By Ryan Delaney
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wamc/local-wamc-986939.mp3
Watkins Glen, NY –
This is the first of two reports.
Huge networks of empty salt caverns carve thousands of feet underneath the western shore of Seneca Lake. Those empty caverns are an ideal place to store natural gas.
Kansas City based Inergy, operating in the region as Finger Lakes LPG, wants to store 2.1 million barrels of liquid petroleum gas in the tapped caverns. The facility would contain pump houses, a truck garage, a six track rail spur, a flare stack and a 13 acre brine pond spread over 600 acres in the town of Reading. Inergy acquired the land by purchasing one of two salt plants operating along the lake in 2008. A year later they began applying for permits with the town and New York's Department of Environmental Conservation.
It wasn't until this January people in the area began hearing about the project. Jeff Dembowski and Yvonne Taylor attended a meeting in nearby Ithaca on the looming expansion of the natural gas industry in New York and heard about Inergy's plans. They teamed up with Joseph Campbell and formed the group Gas Free Seneca.
Campbell and Taylor live year-round along the lake while Dembowski owns property in Reading. The trio readily admited fighting the LPG facility has consumed their lives and mistakes have been made.
"Along the way you're going to drop the ball, and we have," Campbell said. "There are certain things I wish I could go back and say 'yeah, we really should have done that,' but it's only three people and you can't think of everything and you can't do everything."
They did manage to hold a public forum, collect petition signatures and form a business coalition. But they have had less luck getting the Reading Town Planning Board to listen to them. Their request to have an engineer present to the board was rejected and the board has barred any public comment on the project at their meetings.
Bill Newell has been on the board ever since it was formed in the early 90's. Newell said he's been the only member concerned about the project since the beginning.
"The general attitude, and I won't say everybody, but the general attitude on the board has been that the DEC is just fooling around and they're not serious," Newell said from his home in Reading. "There's been a lot of bad-mouthing the DEC. I just discern not much interest in the environment, that's what I get from it. Cover it up so no one can see it and that's all you do."
Since publically voicing his opinion, Newell has been voted out as vice chair of the board.
The engineer Gas Free Seneca tried to get before the planning board is Dr. Charles Sorensen. He used to work for Mobil Oil and frequently sails on Seneca Lake. After looking into initial proposals by Inergy, Sorensen was concerned enough to write a letter to the DEC. While salt caverns are an ideal place to store LPG, most facilities are built on flat ground, according to Dr. Sorensen.
"Seneca Lake is surrounded by steep hills and is essentially a bowl," Dr. Sorensen said.
That's important because LPG is heavier than air.
"If you do have an accidental release, it tends to form a ground hugging cloud of dense vapor that will move down hill and down wind," explains Dr. Sorensen.
Down hill and down wind from the proposed facility is the town of Watkins Glen, a community of about 3,000. Reading doesn't have a fire department and relies on Watkins Glen's volunteer department.
Inergy says it will have an emergency response plan in place before the facility opens and have 24 hour monitoring. Inergy has only acquired LPG facilities and never built one from the ground up. The company's has responded to safety concerns. according to their attorney, Kevin Bernstein.
"At the request of DEC, we identified several potential scenarios that we don't expect will occur, but still, DEC asked us to address those and then indicate what safety systems we have in place to ensure those scenarios don't occur," Bernstein said.
The hilly landscape also poses structural challenges for the man-made brine pond. The 90 million gallons of