cell. I haven’t talked to my kids in two days.
Let’s go back to that half-hearted and basically crappy promise, “I’ll do the best I can,” as delivered to my daughter by her mother, who was overseeing an unlawful action (trespassing) at the time. I’ll do the best I can (along with the equally crappy, I’ll try) basically functions as a pre-excuse for failure to see something through. It was Winston Churchill who said—and I’ll have to paraphrase here as I don’t have access to Google—Don’t do your best. Do what’s required.
It would be easy to say that results-oriented Churchillian determination is the approach I take, as a biologist, when confronting fossil fuel extremism (and its greatest enabler, fracking), while good-intentioned half-measures are what I dole out, as a mother, at home. But that’s not exactly right. Instead, it’s precisely because I have access to the peer-reviewed literature, as a biologist, that I have come to understand climate change as a mass murderer that has my children in its sights. (And fracking is its toxic, thuggish, water-destroying accomplice). I’m informed by the data; I’m animated by a mother’s love.
And here in cell 3, I’m doing what’s required so that my kids have a future. Above all else, my job as their mother is to provide them that.
I am not the only mother whose priorities are thus aligned. I was arrested, side by side, with two other mothers, Mariah Plumlee and Stephanie Redmond, who have three young children apiece. At her own sentencing, Plumlee said, “I’m really sad and angry to be here. I don’t like to break the rules; I usually try to follow them. But I also have principles and children,” saidRedmond. “I have children, and the laws of motherhood supersede the laws bought and paid for by large corporations.”
I fully believe that Mariah, Stephanie and I are on the leading edge of an emergent social movement that will only grow in numbers and intensity as the dire urgency of the climate change emergency (and fracking, its obscene, clanging bell) becomes evermore apparent. In the meantime, we mothers who are already fighting on the frontlines—with our whole hearts, all of our spare cash and as much time away from our kids, spouses and jobs as we dare offer—inhabit two parallel worlds. When we rush back from the rally, the press conference, the public hearing, the arraignment, in order to attend the soccer game, the Halloween party, the holiday concert, the parent-teacher conference, we listen to other moms talk about bake sales, home improvement projects, vacation plans and college admission criteria. (Oh, and maybe the crazy weather we’ve been having that threatens to close the roads and cancel the game). Some of us are on wartime footing. Some of us don’t yet know there is a war going on.
There are a number of reinforcing reasons for what I call climate helplessness—we’re mostly beyond climate denial at this point—and they begin with the capitulation, corroboration and appeasement of both the mainstream environmental community and the federal government toward the oil and gas industry. Less Winston Churchill, more Neville Chamberlain. None of the Obama Administration’s proposals—including the Clean Power Plan—hold any hope of mounting a challenge serious enough to solve the problem in the unextendable time frame that remains to us. Meanwhile, those in the scientific community who are valiantly bringing forth data and attempting to describe our emergency situation to the public use terms like “planetary tipping points” and “existential threats.” They could say “loss of pollination systems resulting in widespread hunger, a phenomenon that is already underway” and “threats to the existence of your children and grandchildren,” which might focus the picture more clearly.
Filling the jails with mothers as a kind of collective SOS signal is only one tool among many in building a climate change movement as powerful as women’s suffrage (Susan B. Anthony was arrested for the act of voting in a presidential election on November 18, 1872) or the Civil Rights Movement (Martin Luther King, Jr. had many small children at home during his several sojourns in county jails). But jail time has several important, value-added relevancies. One is that the enforced extended separation from the natural world serves as a potent reminder of everything we depend upon the world to do for us. Five days without clouds, sky, stars, leaves, birdsong, wind, sunlight and fresh food has left me homesick to the point of grief. I now inhabit an ugly, diminished place devoid of life and beauty—and this is exactly the kind of harsh, ravaged world I do not want my children to inhabit.
And the other is that jail teaches you how to stand up and fight inside of desperate circumstances. This morning we said goodbye to Casey (not her real name) who was headed to court to face charges related to drug addiction. Which itself is related to a childhood filled with sexual abuse—the memories of which were retriggered when her own seven-year-old daughter was raped. We all urged, as we wished her well: Keep fighting. You can’t give up on life.
Inside cell 3, I have a dream: an environmental movement full of crappy moms who do what’s required and refuse to give up on life.
Breakfast in the Chemung County Jail is served at 5 a.m. This morning—Friday, November 21, 2014—it was Cheerios and milk plus two slaps of universally-despised “breakfast cake.” Along with trays of food—which are passed through the bars—arrive the morning rounds of meds for the inmates who take them. Now comes my favorite time of day in jail—the two quiet hours between breakfast and 7 a.m. before the television clicks on and we are ordered to make our beds and the loud day begins. Between the end of breakfast and 7 a.m., most women go back to sleep. Now I can hear only the sounds of their breathing—different rhythms all—and, on the far side of the steel door—the occasional voices of the C.O.s (correction officers, a.k.a. the guards) and the walkie-talkie orders they themselves are receiving.
Sandra Steingraber wrote this letter for EcoWatch from the Chemung County Jail this morning to share with our readers and beyond.
Meanwhile, my bed is already made and I have repurposed my small laundry basket—by flipping it upside down—into a table on which I am writing. And because I am a writer who is writing, I am happy.
I am also happy because I know that, by writing, I am fulfilling a promise to Ashley (not her real name) who brought me last night a sharpened pencil and a stack of inmate medical request forms to use as writing paper. After hearing my story—narrated through the bars of my cell as I am being kept in “keeplock” until the results of my TB screening come back—Ashley said, “I know about you Seneca Lake protesters. I read about that. But only once. You have to keep fighting. You have to write to the newspaper. You can do that from here, you know. You can’t just sit in your cell for 14 days and do nothing. You have to fight.” And then she ran off and found me paper.
Sitting on a stool outside my cell—which is welded to the far row of bars—Ashley freely dispensed advice last night for the We Are Seneca Lake movement. “Don’t give up. Keep writing the newspapers. They are always looking for stories.” She added, “I may be only 21, but I’m wise about some things.”
Here’s Ashley’s story: She was arrested two years ago—at age 19—for stealing a pumpkin. She is jailed now for violating probation. She has three kids—ages 6, 4 and 2—who are staying with her foster mother in Allegany County until she serves her time. She’ll be out the day after Christmas. Meanwhile, she’s studying for her GED and laying plans to go to college.
Half the women in my cell block are here for probation violation. One thing they all agree on: It’s almost impossible to be a single mother in search of housing and a job, both of which require mobility, and comply with probation rules, which restrict mobility. Better to do the time and then make a fresh start.
I get that. And it’s a logic that runs parallel to my own. I have come to believe that a successful civil disobedience campaign likewise depends on the willingness of at least some of us to gladly accept jail time over other kinds of sentences, such as paying fines.
There are four reasons for this. First, it shows respect for the law. In my case, I was arrested for trespassing on the driveway of a Texas-based energy company that has the sole intention of turning the crumbling salt mines underneath the hillside into massive gas tanks for the highly-pressurized products of fracking: methane, propane and butane. (The part of the plan involving methane storage has already been approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission). Even before the infrastructure for this gas storage is built, Crestwood Midstream has polluted the lake with salt, at levels that exceed its legal limits. Crestwood’s response is to pay a fine and keep polluting. By contrast, I refuse to pay a fine to excuse my crime and so accepted the lawful consequences of my actions.
Second, extending one’s civil disobedience testimony in jail shows seriousness of intent. Four of the 17 civil disobedients who have so far been arraigned as part of the We Are Seneca Lake campaign have chosen jail instead of fines: 75-year-old Dwain Wilder, a veteran of the Navy who was incarcerated for Veteran’s Day; 86-year-old Roland Micklem, a Quaker, who is now incarcerated in the Schuyler County Jail [Roland Micklem was released yesterday due to health concern]; 58-year-old Colleen Boland, a retired Air Force sergeant who served in the White House; and me (I’m a 55-year-old biologist and author).
Colleen occupies the cell next to mine. We talk through the wall. Colleen, Roland and I are on track to find out what they serve prisoners for Thanksgiving dinner.
By our willing separation from our families, by our sacrifice and consent to suffer, by our very absence, we are saying that we object in the strongest terms to the transformation of our beloved Finger Lakes community into a hub for fracking. We object to the occupation of our lakeshore by a Houston-based corporation that seeks to further build out fossil-fuel infrastructure in a time of climate emergency, and in so doing, imperils a source of drinking water for 100,000 people.
Third, by filling the jails with mothers, elders and veterans, we peacefully provoke a crisis that cannot be ignored by media or political leaders. Of course, civil disobedience is always a method of last recourse, deployed when all other methods of addressing a grievance have been exhausted. We have turned over all stones. We have submitted comments, written letters, offered testimony, filed Freedom of Information requests for secret documents—only to see our legitimate concerns brushed aside. Our incarceration shows that the regulatory system is broken. So far, in the Seneca Lake campaign, there have been 59 arrests, and a majority of those have yet to be sentenced. There will be more of us in jail before the year is out.
And the fourth reason is this: spending time in jail is a time of personal transformation. Alone with a pencil, some inmate request forms for stationery, the Bible and your own thoughts, you discover that you are braver than you knew. You are doing time, and time offers the possibility of rededicating oneself to the necessary work ahead: dismantling the fossil fuel industry in the last 20 years left to us, before the climate crisis spins into unfixable, unending calamity.
Last night I learned how to create a tool for changing the channel on the television, which blares from the other side of two rows of bars. It involves twisting newspaper around a row of pencils and stiffening it with toothpaste.
Thus do the women of the Chemung County Jail—all mothers—exert agency over the circumstances of their lives and defy the status quo. That’s a skill set we all need. As Ashley scolded me last night, while passing a sharpened pencil through the bars, “You can’t just sit there for the next 14 days. Start fighting.”
By Peter Mantius
Posted Nov. 17, 2014 @ 12:11 pmCorning, N.Y.After five years of secrecy and deception, it’s time to throw the bright light of day on a proposal to store liquid petroleum gas, or LPG, in abandoned unlined salt caverns next to Seneca Lake.Long overdue sunlight must finally be allowed to shine on the caverns’ history. To do that, the state Department of Environmental Conservation — with Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s guidance — will need to order Crestwood Midstream’s proposal to stand trial.
Earlier this month, the DEC issued draft conditions for the LPG storage permit in advance of an “issues conference” scheduled for Feb. 12.
At that hearing, a DEC administrative law judge will determine whether unresolved questions need to be aired in a trial setting with sworn testimony, independent expert witnesses and witness cross-exams.
Expect Crestwood to try to convince Cuomo to let it off the hook.
Crestwood knows it must avoid sworn testimony. Throughout its long campaign for permits, it has repeatedly hidden damning evidence from both the public and the regulators.
Even so, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved in October an expansion of Crestwood’s natural gas storage operations next to Seneca, and that work is now proceeding. But the DEC has jurisdiction over the LPG project, the larger and more dangerous of the two.
Crestwood’s plan is to turn a profit by stuffing natural gas and LPG from Marcellus Shale fracking operations in Pennsylvania into the cheapest, riskiest type of underground storage facility in the industry — salt caverns.
The Seneca caverns are deeply flawed, bounded by layers of salt and brittle shale rock. They are subject to collapse and leakage, and the residents who live next to them face the statistically significant prospect of a catastrophic accident or a forced evacuation.
The company has repeatedly attempted to conceal that danger from the people it would put at risk. The DEC has enabled that irresponsible behavior out of fear that transparency invites controversy.
In late 2011, the agency held two public hearings on the LPG project in a Watkins Glen school auditorium.
But they were largely for show because the DEC was withholding key information from the hundreds who showed up. The DEC still keeps key parts of the company’s “reservoir suitability report” under lock and key. And while the state geologist must by law sign off on the integrity of caverns used for hydrocarbon storage, his reports — if they exist — aren’t public record.
Formal requests under the Freedom of Information Law were needed to pry lose bits of truth. They revealed letters that showed that the company’s own engineer had concluded in 2001 that the cavern now slated to hold liquid butane was “unusable for storage” after its roof had collapsed, leaving a giant rubble pile. He urged his boss to order the cavern plugged and abandoned. His boss agreed. So did the DEC. The cavern was plugged and abandoned.
Years later, the company redrilled the rejected cavern in response to the Marcellus Shale boom.
When the well’s history leaked to the public, Crestwood rushed to patch the problem by prompting the company engineer to deny the roof collapse. He did, and the company now insists the collapse never happened, despite company documents showing a 200-foot rubble pile on the cavern’s floor.
Other discrepancies raise doubts about the safety of the cavern set to hold liquid propane. The company even denied to FERC that it knew about a gigantic roof collapse in the cavern just approved for gas storage.
Crestwood must not be allowed to wiggle out of providing sworn testimony. If Cuomo lets it skip out, his permit process is a sham.
• Peter Mantius is a freelance journalist from Schuyler County who follows shale gas drilling issues. He is a former reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and former editor of two business weeklies in the Northeast.
In Watkins Glenn — an idyllic part of upstate New York best known for its Finger Lakes, fall foliage and wine — activists worry it could soon be known for something less appealing: industrial disaster.
Protesters in the area are engaging in civil disobedience to stop the expansion of a gas storagefacility that stores fracked gas from Pennsylvania in old mined-out salt caves, claiming it presents a safety risk to local residents, an environmental danger to the Finger Lakes region and an economic threat to the area’s wine and tourism industries.
“We do not want the crown jewel of the Finger Lakes and the font of the wine industry turned into a massive gas station for the fracking industry,” said Sandra Steingraber, a prominent anti-hydraulic-fracturing activist and environmental studies professor at Ithaca College who was one of about a dozen protesters who have been arrested several times during continued protests, most recently on Nov. 3, for blocking the entrance to the storage facility.
The controversy over the facility, owned by Houston-based energy company Crestwood Midstream Partners, was brewing for years but came to a head this summer after the legislature of Schuyler County, where the facility is, voted in favor of the proposed expansion, triggering protests that brought out hundreds.
The facility is made up of dozens of old salt deposits that were mined out over the last century, creating naturally sealed caverns that can be used to store liquids or pressurized gas. The caverns are conveniently located a few hundred milesfrom the booming natural gas fields of the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania and close to two gas pipeline routes. But they’re also right next to Seneca Lake, the largest of New York’s Finger Lakes, and one of its most environmentally compromised, thanks to years of leaching pesticides and fertilizers from surrounding farms.
Activists say pressurizing the old salt caverns could cause salt and gas to seep into the lake and pollute the ground, affecting the region’s wine industry. And they point out several catastrophic underground gas and oil storage accidents, including some that have been deadly.
Still, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the presidentially appointed panel that oversees most natural gas infrastructure in the United States, gave the Crestwood Midstream expansion plans the go-ahead last month. To the company’s supporters, that showed the plans were safe. To the company’s detractors, it confirmed that the FERC nearly always sides with industry despite local concerns.
“FERC works with the gas company,” said Joseph Campbell, a co-founder of protest group Gas Free Seneca. “They just rubber-stamp these things. We’re calling on our federal representatives to step in and hold FERC accountable.”
But so far, protesters say calls to representatives have proved fruitless. Sen. Charles Schumer has not responded to protesters’ concerns and did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
‘We do not want the crown jewel of the Finger Lakes and the font of the wine industry turned into a massive gas station for the fracking industry.’
Sandra Steingraber
environmental studies professor, Ithaca College
The FERC has developed a reputation for siding with industry. The agency has received 803 applications for natural gas infrastructure since 2006. It has approved 451 of them, and 98 are pending review. According to the FERC, 258 have been denied or withdrawn, but the agency could not provide a breakdown of how many were denied, as opposed to voluntarily withdrawn by companies. Some have speculated that the FERC has denied nearly none of them. FERC spokeswoman Tamara Young-Allen said the commission has rejected only two applications since 2011.
“Unless we have some intervention from people in power to intercede on behalf of their constituents, we’re going to be taking all this risk while Crestwood takes the profits back to Texas,” Campbell said.
Crestwood wouldn’t comment for this story, except in an email from a spokesman who would not allow his name to be used. That email addressed why Crestwood called the police on protesters last week but not the protesters’ concerns about the facility.
“We have respected the protesters’ rights to oppose our growth projects, but our employees and contractors depend on having access to our existing operations at the U.S. Salt complex,” the statement read.
Crestwood’s official plans are to expand its current natural gas storage capacity by a third, from 1.5 billion cubic feet to 2 billion cubic feet. It also wants to add 2.1 million barrels of liquid gas storage capacity for propane and butane at the facility, a project that received a preliminary permit from the New York Department of Environmental Conservation last week, though that permit is still subject to public input and could be changed.
The department said in a statement that Crestwood’s permit application is pending as the state gathers public comments, but the protesters contend that the state has also proved its allegiance to industry. An investigation by news outlet Capital New York last month found that a fracking study performed at the request of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration was edited to downplay risks associated with natural gas storage before it was made public.
Activists say Crestwood has much larger expansion plans than what it is permitted for, pointing that in several interviews and statements, company officials have spoken of expanding the facility to 10 billion cubic feet of storage — five times what their current permit allows. Crestwood would not comment on this disparity.
Underground oil and gas storage accidents are rare but can be catastrophic. Data on salt cavern storage is sparse, but one report commissioned by the British government in 2008 found that salt cavern facilities worldwide have collapsed or been breached 27 times since they began being used to store oil and gas in the 1940s. According to nonprofit investigative news outlet DC Bureau, salt caverns represent 7 percent of the U.S.’s approximately 400 underground gas storage sites.All eight deadly cavern disasters have occurred in the U.S., according to the British report. In those disasters, the contents of the caverns caught fire, causing explosions.
Nonlethal accidents have nonetheless created major headaches and environmental disasters. Perhaps the most infamous is the Bayou Corne sinkhole in rural Louisiana. There, a salt cavern collapsed in 2012, creating a 750-foot-deep hole that spans 30 acres and is filled with a toxic brew of oil, chemicals and water. It is still growing. Louisiana has urged the 350 residents of the area to move, and many are involved in a class-action suit against Texas Brine, the company that owned the caverns.
Bayou Corne represents the worst-case scenario for residents near Seneca Lake, but residents worry that less dramatic but nonetheless troubling hardships could stem from the expansion of the facility.
“If you salt up a river or put methane in a river, you can clear that in a matter of days or weeks, but you can’t do that with a lake,” Steingraber said. “Pushing more salt and brine into the lake would be catastrophic.”
That’s particularly worrisome for the area’s vineyards, which rely on the groundwater around Seneca Lake for their grapes and the pristine nature of the region for tourism.
“The local wine industry is an agritourism-based industry,” said Justin Boyette, owner of Hector Wine Co., across the lake from the Crestwood facility. “I don’t want people to look up ‘Finger Lakes’ online and the first thing they come up with to be about a disaster.”
Steve Orr, Staff writer4:24 p.m. EST November 13, 2014
Barges and groves of trees being sucked down watery sinkholes. Downtown buildings erupting in geysers of flame that can’t be quenched.
Forget the rhetoric. Just roll the videotape, and you’ll see what some people would have you believe is in store for the southwestern shore of Seneca Lake.
Others say such things could never, ever happen there.
This is the essence of the controversy that’s focused on one company’s proposals to store large quantities of propane, butane and methane in underground facilities along the southwest shore of the largest Finger Lake.
After delays that in one case stretches back five years, the proposals by Houston-based Crestwood Midstream are suddenly advancing through the government approval process.
Federal regulators last month okayed the proposal to expand Crestwood Midstream’s methane (natural gas) storage capacity from 1.45 to 2 billion cubic feet. State regulators on Monday issued a draft permit for the propane and butane storage project. Company officials were quoted expressing relief that their projects had begun to move forward.
This was not welcome news to the residents, business owners and environmental activists who have been protesting the proposals since they came to light. In what was not the first such incident, 10 protesters got themselves arrested blocking trucks at the site two weeks ago.
“People are lining up to get arrested to demonstrate their commitment to preserving the region’s beauty, peace and integrity,” said the Rev. Nancy Kasper of North Rose, Wayne County, one of those busted on Oct. 29. “It really affects every person who lives, works, visits or simply loves the region. It’s going to ruin the nature of the area by industrializing a world-renowned wine industry, agricultural and tourist destination.”
One person pleaded guilty and was jail, and has been the subject of a candlelight vigil. The others are due back in court next week.
The fierce reaction to the proposals stems in part from their location — in the heart of wine and tourist country on the shore of one of the state’s biggest and most beautiful lakes. It also stems from the bedrock opposition that exists among quite a few New Yorkers to anything that has to do with the form of gas and oil extraction known as hydraulic fracturing.
Crestwood Midstream must be wondering where it went wrong. The company has billed the twin projects on its 586-acre site as economically beneficial, safe and no different from the other natural gas and LPG storage facilities that dot upstate New York.
New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation noted three liquid petroleum gas facilities in use as of 2012. They all were located in the south-central part of the state. All three store LPG in salt caverns — giant roomed carved from natural salt deposits by miners.
And at last count New York was home to 24 underground natural gas storage facilities with a combined working capacity of 122 billion cubic feet. That placed New York third among states in number of facilities and ninth in working capacity.(See the data sethere.) All of these storage facilities are in what are called depleted gas fields, meaning the gas is forced into rock formations from which gas was previously removed.
As the map indicates, facilities are scattered throughout the western portion of upstate New York. Several lie near two other Finger Lakes, Honeoye and Keuka.
The expansion approved last month near Seneca Lake increases upstate’s storage capacity only by about one-half of one percent.
But the opponents argue that all underground storage isn’t created equal.
Crestwood’s facilities at Seneca Lake would be located in salt caverns and opponents point out that while salt deposits can be very stable formations, they also can be subject to failure. That’s where the disaster videos come in.
The video that’s linked above depicts an episode in Louisiana in August 2012, when the collapse of a salt cavern in a brine-production mine created a sinkhole that began draining Bayou Corne. Nearby residents were evacuated and remain displaced more than two years later.
Another even more spectacular disaster occurred in the same state in 1980, when an exploratory oil rig on Lake Peigneur in Louisiana accidentally punctured the ceiling of an active salt-mine cavern below, causing the lake to drain into the mine through what has been described as the biggest sinkhole in history.
And then there was the dreadful fires in Hutchinson, Kansas in January 2001. Natural gas being stored in a salt cavern escaped, apparently through a broken pipe, migrated through the rock and emerged miles away to fuel terrible, mysterious fires.
Though the video isn’t quite so jaw-dropping, the ceiling in a chamber of the historic Retsof salt mine in Livingston County collapsed in 1994, creating a sinkhole and other odd geological impacts and led to the abandonment of the mine.
Crestwood Midstream, whose officials didn’t return a call for comment for this blog, have argued that the circumstances of those disasters were different, and that the salt caverns they plan to use are solid. Federal regulators clearly agree, and the DEC seems to be trending that way.
But as Peter Mantius of DC Bureau explained, at least one cavern at Seneca Lake has suffered a ceiling collapse, though the feds supposedly paid it no mind. (His has been the best reporting on these projects, by the way, and you can read it all via that link.)
Opponents raise other concerns — brine pumped out of the salt caverns would be stored in surface ponds, creating a potential source of pollutants for the lake. And life near the site would be disrupted by a marked increase in truck and train traffic.
But it’s the videos that allow opponents of the Seneca Lake projects to raise the specter of catastrophe — the waters of Seneca Lake disappearing down a hellish sinkhole or Watkins Glen lying in ashes.
Likely to happen? No. Impossible? Maybe not. Enough to stop the projects? We’ll see
By Kristin Davis, Staff writer2:34 p.m. EST November 12, 2014
Retired Air Force Senior Master Sgt. Collen Boland will mark Veteran’s Day with a vigil outside Schuyler County Jail in New York tonight.
That’s where a fellow veteran is serving a 15-day sentence for refusing to pay a fine for trespassing — and where she too may end up following a court appearance scheduled for next week.
Boland and Dwain Wilder, a former sailor, were among 10 protesters arrested Oct. 27 for blocking the entrance of an energy company that four days earlier got the green light to expand an existing natural gas storage facility near the largest of New York’s pristine Finger Lakes.
The pair are among hundreds of so-called Seneca Lake Defenders who fear the environmental impacts of the project, which involves storing natural gas in old salt caverns in the area.
Until late last month, Boland, 58, lived a relatively quiet life in Elmira, just north of the Pennsylvania border. She retired from the Air Force in 1995 following what she called a storybook career traveling to parts of the world she hadn’t known existed. She went on to earn a degree in human development from Cornell University and volunteer for a home for abandoned children in Nepal.
“When I retired, I retired,” Boland said. “I didn’t carry my veteranship along with me. I didn’t profit up, ever.”
But on Oct. 27, she donned the U.S. Air Force fleece jacket emblazoned with her name, rank and rows of decorations. She headed out to Crestwood energy company’s Schuyler County entrance and linked arms with fellow protesters. When a tractor trailer approached, the human chain refused to move. Sheriff’s deputies showed up a few minutes later and placed them under arrest.
The whole ordeal was captured on video that has since been uploaded to YouTube.
She wore the jacket for a number of reasons, Boland said in a press conference that followed the group’s arrest and release.
“One is to try to dispel the notion that the only people standing up to protect our water, our air, and our communities are tree-hugging hippies or out of touch dreamers. Don’t get me wrong, I love trees, but I was never quite cool enough to be a hippie —and I’m certainly not dreaming,” she said to a roar of laughter and applause. “I am still serving, still defending. I am defending the natural beauty of the Finger Lakes region that I love against all enemies foreign and domestic. Crestwood is my enemy.”
In an email statement, a Crestwood spokesman said the company respects the rights of protesters who oppose the growth projects. “But our employees and contractors depend on having access to our existing operations at the US Salt complex” where the rally took place.
“Unfortunately, we were required to involve law enforcement after the protests began to raise safety concerns and interfere with the operations of our century-old US Salt plant,” according to the statement.
Boland grew up in Corning, New York, about 20 miles south of the site of the protest. Her older brother went to West Point, and it was on weekend visits with her father that, she said, they saw “lots of precision and shiny things. That attracted me.”
Boland’s family expected her to go to college after high school. When that didn’t work out, she said, “I had to find something to do, and relatively quickly. Being familiar with shiny things and being impressed by that — duty, honor, country — it was an easy path.”
She spent three years active duty Army and one year in the Army Reserves. “Then I switched over to the good life in the Air Force.”
Boland was a career administration specialist. “The military never told me what my next assignment was going to be. I always found my own job,” she said. “I was not going to let the U.S. government tell me where to go, even though I decided to serve my country. I’m going to figure out where I think I can best serve. I was going to take control of my own fate.”
It served her well, she said. Boland worked at the Pentagon and was a staff member for the White House’s National Space Council. She was an administrative assistant for the commander of U.S. Pacific Command, traveling to more than 20 countries by the end of her Air Force career.
“It was very difficult and the stress level was high and we didn’t sleep much. But the opportunity to go out there and meet the people of the world and feel that we’re all in this together — that forms who I am today and what I’m doing today,” Boland said.
Still, she never imagined she’d become an activist — or that she’d one day use her military experience to help bring attention to her cause. (Such a thing is off-limits to active-duty troops.)
It happened a few years ago, Boland said, after she watched the 2010 documentary “Gasland.” The film details the dangers of drilling for natural gas, and the highly contentious process of hydraulic fracturing in particular.
“That was it, once I saw that. The next thing I knew I was up in Albany,” Boland said, lending her voice to a growing cacophony of opposition. “I started saying no and hell no.”
When New York lawmakers passed a two-year moratorium on the process in 2013, she turned her attention south, to just over the border in Pennsylvania.
Infrastructure used to support fracking extends well into New York, she said. “It breaks my heart to see this beautiful region become a storage and fracking hub of the northeast.”
The company she protested against sought — and recently received — approval to expand storage of methane gas in abandoned salt taverns, although it hasn’t yet begun.
Proponents of the project say it is perfectly safe.
Boland believes the science says otherwise.
“Once you know something — even as painful and distressing as it is — you can’t un-know it,” she said. “You get involved in it and you can’t turn it off. It’s most distressing. I can’t walk away from it. So here I am today.”
Boland faces charges of trespassing and disorderly conduct, to which she pleaded guilty to last week. The judge in her case postponed a decision until Nov. 19.
She’ll most likely be ordered to pay a fine — which Boland, like fellow veteran Dwain Wilder — has no plans to do. If it lands her in a jail cell, she said, so be it.
“We have done everything we can to stop this madness. We’ve gone to the legislature, the county, to Albany, to Washington, D.C. We’ve written letters and made public comments to the Environmental Protection Agency. We’ve done everything the system says we have to do to have a voice,” Boland said. “There comes a time when the only thing left is civil disobedience.”
1 man jailed; dual charges delay several cases to Nov. 19
READING CENTER, Nov. 6 — Ten protesters arrested Oct. 29 in a blockade at two Crestwood energy company gates along Route 14 north of Watkins Glen appeared in court Wednesday night, but only one case reached conclusion: a 15-day jail term for a Rochester man.
The appearance of the 10 before Town of Reading Justice Raymond Berry was complicated by the presence of two charges against seven of the protesters: counts of trespass and disorderly conduct. Those seven had been arrested at the main gate to the Crestwood compressor station, where they were lined up, blocking a chemical company truck from entering.
They were protesting the federally approved storage of methane in salt caverns along the west side of Seneca Lake — a project they say endangers the lake waters and threatens the economic vitality of a region steeped in wineries and tourism. There is also, they say, the danger of a catastrophic event, such as a major explosion that might seriously affect the area for miles.
The other three protesters that day were posted at a smaller gate to the south. At the time of their arrests, they weren’t blocking any vehicles, although they said they had earlier prevented a small truck from exiting the Crestwood grounds. Each of the three was charged only with trespass.
Protest organizers said earlier this week — following the arrest of 15 more protesters (whose court appearances are spread out across November and early December) — that they were hoping their legal counsel would be able to get the Oct. 29th disorderly conduct charges dropped or any penalty from them eliminated through a plea agreement.
But, said Sandra Steingraber, a key protest organizer and one of Wednesday night’s defendants, calls to the District Attorney’s office “were made and made and made, but the DA didn’t provide an answer.”
When Wednesday’s first defendant, Colleen Boland, told Judge Berry that she would plead guilty to trespass if the judge agreed to dismiss the conduct charge, he said he was not empowered to do that — that such a result would have to be approved by the DA.
That set the tone through a two-hour-plus court proceeding. Berry adjourned Boland’s case until 5 p.m. Nov. 19th, a pattern he followed in all but one of the succeeding cases. In some, defendants pleaded guilty, in some not guilty, and in a couple neither one, the pleas left up in the air.
Of the 10 defendants, only the case of Dwain Wilder of Rochester reached sentencing, after Wilder pleaded guilty to the single count of trespass lodged against him for his role at the south Crestwood gate.
“I did intend with all my might to block Crestwood’s access,” he told the judge before being fined $250 and a $125 state surcharge. He refused to pay, was accordingly sentenced to 15 days in the Schuyler County Jail, and was led from the courtroom by a deputy to begin serving his time.
The two defendants with him at the south gate, Rev. Nancy Kasper of Wayne County and Charles Geisler of Ithaca, pleaded not guilty Wednesday to trespass. Their cases were adjourned to Nov. 19.
The dual charges, presumably to be sorted out when the judge contacts the DA’s office, are still faced by Boland, Steingraber, Jeanne Judson, Patrick Judson, Roland Micklem, Catherine Rossiter of Sayre and Patricia Heckart of Trumansburg. The latter actually split her pleas, saying “guilty” to trespass and “not guilty” to disorderly conduct, but said afterward that she wished she had entered “not guilty” to both. While a couple of defendants tried to read statements, only to be deterred by the judge, trespass-accused Geisler managed to read aloud a complaint issued by Crestwood official Barry Moon to the Schuyler County Sheriff’s Office before the Oct. 29 arrests.
In it, the official said the protesters were “hindering the flow of traffic in and out” of the Crestwood grounds without permission, and that he wanted them “removed and arrested today and in the future” should they reappear at the company’s gates.
After court was concluded, the defendants marched out of the building to cheers from about 80 supporters still on hand. A larger group — about 150 people, counting defendants — were present in the parking lot before the court opened. Steingraber told the post-court gathering that while she “had planned to go to jail tonight, we are going home … But if we need to fill the jails to stop this project, we’re willing to take that tactic.”
The rally beforehand:
Well over 100 people gathered in the parking lot outside the Town of Reading hall more than an hour before the 7 p.m. court proceeding.
TV and online media were on hand, and speeches took center stage. With Steingraber acting as emcee, the microphones yielded speeches by defendants Colleen Boland, Jeanne Judson, Patrick Judson, and 86-year-old Roland Micklem, entrepreneurs Lou Damiani and Justin Boyette, former legislator (and Monday arrestee) Ruth Young, and recent Legislature candidate Sylvia Fox, who noted that she was one of two anti-storage candidates who combined earned more than half the vote in District 6, encompassing the Village of Watkins Glen and nearby environs.
All gave impassioned talks welcomed by the supporters, who occasionally broke into the chant: “We Are Seneca Lake,” the term applied to the grassroots movement that has sprung up in opposition to the methane storage project.
Photos in text:
From top: Speakers at the rally preceding court included retired Air Force Master Sgt. Colleen Boland of Elmira; retired teacher Jeanne Judson and her son Patrick; former Schuyler County Legislator Ruth Young, and defendant Roland Micklem.
Left: Recent Schuyler County Legislature candidate Sylvia Fox. Right: Defendants Catherine Rossiter of Sayre (left) and Rev. Nancy Kasper of Wayne County.
15 more protesters arrested at Crestwood
WATKINS GLEN, Nov. 3 — Five days after 10 protesters had been arrested at a pair of Crestwood energy company gates along Route 14 north of Watkins Glen, another 15 were arrested Monday morning by Schuyler County Sheriff’s deputies and State Police.
This time, the protesters at the main gate were not arrested before the protesters at the second, smaller gate to the south. This time, police descended on both locales simultaneously. Arrested this time were 15 people who had not been arrested the previous Wednesday. And this time several of those taken into custody on trespass charges were elderly.
The protesters, who have objected loudly in the past to the planned storage of Liquefied Petroleum Gas in salt caverns to the west of Seneca Lake — a proposal on hold at the state level — are currently mobilizing against the federally approved storage of methane in salt caverns. They cite the potential contamination of Seneca and other Finger Lakes, and the threat of an explosion that they said could rock the region.
Among those taken to the Sheriff’s Office for processing were 90-year-old Martha Ferger of Dryden, who said this was the first time she had ever been arrested — at least “the first I remember.” She added that she wasn’t sure what she would do when she goes to court before Town of Reading Justice Raymond Berry. If a protester pleads guilty, he or she has the option of paying a mandatory fine and surcharge, or of going to jail for up to 15 days — although the terms actually served by area protesters over the past couple of years have averaged seven or eight days.
Not far behind Ferger in years was arrestee Bob Henrie of Wayne County (right), who said he is 88 — “the same number of keys on a piano.” He said he is due in court on Nov. 12th, and wants to talk to 86-year-old Roland Micklem — arrested last week — before he makes a decision on what course to follow in court, and whether to opt for jail. “I know Roland’s not going to pay,” he said.
Celebrating his 75th birthday Monday was arrestee Kenneth Fogarty of Chenango County(below), a retired City University of New York math professor who in retirement has been teaching a class or two per semester at SUNY Morrisville’s annex in Norwich. He said he has been active for years in C-CARE (Chenango Community Action for Renewable Energy), and that he expects to pay the fine instead of going to jail “because I have to teach” a college course, which he dubbed “Elementary Algebra for Frightened Adults.”
“I’m in my last quarter on Earth,” he said, “and it’s time to pay it back. It’s not to be desecrated.”
And two years his senior was arrestee Ruth Young, 77, a former Schuyler County legislator who said she is a member of People for a Healthy Environment — one of several grassroots organizations that have sprung up in recent years in reaction to hydrofracking and associated ecological hot buttons — including the storage of gases in salt caverns. She said the arresting officers were “very gentle and professional,” giving a verbal warning before making arrests. But, she added, “I am saddened to see what is going on here.”
Others arrested were Lyn Gerry of Watkins Glen, John Dennis of Lansing, Mariah Plumlee of Covert, Joanne Cipolla-Dennis of Dryden, and Lindsay Clark of the Rochester area, along with several people whose places of residence were not available: Laura Salamandra, Elan Shapiro, Darlene Bordwell, Jodi Dean, Paul Passavant, and Stephanie Redmond.
Dennis was quoted in a press release from protest organizers as saying: “I’m worried about water quality. There are severe salinity problems already, and I’m almost certain those will get worse because we think the existing problems are caused by gas storage started in 1964.”
Plumlee, a mother of three, was quoted as saying: “I think it’s really important to do this, and if everybody did this then we wouldn’t have this problem. We moved here almost ten years ago because we knew it would be a wonderful place to raise a family.”
Gerry, a radio journalist, was quoted too: “Our elected officials have let us down,” he said, “so we have to take matters into our own hands. I love Seneca Lake, I love this area. I’m not from here originally. I’ve traveled 3,000 miles to come to this beautiful place by this beautiful lake to live. I’ve come from a place that greed has already destroyed. So I know what a land being destroyed looks like. So now, my back is to the wall and I must defend what I love.”
Serving as liaison with police at the arrest sites Monday were Sandra Steingraber, noted professor, author and activist, who was among the 10 people arrested last week, and Doug Couchon of Elmira, who said more protest plans are in the hopper, but that he isn’t about to undercut the strategy by divulging them. “It’s a long-term campaign,” he said.
Meanwhile:
The 10 people arrested last week are scheduled to appear Wednesday before Justice Berry. All were charged with trespass, and unlike in the past or on Monday, seven were charged with disorderly conduct — like trespass a violation. Organizers were hoping the “DisCons,” as they called the Disorderly Conduct counts, would be dismissed or simply merged with the trespass counts.
Photos in text:
Top: From left, arrestees Ruth Young, Martha Ferger and Joanne Cipolla-Dennis. Second through fourth: Arrestee Bob Henrie, 88; arrestee Kennth Fogarty, 75; and liaison Doug Couchon.
When I was in Ohio and I called my dad to tell him I was coming home from the Climate March early, I was in a state of both sadness and disbelief. I couldn’t believe that Houston-based Crestwood Midstream had received federal approval to store methane in salt caverns along Seneca Lake, my home, and I did not want to leave my March family. He assured me I was doing the right thing.
“You’ll still be fighting the same fight.”
Seneca Lake
I know he’s right, but it’s hard to believe that it is the same fight. The type of work and the mood of the situation here at home is entirely different from the Climate March. The March is addressing the broader issue of climate change, which encompasses gas storage on Seneca Lake along with hundreds of other projects around the country and the world. Our primary activity is walking and experiencing our world and the stories of the people living in it. It is our responsibility to bring the concerns, questions, hopes, dreams and prayers of the American citizenry to President Obama’s doorstep. We live in community, and we are constantly surrounded by love and friendship.
Back here in Upstate New York, the story is much different. Although I am making many new friends (none of them my age) and finding a place in a new community of inspiring people, the tone is more focused and serious. While the Climate March is mostly an awareness-raising, mind-awakening crusade across the country, the fight to save Seneca Lake is exactly that; a fight. A battle. We are waging a weaponless war.
There are strategics and long planning meetings, reconnaissance missions and hours of research, media swarms and endless floods of emails, and the planning committee even fondly calls the citizens who have joined the resistance “troops.” And yet, we are fighting this war in peace, because we know that using violence to bring about peace is one of the biggest paradoxical mistakes humanity is still consistently making.
The Finger Lakes community has not arrived at the decision to use civil disobedience lightly. We have used every other possible option to redress our grievances. We have contacted and met with our representatives, we have written countless letters to the editor, we have rallied, we have united the area’s businesses against the project and we are pursuing the matter in the courts. Yet, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission blew past the overwhelming local opposition to the gas storage project and gave Crestwood the green light to store methane gas in unstable salt caverns beneath the western shore of Seneca Lake. Although FERC’s decision is certainly angering, it doesn’t necessarily come as a surprise. FERC is a federal agency that receives most of its funding from approving permits; hence, the more permits they approve the more money they get. This is a perfect example of our government valuing money over people and the planet.
The only thing we have left is our bodies. Although Crestwood claims in its biweekly reports to FERC that it has not yet started construction on the compressor station for the methane gas, they have been authorized since October 24th to begin. On October 23, 24 and 28, we blockaded the main entrance to Crestwood for most of the work day. Each day, they locked the gates and left us alone. On October 29, we knew we had to step up our game. Our group split up, and we blockaded both the main entrance and a smaller southern entrance at the same time. At first they shut both gates and made it look as though they were going to let us sit there again, but not long after a manager appeared asking if we would let a truck in.
“Tell me, how do you define ‘blockade’?” Lindsay Speer, my fellow Seneca Lake Defender asked.
Our resolve and commitment to nonviolence would soon be tested.
At the main gate, I was playing the role of police liaison, peace keeper and videographer/photographer. The group at the south gate called to tell me they had just turned away the manager, and to expect him at my gate next. About ten minutes later, a freight truck from Amrex Chemical Company based in Binghamton pulled into the driveway, and the manager appeared at the gate and asked us to let the truck in. I clarified to him that our blockade was not going to let anything in or out.
“Well, I’m going to open the gates, then!” He declared in a tone that said, ‘alright, you asked for it.’ The negotiation phase was over; now, they were using intimidation.
When he opened the gates, the driver climbed into his truck and lurched forward, blaring his horn. The members of the blockade looked on fearlessly and didn’t so much as flinch. The truck came to a rest just feet away from where they were standing, but the driver proceeded to rev the engine. I had never been so proud.
“The state troopers will remove you!” The driver declared, dutifully snapping open his flip phone.
From left to right: Colleen Boland, Sandra Steingraber and Rolan Micklem being taken into custody
The local and state police arrived, and without giving a lawful order to disperse they immediately took the seven blockade members at the main gate, including fracktivist and biologist Sandra Steingraber, into custody. After the main gate was cleared, they went to the second gate and arrested the three people blockading there.
From left to right: Nancy Kasper, Chuck Geisler and Dwain Wilder
Somehow, the arrestees at the main gate managed to incur both a trespass violation and a charge of disorderly conduct. A trespass charge is granted when a person is on private property. A disorderly conduct charge is granted when a person is disruptive on public property. This means that the seven of them were miraculously on private and public property at the same time. We expect this issue to be addressed at their court date in the Town of Reading outside Watkins Glen this upcoming Wednesday.
These are the faces of the first 10 people to be arrested in the We Are Seneca Lake resistance movement. They include mother and son team Jeanne and Astro Judson, 86-year-old environmentalist Roland Micklem, retired Air Force Master Sergent Colleen Boland and others. They will not be the last. I personally expect to be behind bars myself before the year is out.
When the government and elected leaders fail to serve and protect the people, breaking the law becomes a public service. Standing nose to nose with a freight truck becomes an act of bravery, not an act of foolery. When the people are ignored in a democratic system, we cannot sit back complacently and allow power-abusers to walk all over us.
More than two dozen people put their bodies on the line today in a last-resort protest to stop a major gas storage expansion project that has been authorized to begin construction tomorrow on the shore of Seneca Lake, the largest of New York’s Finger Lakes. The protesters formed a human blockade in front of the Texas-based Crestwood Midstream company gate, shutting down the Finger Lakes facility from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. today.
More than two dozen people put their bodies on the line today in a last-resort protest to stop a major gas storage expansion project on the shore of Seneca Lake, the largest of New York’s Finger Lakes. Photo credit: wearesenecalake.com
A larger rally and the continuation of the human blockade and protest will take place tomorrow, Oct. 24, starting at 10 a.m.at the gates of the Crestwood compressor station site on Seneca Lake. The “WE ARE SENECA LAKE” actions are taking place to protest the methane gas storage expansion project that will store highly pressurized, explosive gas in abandoned salt caverns on the west side of Seneca Lake.
“Seneca Lake is a source of drinking water for 100,000 people and a source of economic prosperity for the whole region, not a gas station for fracking operations,” said renowned biologist and author Sandra Steingraber, PhD, one of the residents participating in the human blockade. “It’s a place for tourists, wineries, farms and families. Speaking with our bodies in an act of civil disobedience is a measure of last recourse to protect our home, our water, and our local economy—with our bodies and our voices, telling Texas-based Crestwood to go home!”
This proposed project has faced unparalleled public opposition due to unresolved questions about geological instabilities, fault lines, possible salinization of the lake and public health concerns. Even though Capital New York investigation revealed this month that Gov. Cuomo’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) excised references to the risks of underground gas storage from a 2011 federal report on methane contamination of drinking water and has allowed key data to remain hidden, Crestwood still received federal approval to move forward with the construction of this methane gas storage project.
“Crestwood is threatening our water, our local economy and our families,” said Doug Couchon of Elmira, another resident participating in today’s blockade. “We’ve tried everything to stop this disastrous project, and now peaceful civil disobedience is our last resort.”
Protestors are outraged that Crestwood was given approval by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to store two billion cubic feet of methane (natural gas) in the caverns along the western shore of Seneca Lake where the New York State DEC temporarily halted plans to stockpile propane and butane (LPG) due to ongoing concerns for safety, health and the environment.
The project is opposed by more than 200 businesses, more than 60 wineries, 11 municipalities (including neighboring Watkins Glen) and thousands and thousands of residents in the Finger Lakes region who are concerned about the threat it poses to human health, drinking water and the local economy, including the tourism industry. A recent report on the state’s grape and wine industry showed that it contributes $4.8 billion to the New York State economy every year and generates more than 5.2 million wine-related tourism visits.
“As we literally put our bodies on the line, we once again call on President Obama, Governor Cuomo, Senator Schumer, Senator Gillibrand and Congressman Reed to do what’s right and step in and stop this terrible project from ruining the heart of the Finger Lakes,” said Watkins Glen resident Lyn Gerry who participated in today’s blockade.
My parents collected Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. I read them all, discovering, only years later that “condensed” meant “abridged.” “Jane Eyre” was a darker tale than I knew.
Excising unpleasantries from literature is an old practice. To create The Family Shakespeare in 1818, publisher Thomas Bowdler eliminated prostitutes. Lady Macbeth cries, “Out, crimson spot!”
Such tamperings seem quaint, but the impulse to delete problematic truths is apparently alive and not confined to fiction.
In 2012, the Cuomo administration took an editorial hand to a report on methane in groundwater commissioned from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The result — as revealed by Capital New York’s Scott Waldman — was a version that downplayed the dangers of fracking and eliminated the topic of gas storage.
Happily, science has a way of prevailing. In the last two years, multiple independent studies have documented methane leakage from fracking operations. We now know the problem is more — not less — widespread than previously appreciated.
Also happily: This knowledge emerged within the context of a statewide moratorium on fracking. Nobody’s basement had to blow up to prove the point.
But there is no moratorium on underground storage. Hence, in the Finger Lakes — where abandoned, lakeside salt caverns are targeted by Houston-based Crestwood Midstream for a massive natural gas storage project — we find ourselves unprotected and at the mercy of bowdlerized science.
We know the 2011 draft of the USGS report raised red flags about underground storage of compressed gas. We also know that all reference to this problem was expunged from the final version.
It gets worse. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has now issued its own go-ahead for underground gas storage at Seneca Lake on the basis of findings that remain hidden from the public.
Crestwood has argued that key data about the structural integrity of these old salt caverns is proprietary information. Both FERC and Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Department of Environmental Conservation have complied with this request for secrecy.
Journalistic sleuthing — by Peter Mantius for DC Bureau — has uncovered old reports that document unstable geology within these caverns, while independent scientists have called for an end to secrecy, pointing to catastrophic fires and explosions within other salt caverns around the nation that were repurposed for gas storage.
Nevertheless, after consulting documents that we residents cannot see, federal regulators have announced that construction can start immediately — as reported by Gannett’s Ray Finger. Crestwood indicates it will begin on October 24.
This is unacceptable. The facts of science are not fictional passages that can be deleted, or hidden, at will. Our families are not characters in gilded books. Our safety should not be jeopardized by secrecy and censorship from state and federal agencies.
The Finger Lakes urgently appeal to President Barack Obama, Cuomo, and Sens.Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand for immediate help. Step in, publicly acknowledge the validity and gravity of the public health and economic objections, and stop this reckless project — before we lose what we cannot replace.
Steingraber is a biologist and co-founder of New Yorkers Against Fracking
Brushing aside warnings of dangerous geological risk, federal regulators say construction can start immediately on a methane gas storage project next to Seneca Lake that has galvanized opposition from wine and tourism businesses across the Finger Lakes in upstate New York.
The Sept. 30 decision by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission represents a major breakthrough for Houston-based Crestwood Midstream. The company has been waging a five-year campaign for permission to convert long-abandoned lakeside salt caverns into a regional storage hub for both methane gas and liquid petroleum gas, or LPG, from fracking operations in Pennsylvania.
FERC has jurisdiction over the methane gas storage portion of the project, while the state Department of Environmental Conservation has the final say over the storage of LPG, mostly propane and butane. The company has been trying to persuade both agencies that the old caverns are ideal storage sites for highly-pressurized, volatile hydrocarbons. Scientists who are not paid by the company disagree and have warned of the caverns’ unstable geology.
In May, after 14 months of review, FERC granted conditional approval of Crestwood’s request to expand its existing methane storage into a cavern that has a history of instability. Meanwhile, the DEC has been evaluating the LPG portion of the project since 2009. It announced in August plans to hold an “issues conference” to further weigh the evidence before ruling.
Crestwood’s storage hub would be located in a cluster of several dozen salt caverns on the west shore of Seneca Lake less than three miles north of the village of Watkins Glen, population 1,859. The company continues to mine salt at the site, and it already uses a former salt cavern to store methane gas. FERC has allowed it to expand its working gas capacity from 1.45 billion cubic feet to 2.0 bcf.
Typically, methane gas is transported to the caverns by pipeline, while LPG storage would require truck and rail transport. If Crestwood wins DEC approval, it would store LPG in two other caverns less than a quarter mile away from the compressed methane.
The company has asserted that the history of the storage caverns, including details of their flaws, is a trade secret. And state and federal regulators have complied with the company’s requests to keep most cavern information out of the public eye. But reports dating back decades by engineers employed by the caverns’ owners — tracked down in Internet searches — candidly spell out their defects.
Opponents of Crestwood’s proposed storage hub have expressed alarm over FERC’s brisk dismissal of potential risks, but safety issues are not their only concern. They also fear increased air and noise pollution, a steep increase in LPG truck traffic through the village of Watkins Glen and new LPG rail traffic over a spindly 80-year-old trestle that spans the Watkins Glen gorge, one of the state’s Top 10 tourist destinations.
In March, two internationally renowned vintners who recently purchased 65 acres directly across Seneca Lake from Crestwood’s property wrote Gov. Andrew Cuomo to urge him to block the LPG portion of the plan.
“The potential for accidents, the threat to fresh water quality and the visual impact of a 60-foot flare stack with massive compressors is not compatible with developing the tremendous potential of the region,” wrote Paul Hobbs, owner of the Paul Hobbs Winery in Sonoma County, California, and Johannes Selbach of the Selbach-Oster estate in Germany’s Mosel Valley.
“For the past several years we have explored the vineyards and wineries of the Finger Lakes in search of an ideal parcel for growing world class Riesling,” Hobbs and Selbach wrote the governor. The site chosen on the east side of Seneca Lake just outside Watkins Glen, which features steep slopes, low-PH scale shale and slate soils and a cool growing season, “is unquestionably one of the premier places in the world for high quality winegrowing,” they added.
The Seneca Lake Wine Trail already has about three dozen member wineries. Michael Warren Thomas, who helped recruit Hobbs and Selbach to join them, recently met with a top aide to Cuomo to point out that their arrival could easily stimulate significant new investment in the Finger Lakes wine industry. Already, Thomas noted, Louis Barruol of Chateau St. Cosme and Master Sommelier Christopher Bates have floated the idea of building a visitor center near Watkins Glen in a bid to draw from around the world.
“These are not bulk wine producers,” Thomas said of Hobbs and Selbach. “They are people looking to make the best wine in the world in small quantities. We ought to pay attention when we have the best in the world deciding to make wine in our backyard.”
While Hobbs and Selbach arrived without invitation, hoopla, political backing or government incentives, Crestwood has been backed — both overtly and quietly — by a coalition of politicians.
In July 2013, state Sen. George Maziarz, R-Newfane, the chairman of the Senate Energy and Telecommunications Committee, wrote DEC Commissioner Joseph Martens to urge him to promptly approve Crestwood’s LPG proposal.
This past June, Dennis Fagan, the Republican chairman of the Schuyler County Legislature, drafted a resolution supporting the LPG project. Skipping the customary committee process, he pushed for a vote and won 5-3. That vote incensed many in Watkins Glen, the county seat. The town council later voted for a resolution opposing the project.
Fagan’s promotional role prompted more than 400 people to mass in protest at the subsequent legislative hearing. Several local residents called for him to withdraw the resolution and recuse himself from discussion of the matter due to potential conflicts of interest. He declined both requests.
The company he had founded, Fagan Engineers, has done extensive work with companies involved in oil and gas production and pipelines. Fagan recently sold his firm to his brother and other partners, but he said he continues to receive payments from them as part of the sales agreement. Fagan Engineers is currently building a facility 15 miles south of Watkins Glen for Access Midstream, a joint venture partner with Crestwood in a Wyoming project valued at well over $100 million.
Fagan has long touted Crestwood’s planned storage hub. In an October 2011 letter of support to the DEC, he predicted that the LPG project would expand Schuyler County’s tax base by $20-30 million. Two years later, he announced that the property Crestwood plans to use for its methane gas storage would have its assessed value reduced from $29 million to $22 million by 2015, despite plans for extensive development.
Inergy, Crestwood’s predecessor company, negotiated the assessment cut with Schuyler County’s Town of Reading, where the Crestwood property is located. Inergy and Crestwood merged in 2013.
State Supreme Court records show that Congressman Tom Reed, R-Corning, had a hand in the court case that led to the company’s slashed assessment. Reed had served as Reading’s attorney for several years before being elected to Congress in 2010, and he was not officially replaced as the town’s lawyer until January 2012, according to Rita Osborne, Reading’s deputy clerk. Reed’s replacement, Thomas Bowes, had worked in Reed’s Corning law office for four years before leaving in December 2011.
In 2012 — after Reed had officially been replaced by Bowes — Inergy petitioned in the State Supreme Court for the assessment cut. However, a State Supreme Court filing dated July 12, 2012 lists “Thomas Reed II, Esq.” — not Bowes — as “attorney for the respondents,” which included the town, its assessor and its board of assessment review.
In an interview with DCBureau.org last August, Reed acknowledged his past role as Reading’s attorney, but denied any role in the Inergy/Crestwood assessment case. Reed said his name may have been placed on the court document by mistake. Fagan, the county chairman, said in a more recent interview that he was not aware of any role Reed had in cutting the tax assessment for the methane storage property.
FERC’s decision to grant a green light for construction on the methane storage cavern preceded any public announcements of approval from the state. By law, the DEC must agree to modify Crestwood’s current underground storage permit for methane gas, and the state geologist must certify that the storage cavern is safe. However, as a practical matter, the state does not have the legal authority to block the methane storage project, if legal precedents involving federal-state jurisdiction are any gauge.
The best the public can hope for in the future is diligent monitoring of the methane storage facility for leaks and roof and wall collapses, said H.C. Clark, a Houston geologist who has sharply criticized FERC’s analysis of the cavern.
Clark pointed out in January that FERC had neglected to assess the safety implications of a massive roof collapse in the cavern. He learned about the event in a detailed report written in the late 1960s by Charles Jacoby, an engineer who worked for the cavern’s owner at the time.
During its analysis of the project, FERC had pointedly asked Crestwood if it knew of any cavern roof or wall collapses anywhere within its Seneca Lake cavern field. The company issued a qualified denial. If fact, a 400,000-ton chunk of rock — roughly the size of an aircraft carrier — had given way in the very cavern that the company proposed to use for methane storage.
After Clark disclosed the roof collapse to the public and DCBureau.org and other media outlets publicized it, FERC addressed the issue. It attributed the roof collapse to the fact that LPG and brine had been cycled in and out of the cavern at the time, eating away at its salt walls and weakening its structure. LPG has not been stored in the cavern since 1984, and it is now mostly filled with brine.
In its May 15 order conditionally approving the reopening of the cavern for methane storage, FERC concluded that after all brine has been removed and methane gas is added, “dissolution of the salt in the gallery will not occur.”
But Clark, who holds a Ph.D. in geophysics from Stanford and taught the subject for many years at Rice University, said an interview Oct. 1 that it would be “absurd” for FERC to imply that removing brine from the cavern removes all risk of further collapse. “This is an old — ancient by now — cavern sitting there with a broad, flat rock top, which is not what salt cavern folks want to hear,” he added. “The compressed natural gas will work its way up through any kind of abnormality.”
FERC attached several conditions to the methane storage expansion permit. One requires the company to provide fresh data on the current dimensions of the cavern and the volume of the huge rubble pile on its floor. But Clark said the results will probably never reach the public or independent scientists qualified to evaluate them. That is due, he said, to the understanding between the company and its regulators that flaws in caverns used to store volatile hydrocarbons are not to be disclosed to the public.
That policy may increase risks of catastrophic events, he added. “Bayou Corne illustrates the folly of trying to keep this stuff secret,” Clark said in reference to the Louisiana salt dome collapse in 2012 that has created a giant sinkhole about 30 miles south of Baton Rouge. Hundreds of residents have been evacuated and the state’s top natural resources official was forced to resign.
“By keeping it secret, look what happened in Louisiana,” Clark said. “(Gov. Bobby) Jindal is trying to figure it out after the fact. The state has had to spend a fortune … and the sinkhole’s getting larger.”
Both methane gas storage and LPG storage in salt caverns have been prone to severe accidents. Major fires and explosions struck at salt caverns holding compressed natural gas in 2001, 2003 and 2004. Catastrophic accidents hit LPG storage caverns in 1980, 1984, 1985 and 1992, killing or seriously injuring people in three of those cases.
In August, Dr. Rob Mackenzie, a retired CEO of the Cayuga Medical Center, a hospital about 20 miles east of Watkins Glen, sought to quantify the safety risk of Crestwood’s methane gas storage operation to Schuyler County residents. An experienced risk analyst, Mackenzie prepared a formal quantitative risk analysis of the Crestwood methane gas proposal.
Mackenzie analyzed accident events — major fires, explosions, collapses, catastrophic loss of product, evacuations — at salt cavern storage facilities in the United States dating back to 1972. He concluded that the risk of an “extremely serious” salt cavern event within Schuyler County over the next 25 years is more than 35%.
Citing data from the Energy Information Administration, Mackenzie noted that in 2012 there were 414 underground gas storage facilities in the United States, including 40 in salt caverns. Aquifers and depleted oil and gas reservoirs are much more commonly used for hydrocarbon storage, and they have dramatically better safety records than salt caverns. “Worldwide, the percentage of incidents involving casualties at salt cavern facilities as a percentage of facilities in operation in 2005 was 13.6%, compared to 0.63% for depleted reservoirs and 2.5% for aquifers,” Mackenzie reported, citing a 2008 study by British health officials.
Between 1972 and 2012, there have been 18 “serious or extremely serious incidents” at U.S. salt cavern storage facilities, Mackenzie wrote, citing EIA data. “With the average number of (salt cavern) facilities in operation through most of the last two decades at close to 30, the U.S. incidence is about 60% (compared to 40% worldwide), and the frequency is about 1.4% per year,” he said. “Most other regulated industry sub-segments with a persistent serious to extremely serious facility incident rate of over 30% would be shut down or else voluntarily discontinued, except in wartime.”
Mackenzie also found that nine of the 18 salt cavern incidents involved large fires and/or explosions; six involved loss of life or serious injury; eight involved evacuations of between 30 and 2,000 residents; and 13 involved extremely serious property losses.
FERC, the regulatory agency, saw no need to further question the suitability of Crestwood’s salt cavern storage.
Ray Finger, rfinger@stargazette.com | @SGRayFinger2:32 p.m. EDT October 6, 2014
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission says Crestwood Midstream can begin construction to expand methane facility
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission last week approved Crestwood Midstream’s request to begin construction to expand methane storage in salt caverns next to Seneca Lake.
However, word is still awaited from the state Department of Environmental Conservation on the company’s request to build a new liquefied petroleum gas storage facility in underground salt caverns in the town of Reading.
The federal commission regulates natural gas, while the DEC regulates liquefied petroleum gas.
Arlington Storage Co., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Crestwood, asked in a letter dated Aug. 12 for clearance to begin the project, saying it has satisfied all pre-construction requirements imposed by the commission when it gave conditional approval in May. The commission responded Tuesday that the request to begin construction was granted.
Comment from Crestwood has been requested.
As might be expected, expansion project opponents are unhappy with the commission’s decision.
“The implementation plan is a joke. It is vague with little detail or consideration for potential problems during construction,” said Yvonne Taylor, co-founder of Gas Free Seneca.
“It is obvious that FERC is a runaway body that simply rubber-stamps gas and oil projects with a total disregard for significant and substantial safety concerns and objections raised by scientists, communities and independent experts. The people of the Finger Lakes region refuse to be a sacrifice zone for the gas industry and for out-of-control agencies like FERC,” she said.
“Approval of additional gas storage on the banks of Seneca Lake sends the message that neither the state nor the federal government is a friend to the agri-tourism industry. These business owners, who bring billions of dollars into the region annually, see this as an attack on their industry,” Taylor said.
It is imperative that Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Charles Schumer, U.S. Rep. Tom Reed and President Barack Obama lead the way to a better course of action, she said. “We implore them to find that course and to find it quickly.”
Crestwood plans to build and operate a new underground facility for the storage and distribution of propane and butane on a portion of its 576-acre site, according to commission documents.
In August, more than 300 opponents of the expansion plan and plans to build an LPG storage facility protested outside Crestwood’s existing storage facility on state Route 14 along Seneca Lake.
Residents and business owners in the Finger Lakes region are calling for U.S. Senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand along with President Barack Obama to intervene and halt a natural gas storage expansion plan on Seneca Lake.
A coalition consisting of 200 businesses, 60 wineries, 10 local governments and thousands of residents in the Finger Lakes region sent letters to the elected officials citing residents’ health and the health of Seneca Lake, which is a drinking water source for 100,000 people and critical to the local tourism economy.
Proposed by the Texas-based oil and gas corporation Crestwood-Midstream, the plan is to store natural gas in the salt caverns on the shores of Seneca Lake.
Although salt cavern storage represents only a small percentage of gas storage facilities, it’s responsible for a large portion of instances of catastrophic failure. In 2001, for example, natural gas traveled 7 miles from a salt cavern in Kansas where it migrated into in abandoned brine wells and exploded, killing two people, destroying buildings and evacuating residents.
Residents in the Finger Lakes are concerned because there are many abandoned brine wells just miles from the proposed facility in Watkins Glen. This could lead to either an explosion or water contamination, or both, according to the group Gas-Free Seneca.
“One accident at the proposed gas storage facility could tarnish the brand of the Finger Lakes and destroy the growing, sustainable economy that this region has spent generations building,” states the letter to senators Gillibrand and Schumer. “Additionally, the threat itself and its potential for contamination casts a dark cloud over the region’s tourism draw and potential future growth and investment.”
The group is arguing that when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission granted approval for the gas storage expansion at the Seneca Lake facility, they did so with little-to-no independent scrutiny.
The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has not made a decision yet but has raised concerns and announced it would hold an “issues conference” in the region.
“The proposed gas storage facility not only represents an increased investment in fossil fuel infrastructure that is counter to the spirit of [last week’s global] Climate Summit, but is a fundamental threat to the Finger Lakes region and its residents,” said Yvonne Taylor, co-founder of Gas Free Seneca.
Dr. Robert Mackenzie, former CEO of Cayuga Medical Center, conducted a quantitative risk analysis of the proposal that shows “the risk of an extremely serious catastrophic event from storing gas in these salt caverns, which were never engineered to store gas, is 35 percent over 25 years.”
Just recently, one of Crestwood-Midstream’s subsidiaries was responsible for a million-gallon brine spill in North Dakota which ended up in a bay that provides drinking water to a surrounding Native American reservation.
A call to Crestwood-Midstream has yet to be returned.
A subsequent incident could have potential consequences that would be devastating to the Finger Lakes region, which has not only been a top tourism destination for New Yorkers, but was included among the top 10 lake vacations in the world last year, according to Frommers, the largest travel magazine in the United States and Canada.
Also, the region has gained increased notoriety as a home to world-class wines, with acclaimed national and international recognition. Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently highlighted the success of the state’s wine industry as a driver of the economy while at the Governor’s Cup Wine Competition, where a wine from Seneca Lake took home an award for the best wine in the state.
A recent report on the state’s grape and wine industry conducted by Stonebridge determined that it contributes $4.8 billion to the New York State economy every year, supporting the equivalent of 25,000 full-time jobs, paying over $408 million in taxes, and generating over 5.2 million wine-related tourism visits.
The Finger Lakes are a premier location of two industries integral to economic growth in New York state: tourism and winemaking.
In many ways they are intertwined, with wineries driving tourism, similar to Napa Valley in California attracting visitors.
But a major problem is looming in the area. Crestwood-Midstream, a Texas-based oil and gas corporation, is threatening these thriving industries with its proposals to locate and expand gas storage along Seneca Lake, the largest fresh water body in New York and over half of the water in the Finger Lakes.
The Cuomo administration must recognize the scope of this threat to our state from this company, which was responsible for the largest oil field spills in North Dakota’s history just last month, involving 1 million gallons of hazardous brine.
More than a top tourism destination for our state, the Finger Lakes area was included among the top 10 Lake Vacations in the world last year.
Cuomo credited the state’s growing tourism industry with producing $7.5 billion in local and state taxes and nearly $60 billion in direct spending within the state. It is also responsible for one out of every 12 jobs in New York, and our state saw over 200 million visitors in 2013.
The wine industry is also flourishing, and accounts for a portion of tourism growth. A recent report shows the wine industry contributes $4.8 billion to the New York economy every year, supports the equivalent of 25,000 full-time jobs, and pays over $408 million in taxes. The Finger Lakes region, in particular, has gained increasing prominence as home to world-class wines and is now considered the Napa of the Northeast, with acclaimed national and international recognition. The Cuomo administration has fittingly highlighted the industry’s success at the Governor’s Cup Wine Competition in the area, where a wine from Seneca Lake took home the honors for best wine in the state.
Crestwood-Midstream proposals would endanger the industries by irreversibly industrializing the Finger Lakes, bringing more than 70,000 additional trucks to the roads, and heightening the risk of catastrophic fires and explosions of the dangerous liquid gas, in addition to posing health complications for residents that were cited by Schuyler County Health Care Professionals.
These facilities within salt caverns, like the one proposed, are among the most dangerous.
Crestwood-Midstream has shown a callous disregard for local businesses and economy, and the serious concerns raised about their proposals. Rather than address legitimate concerns, A Crestwood executive sent an email to colleagues in June 2013 pushing for withholding local propane deliveries to the more than 200 local business owners who expressed opposition.
While local businesses employ hundreds of residents of the Finger Lakes and fill the region’s tax coffers, Crestwood wouldn’t pay any county sales taxes and has promised roughly eight to 10 jobs. Its lawyers already sued to lower its property tax assessment by $7 million, and they would no doubt seek additional reductions in the future, lessening their tax payments even further.
As the sixth generation in my family to produce wines in the Finger Lakes, I am proud of how much the region contributes to the state economy.
New York has everything to lose by permitting this project.
Cuomo must protect one of New York’s most vital natural resources and the growing industries of our state by rejecting the proposals. That would be consistent with his laudable efforts to support the wine and tourism industries’ ability to help spur investment, improve local economies and provide sustainable jobs for New Yorkers.
Hazlitt is the owner of Hazlitt 1852 Vineyards, a Finger Lakes winery started in 1984 as an addition to the seven-generation family farm that produces more than 500,000 gallons of wine per year.
In the 1960s, a 400,000-ton block of rock fell from the roof of an old salt cavern in the Finger Lakes region of New York — a cavity that new owners now want to reopen and use to store highly pressurized natural gas.
The Midwestern energy company that seeks a federal permit for the storage project has denied knowing the roof failure ever happened. And the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which is poised to rule on the company’s permit application, has never publicly acknowledged the event.
But a Houston geologist hired by lawyers for opponents of the project characterized the omission by Arlington Storage Co. and FERC as “an incredible error” that heightens safety concerns about the project next to Seneca Lake, less than three miles from the Village of Watkins Glen, population 1,860.
“Clearly, Arlington’s application and FERC’s conclusions are compromised by this error,” H.C. Clark wrote in a Jan. 15 letter that is now part of FERC’s public record in the case.
In the letter, Clark, who holds a Ph.D. in geophysics from Stanford and taught the subject for years at Rice University, analyzes a “400,000-ton fault block cavern roof failure” and rock faults surrounding the cavern. Clark draws on a series of long-suppressed reports written more than 50 years ago by a geologist for the company that then owned the cavern.
The fallen chunk of rock — roughly four times as massive as the U.S.S. Nimitz supercarrier — now sits on the floor of the cavern, leaving an unsupported rock roof roughly the size of a football field. The roof collapse created an irregular cavity that may soon hold pressurized methane drawn from natural gas wells in nearby northern Pennsylvania.
Both federal and state regulators are responsible for scrutinizing all plans for underground storage of volatile hydrocarbons. Salt cavern storage presents not only risks of human error in operating a complex industrial site, but also two categories of geologic risk: cavern collapses and leaks.
Geologic risks are slight in regularly-shaped cavities surrounded by pure salt, which is nearly impermeable. But when the cavity is highly irregular in shape and its boundaries are made up of more complex elements, including heavily faulted shale rock, risks can rise substantially.
When salt cavern accidents do occur, they can be devastating. Major fires and explosions struck at salt caverns holding LPG in 1980, 1984, 1985 and 1992, killing or seriously injuring people in three of those cases. Catastrophic accidents hit salt caverns holding compressed natural gas in 2001, 2003 and 2004.
More recently, in August 2012, the sudden collapse of a salt cavern wall near Bayou Corne, La., 75 miles west of New Orleans, has created a 26-acre sinkhole. The crisis is nowhere near resolved because energy companies store natural gas, liquid butane and various chemicals in adjacent salt caverns.
Several hundred residents who were forced to evacuate immediately have not been able to return to their homes in a year and a half. The state of Louisiana is now offering to buy out dozens of them as it copes with the latest threat: the buildup of explosive gases in the local aquifer.
The dangers of gas leaks from salt caverns along rock faults was shockingly demonstrated in Hutchinson, Kan., in January 2001. Several explosions at seemingly random sites occurred as far as seven miles from a ruptured cavern. The blasts caused fireballs in downtown Hutchinson and havoc at the Big Chief Mobile Home Park outside town, where John and Mary Ann Hahn were killed.
The Hutchinson catastrophe set off alarms at the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, which, along with FERC, has jurisdiction over the Watkins Glen brine field. The brine field, developed over 120 years for salt mining, contains more than 60 wells, may of them abandoned. A series of companies have used a few of the resulting caverns for hydrocarbon storage. Arlington and affiliated companies now own the entire brine field, including an active salt mining company, U.S. Salt.
The DEC noted similarities between the Watkins Glen brine field and the brine field in Kansas. In a June 4, 2001, letter written “in response to the Hutchinson, Kansas, incident,” Kathleen F. Sanford, then chief of the DEC’s permits section, asked the owner of a portion of the Watkins Glen site to “please prepare a report which documents the integrity of each of these wells.”
Sanford’s letter to New York State Electric and Gas Corp. referred to several wells it was using to store natural gas and several others it saw as potential gas storage wells — all of which NYSEG sold to Arlington in 2011. The group included Well 30, which suffered the massive roof failure in 1969.
Well 30 was drilled in 1958 by Akzo Nobel Inc., and at least four other companies have operated it since then, either as owners or leasers: International Salt, Teppco, NYSEG and Arlington. Several decades ago, Well 30 was connected to its neighbor, Well 31, by hydraulic fracturing along a rock fault. It is that combined cavity that Arlington now plans to use for natural gas storage. The company calls it “Gallery 2.”
Akzo had initially used wells 30 and 31 to mine salt by washing the salt walls with fresh water and extracting super-salty brine. After the wells expanded into caverns and were linked by drilling, they were converted for use as a storage site for liquid petroleum gas, or LPG.
From 1964 to 1984, Teppco stored LPG in the well 30-31cavern, without reported incident — although the 400,000-ton roof collapse did occur during that period. In 1984, Teppco moved its LPG storage activity from the salt cavern to a new cavity that it dug into rock and lined — nearby but outside the brine field. The company declined to say why it went to the expense of moving its storage operation. The DEC, which granted Teppco an underground storage permit for the new facility, told DCBureau.org last year that it had no records of the reason the company made the move.
The well 30-31 cavern, or Gallery 2, was plugged and abandoned in 1989 and left as a brine-filled cavity. About a decade later, when NYSEG controlled the cavern, it won FERC approval to store natural gas in it. But the company never followed through and eventually gave up its permit.
NYSEG did store natural gas in another cavern several hundred feet to the east. When Arlington bought NYSEG’s portion of the brine field in 2011, it continued that operation in what it now calls “Gallery 1.”
Arlington initially flirted with the idea of seeking DEC permission to use Gallery 2 for LPG storage, but it abruptly changed course and turned to FERC for a new gas storage permit instead.
In its review, FERC asked Arlington on May 15, 2013, for engineering details of Gallery 2’s structure. Clark, the Houston geologist, concluded that the company’s answers were evasive.
For example, FERC asked the company to provide “the size and volume of the rubble pile” in the hydraulically fractured link between Wells 30 and 31. The company, in its June 3 response, did not quantify the rubble pile, and FERC let the issue drop.
All of the caverns Arlington and its affiliates have earmarked for hydrocarbon storage have large rubble piles caused by roof and wall collapses.
“The rubble pile remains an unknown,” Clark wrote of the fallen rock along the drilled connection between wells 30 and 31. “It is particularly important when a cavern system is of this advanced age and is as involved with faulting as this one is, that the dimensions of all components, including the cavity and rubble pile between caverns 30 and 31, be know to the fullest extent.”
FERC also asked Arlington the following question: “In response to commenters’ concerns regarding roof failure, please state if this has ever been an issue in either Gallery 1 or Gallery 2 or if you have knowledge of any roof or wall failures in any of the caverns within the Watkins Glen brine field.”
The company responded as follows on June 3: “To Arlington’s knowledge, there have been no cavern roof failures in Galleries 1 or 2, or in any other cavern within the Watkins Glen brine field in which natural gas or natural gas liquids have been stored.”
FERC had asked about “roof or wall” — not simply roof failures and “any other cavern” — not simply storage caverns. But even more significantly, Arlington’s answer sidestepped reports written between 1962 and 1973 byCharles Jacoby, a geologist for International Salt, that provided detailed analysis of the Well 30 roof collapse and extensive faulting throughout the brine field. One report Jacoby wrote in 1969 focused on wells 30 and 31 specifically, describing the 400,000-ton roof collapse and illustrating it with cross-section diagrams of the cavern.
The 1969 Jacoby paper had circulated in international geological circles and had been referenced in a filing by the Earthjustice law group in FERC’s public record of the case in May 2013 – a month before Arlington stated that it had no knowledge of a cavern roof failure. Clark said Arlington presumably had access to all the Jacoby reports as a successor company to International Salt, which produced them. Arlington has provided state and federal regulators with certain Jacoby reports, though not necessarily the key 1969 report.
“Perhaps the Arlington representative who wrote the answer (to FERC’s question) was unaware of the work Jacoby did on the specific caverns of the proposal,” Clark wrote. “Earthjustice, however, found the (1969 Jacoby report) easily and sent it to me as part of their file of basic background references.”
Clark noted in a footnote that Jacoby’s papers “have been taken down in the last few months” from the website Earthjustice had cited in its FERC filing.
FERC has yet to acknowledge either the massive roof failure or the 1969 Jacoby report. Last September, FERC issued its final Environmental Assessment of the Arlington project. The document provided summary conclusions about the geology of Well 30 that Clark said were at odds with Jacoby’s findings.
Craig Cano, a spokesman for FERC, accepted emailed questions from DCBureau.org about Arlington’s application a day before he stated that FERC does not comment on pending cases.
Debbie Hagen, a spokeswoman for Arlington’s parent company, did not return phone calls or answer or acknowledge emailed questions about the case.
Arlington is a limited liability subsidiary of Crestwood Equity Partners LP, the new name of Inergy LP, which merged with Crestwood last year. “Midstream” affiliates of Kansas City-based Inergy and Houston-based Crestwood that operate pipelines and store natural gas and LPG have also merged.
While Arlington’s gas storage application has triggered dozens of negative comments to FERC, opposition to a related proposal to store LPG in the Watkins Glen brine field has been even more intense.
In 2009, Inergy, operating through its limited liability subsidiary Finger Lakes Storage, sought the DEC’s permission to store liquid propane and butane in caverns several hundred feet west and north of Arlington’s Gallery 2. The pending application is now in its fifth year.
The LPG proposal has spurred spirited opposition from a citizens group called Gas Free Seneca, which claims support of more than 125 local businesses and thousands of individuals. Group members have testified to the DEC, led vociferous protest marches through Watkins Glen and even gone to jail to protest the LPG project. High on its list of concerns has been potential geologic risk. The group also hired Earthjustice, which retained Clark.
“Gas Free Seneca has been saying for almost three years that 60-year-old abandoned caverns that were created by solution mining for salt were never engineered or created for the purpose of storing compressed natural gas or liquefied propane and butane under high pressure,” said Joseph Campbell, co-founder of the group opposed to both the LPG and gas storage proposals.
Finger Lakes Storage proposes to store 600,000 barrels of pressurized liquid butane in a cavern known as Well 58 and 1.5 million barrels of liquid propane in a cavern close by. Well 58 had been plugged and abandoned in 2003 after a cavern engineer, Larry Sevenker, deemed it “unsuitable for storage.”
Sevenker had written a 2001 report for his employer, U.S. Salt, that said Well 58’s roof had collapsed. His boss at U.S. Salt and DEC officials concurred with his conclusion and with his recommendation to close and abandon the well. In interviews with DCBureau.org, Sevenker also stated that Well 58 had been drilled through a major rock fault.
Days after DCBureau.org published Sevenker’s comments in January 2013, an official at U.S. Salt (now owned by the Crestwood/Inergy combination) called Sevenker to urge him to write a letter recanting his previous positions. Sevenker, who said he was still being paid by U.S. Salt, acknowledged that he agreed to sign a letter with wording provided by the company official.
Then a public relations firm hired by Inergy made cold calls to several local media outlets offering the company-crafted Sevenker letter as evidence refuting claims that Well 58 was unsuitable. An Inergy lawyer forwarded the letter to the DEC.
For years, Inergy has tried to prevent the public from viewing a “reservoir suitability report” on its proposed LPG caverns on the grounds that the history of the caverns is a proprietary trade secret. And in 2010, Inergy had addressed Sevenker’s analysis in a confidential report, writing, “There is no reason to believe now that a roof cavern collapse did in fact occur.”
For the most part, regulators have deferred to the company’s request to keep the geology of the caverns secret. Although the DEC, FERC and the federal Environmental Protection Agency have all been criticized for that stance, there is some legal justification for it. The federal Freedom of Information Act, written in 1966, contains a specific exemption for “geological and geophysical information and data, including maps, concerning wells.” It has been rarely invoked.
But lawyers for Arlington did cite the FOIA exemption last year in a bid to prevent Clark from reviewing its confidential files under a strict non-disclosure agreement. FERC denied the company’s bid, and Clark has reviewed certain confidential files.
Working as a consultant to Earthjustice, Clark wrote his public findings in the Jan. 15 letter filed with FERC. He also wrote a separate confidential report to FERC.
Clark’s public letter takes a fresh look at Sevenker’s conclusions from 2001 about Well 58 being “unsuitable for storage” because of a roof collapse.
“The parallel between the fault block cavern roof failure in Cavern 30 (Arlington’s proposed gas storage site) and the roof collapse in Cavern 58 (Finger Lake Storage’s proposed liquid butane site) is obvious,” Clark wrote.
“It is clear that researchers working on caverns in the Watkins Glen brine field have encountered cavern roof failures and attributed these failure to fault situations. It is essential that cavern roof failure in the Watkins Glen brine field be recognized.”
Clark also concludes that FERC has given faulting in the brine field “short shrift,” reflecting Arlington’s statement that faulting, “if it exists” in the area, tends to seal rock.
Jacoby, who is deceased, had a different take. He identified thrust faults, tear faults and a major strike-slip fault surrounding Well 30. He noted that the strike-slip fault, in particular, had demonstrated its capacity to act as a conduit. Brine from a deep well had travelled along the strike-slip fault and been observed seeping out of the ground a half-mile north of its underground source, Jacoby noted.
FERC dismissed the strike-slip fault without discussion, saying that it passed to the east of Well 30. Neither did it address the tear faults or thrust faults.
Clark found FERC’s analysis inadequate. “The materials reviewed by FERC are incomplete, and its impressions about the caverns are incorrect,” he concluded.
Peter Mantius is a reporter in New York. He covered business, law and politics at The Atlanta Constitution from 1983-2000. He has also served as the editor of business weeklies in Hartford, CT, and Long Island. He is the author of Shell Game (St. Martin’s Press 1995), a nonfiction book on Saddam Hussein’s secret use of a bank office in Atlanta to finance billions of dollars in arms purchases from Western countries before the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Ray Finger, rfinger@stargazette.com | @SGRayFinger9:42 a.m. EDT August 19, 2014
WATKINS GLEN Opponents of a gas storage facility near Seneca Lake have been asked to be willing to be arrested for their cause.
More than 300 opponents of a plan by Texas-based Crestwood Midstream, an energy company, to store liquefied petroleum gas and natural gas in underground salt caverns in the Town of Reading protested Monday at the site of the storage facility on state Route 14 along Seneca Lake.
Sandra Steingraber, co-founder of Concerned Health Professionals of New York and distinguished scholar in residence in the Department of Environmental Studies and Sciences at Ithaca College, told the gathering near Route 14 that the lake is the source of drinking water, as well as the micro-climate that allows wine grapes to thrive.
“We turn water into wine with this lake. That’s what we do,” she said. “This lake is not the Houston Shipping Channel, and you, Crestwood, are a dangerous trespasser into our home, and we are asking you to leave.”
Steingraber asked protestors to consider making a solemn commitment and take a pledge to protect Seneca Lake.
“To not only pursue all possible avenues and turn over all possible stones, write all possible letters, make all possible phone calls but, if necessary, to use your bodies and your voices in the American tradition of civil disobedience to show the world that we New Yorkers can’t be messed with,” she said, drawing cheers.
Crestwood Midstream wants to store the two different types of gas in depleted salt caverns along Seneca Lake. Proponents say it will bring new revenue into the area while others, including environmentalists and winery owners, say it poses a threat to the lake, which provides drinking water, and traffic generated by the industry would be disruptive to tourism and the area’s wine industry.
Steingraber said Crestwood told the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission last week that it would begin construction Monday on a compressor station to pressurize natural gas for the salt caverns, with pipelines and drill rigs to follow in October. That was after the state Department of Environmental Conservation essentially issued a restraining order on Crestwood’s plans to store liquefied petroleum gas at Seneca Lake, she said.
“There’s a cynical swapping out of one gas for another to do an end run around the decision to call a temporary halt to this practice, showing, what we are arguing, is a flagrant disregard to the will of the people of science, of local elected officials, business owners, wineries and maybe even the DEC itself,” Steingraber said.
Crestwood, however, described the situation differently, and noted it can’t begin construction to enlarge its natural gas facility until it receives the federal agency’s approval to do so.
In a formal statement issued Monday afternoon, Crestwood responded: “The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) recently authorized a small expansion of our Seneca Lake natural gas storage facility. The FERC order authorizing the expansion requires us to file an implementation plan for the environmental and engineering conditions contained in the order. We filed our implementation plan last week, and we cannot commence construction until the FERC approves our plan.”
FERC regulates natural gas, while the DEC regulates liquefied petroleum gas.
On Aug. 11, the DEC said it wants to hear further arguments on the legal and safety aspects of the liquefied petroleum gas project before it issues a permit allowing it. Crestwood, under the subsidiary name of Finger Lakes LPG Storage, has proposed to build a new underground LPG storage facility to store and distribute propane and butane on a portion of a 576-acre site on state Routes 14 and 14A, west of Seneca Lake.
An administrative judge would hear arguments as a so-called “issues conference” to define the significant points of dispute.
Opponents called U.S. Sens. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and President Barack Obama for help in reversing FERC’s regulatory decision and on Gov. Andrew Cuomo and DEC Commissioner Joseph Martens to help in any way they can.
William Ouweleen, co-owner of O-Neh-Da and Eagle Crest Vineyards on Hemlock Lake in the Rochester area, offered an invitation to a “Save Seneca Lake” letter-writing party event from 2 to 7 p.m. Sunday at Eagle Crest.
During the event, the vineyard will provide wood-fired pizza, wine tastings, music and tours of the winery, and volunteers to help submit letters to elected officials opposing the gas storage, he said.
“I’m here today as a concerned citizen and longstanding member of the Finger Lakes wine community to express our grave concern and strong objections to the proposed gas storage facility in the abandoned salt caverns along Seneca Lake,” Ouweleen said Monday.
Dr. Rob Mackenzie, who recently retired as president and chief executive officer of Cayuga Medical Center and lives in Hector, N.Y., said he spoke as a private citizen in discussing his findings in which he used public petrochemical data that is available online.
He said he found the risk over 25 years is about 35 percent for an extremely serious or catastrophic salt cavern facility disaster, such as fire with explosion, deaths with multiple injuries, temporary or permanent evacuation and major property loss. The riskiest caverns are older ones with geology like Schuyler’s, he said.
Combining the hazards of transporting liquefied petroleum gas, Mackenzie said he found the overall risk over 25 years to be 42 percent, he said.
“The only way to significantly reduce these risks is to not store volatile fuels in Schuyler County’s salt caverns,” he said. “Based on this analysis, I agree with Gas Free Seneca’s position that Crestwood should not start construction for further gas storage.”
Glenda Gephart, Correspondent6:16 p.m. EDT August 12, 2014
The DEC announced Monday it will hold a conference with key parties about the proposal to store liquid propane and butane in Town of Reading, Schuyler County.
WATKINS GLEN – Opponents of a proposed liquefied petroleum gas storage facility in the Town of Reading were happy to hear the state say it will listen some more to the debate about using depleted salt caverns north of Watkins Glen for the project.
The Department of Environmental Conservation on Monday afternoon announced it will ask an administrative law judge to hear further comments on the Crestwood Midstream Partners project.
“DEC will not grant a permit unless it can be demonstrated that the permit is in compliance with all legal requirements and that the proposed activity can be done safely in New York State,” according to anotice on its website.
The announcement was good news for the project’s opponents.
“This is a great thing,” said Sylvia Fox, a Town of Reading resident, to Schuyler County legislators Monday night.
“It gives me hope that our state government is listening to us,” Fox said, but she and several other speakers at the session said local lawmakers are not listening, and they repeated their plea that the legislature rescind its June vote that supported the gas storage project.
“Step back. Let’s redo this whole thing,” said Paul Wehrung, of Burdett. “It’s too serious to let it go the way it’s going.”
“There’s no good purpose with passing a resolution that shuts people out and that limits debate,” said Legislator Michael Lausell, D-Hector, who has opposed the gas storage project. “A lot of people in this county feel that they’re not being listened to.”
The administrative judge will hear from DEC staff, Crestwood and any group or individual who files a petition for party status. No date or location for the process was announced.
Known as an “issues conference,” the purpose is to define significant and substantive points of dispute, according to the DEC. An adjudicatory hearing to litigate disputed issues could follow.
David Crea, an engineer at U.S. Salt in Watkins Glen, which is owned by Crestwood, said people involved in the project have known for some time that DEC staff finished its review of the project in April 2013 and recommended approval.
Schuyler County Legislature Chairman Dennis Fagan has said he has been told the same by an insider in the DEC.
The issues conference will be “a spectacle that will rival NASCAR,” Crea said, describing it as a tactic to help Gov. Andrew Cuomo delay making a decision until after the November gubernatorial election.
Crestwood issued a statement Monday expressing its disappointment in the DEC’s decision, which comes five years into the permitting process:
“… The review process has been extensive and thorough, and the department has confirmed it has all of the information required to make a decision later this year. This shovel-ready project has been designed to achieve the highest safety and environmental standards, will add significant tax base to local economies, and will help local consumers avoid paying more than they should for propane supplies during the winter months.”
Crestwood, under the subsidiary name of Finger Lakes LPG Storage, has proposed to build a new underground LPG storage facility to store and distribute propane and butane on a portion of a 576-acre site on state Routes 14 and 14A, west of Seneca Lake. The storage facility would utilize existing caverns in the Syracuse salt formation created by US Salt and its predecessors’ salt production operations.
The truth-benders from the Texas oil patch who want to use old salt caverns next to Seneca Lake to store petroleum products can count on Dennis Fagan, chairman of the Schuyler County Commission. He runs interference for them, wielding company talking points to brush aside mounting dissent in Watkins Glen.
Peter Mantius
The truth-benders from the Texas oil patch who want to use old salt caverns next to Seneca Lake to store petroleum products can count on Dennis Fagan, chairman of the Schuyler County Commission. He runs interference for them, wielding company talking points to brush aside mounting dissent in Watkins Glen.
On June 9 Fagan rammed through the Schuyler commission his resolution supporting Houston-based Crestwood’s plan to store highly pressurized liquid petroleum gas, or LPG, in two rubble-filled caverns.
Supporters with Crestwood T-shirts cheered him on, many of them company employees. At least twice as many local residents fumed, and a few burst with outrage. Not all the crowd could squeeze into the hearing room where Fagan held forth.
Fagan is a professional engineer, a fact he is always quick to disclose. He’s taken it upon himself to see that Schuyler is the only one of the four counties surrounding Seneca Lake that doesn’t oppose Crestwood’s plan.
Seneca County Supervisor Steve Churchill recently dared question Fagan about the structural integrity of Well 58, where Crestwood plans to store liquid butane. Fagan set him straight in a June 13 letter, categorically declaring that Well 58’s roof never collapsed. Any evidence or conclusions to the contrary are “erroneous,” he wrote.
For years now, Crestwood and Inergy, its predecessor company and merger partner in 2013, have schemed to hide that very evidence. Now that it’s come to light, Fagan has joined the company’s sock puppet ensemble to try to discredit it.
Here are the facts, based on documents. In January 2001, an engineer who’d studied dozens of the Watkins Glen caverns over many years determined that Well 58’s roof had collapsed. Larry Sevenker reported that the cavity was “unusable” for hydrocarbon storage, and he recommended that it be plugged and abandoned. His supervisor at U.S. Salt agreed, as did the state Department of Environmental Conservation, and the well was plugged two years later.
On Jan. 17, 2001, nine days after Sevenker had first raised alarms about Well 58, a series of explosions triggered by leaks from a salt cavern gas storage facility in Kansas killed two people and forced mass evacuations. DEC officials fretted about similarities between the Hutchinson, Kan., facility and the U.S. Salt cavern cluster and demanded details on Well 58 and others.
Fast forward to late 2008. As the oil patch grew dizzy over the potential of gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale, Inergy bought U.S. Salt to store its byproducts. A company official told the trade press the site was ideal because it had dozens of abandoned caverns and ample disposal options for excess brine. As the company drilled and tested for exploitable cavern space between 2010 and 2012, it violated its permit to dump brine into Seneca Lake for 12 straight quarters.
In 2010 it redrilled Well 58. Lo and behold, tests “proved that no roof collapse had occurred in 2001,” to quote Fagan’s letter to Churchill.
But if Well 58’s roof never collapsed, who can explain documents that show a rubble pile 217 feet high at the bottom of its cavern? Did the walls collapse? Did the rubble simply erupt?
Well 58 was drilled to 2,642 feet in 1992. Nine years later, Sevenker noted extensive shale and salt rubble and measured the cavern floor at 2,478 feet. So the rubble pile was 164 feet deep. When Inergy analyzed the well in 2010, it reported: “Top of rubble pile, bottom of existing cavern = 2,425 feet.” So another 53 feet of rubble had accumulated between 2001 and 2010.
After Sevenker’s analyses became public in 2013, an Inergy official phoned him at home in Louisiana to help him draft a letter recanting. Sevenker, still on the company’s payroll as a consultant, went along.
“U.S. Salt has since provided me with two more recent sonars showing a completely different profile of the cavern — one not filled with rubble, but rather normal looking,” he wrote, under Inergy’s direction. The company then hired a PR firm to circulate the company’s words repackaged as Sevenker’s recantation.
I’ve interviewed Sevenker half a dozen times. He lacks Fagan’s bluster and certainty. He told me he made mistakes in his 2001 analysis, but he added that the rock and salt layers that make up the cavern roofs and walls collapse all the time. Little chunks, big chunks, giant chunks. That’s why all the caverns at U.S. Salt have rubble piles.
Those facts are inconvenient for Crestwood officials, and they need to be managed. But that’s what lawyers are for.
Last year, when Crestwood’s subsidiary, Arlington Storage, was applying to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for permission to store natural gas in a cavern adjacent to Well 58, FERC asked Arlington officials whether they were aware of any roof or wall collapses in any salt caverns on the U.S. Salt property.
The company’s answer: “To Arlington’s knowledge, there have been no cavern roof failures in Galleries 1 or 2, or in any other cavern within the Watkins Glen Brine Field in which natural gas or natural gas liquids have been stored.”
If that statement was not an outright lie, it artfully sidestepped the facts. But FERC never pressed the point, even after learning it had been toyed with.
FERC’s own public file on Arlington’s application contained documents detailing a 400,000-ton roof collapse in the very cavern that Arlington will use to store natural gas. They included cross-section diagrams of the cavern before and after the aircraft carrier-sized block of rock fell from the cavern’s roof.
But FERC caved, approving Arlington’s gas storage application in May without ever admitting its own disgraceful lack of rigor. Now its the DEC’s turn to rule on the company’s LPG storage application.
• Peter Mantius is a freelance journalist from Schuyler County who follows shale gas drilling issues. He is a former reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and editor of two business weeklies in the Northeast. This is an opinion column.
Last month extreme fossil fuel extraction and I were both recipients of an accusatory outburst by my 13-year-old.
Steve Orr, Staff writer
The appearance of the 10 before Town of Reading Justice Raymond Berry was complicated by the presence of two charges against seven of the protesters: counts of trespass and disorderly conduct. Those seven had been arrested at the main gate to the Crestwood compressor station, where they were lined up, blocking a chemical company truck from entering.
Protest organizers said earlier this week — following the arrest of 15 more protesters (whose court appearances are spread out across November and early December) — that they were hoping their legal counsel would be able to get the Oct. 29th disorderly conduct charges dropped or any penalty from them eliminated through a plea agreement.
Of the 10 defendants, only the case of Dwain Wilder of Rochester reached sentencing, after Wilder pleaded guilty to the single count of trespass lodged against him for his role at the south Crestwood gate.
Well over 100 people gathered in the parking lot outside the Town of Reading hall more than an hour before the 7 p.m. court proceeding.
WATKINS GLEN, Nov. 3 — Five days after 10 protesters had been arrested at a pair of Crestwood energy company gates along Route 14 north of Watkins Glen, another 15 were arrested Monday morning by Schuyler County Sheriff’s deputies and State Police.
Among those taken to the Sheriff’s Office for processing were 90-year-old Martha Ferger of Dryden, who said this was the first time she had ever been arrested — at least “the first I remember.” She added that she wasn’t sure what she would do when she goes to court before Town of Reading Justice Raymond Berry. If a protester pleads guilty, he or she has the option of paying a mandatory fine and surcharge, or of going to jail for up to 15 days — although the terms actually served by area protesters over the past couple of years have averaged seven or eight days.
And two years his senior was arrestee Ruth Young, 77, a former Schuyler County legislator who said she is a member of People for a Healthy Environment — one of several grassroots organizations that have sprung up in recent years in reaction to hydrofracking and associated ecological hot buttons — including the storage of gases in salt caverns. She said the arresting officers were “very gentle and professional,” giving a verbal warning before making arrests. But, she added, “I am saddened to see what is going on here.”
Serving as liaison with police at the arrest sites Monday were Sandra Steingraber, noted professor, author and activist, who was among the 10 people arrested last week, and Doug Couchon of Elmira, who said more protest plans are in the hopper, but that he isn’t about to undercut the strategy by divulging them. “It’s a long-term campaign,” he said.
FERC has jurisdiction over the methane gas storage portion of the project, while the state Department of Environmental Conservation has the final say over the storage of LPG, mostly propane and butane. The company has been trying to persuade both agencies that the old caverns are ideal storage sites for highly-pressurized, volatile hydrocarbons. 
In its review, FERC asked Arlington on May 15, 2013, for engineering details of Gallery 2’s structure. Clark, the Houston geologist, concluded that the company’s answers were evasive.
Debbie Hagen, a spokeswoman for Arlington’s parent company, did not return phone calls or answer or acknowledge emailed questions about the case.
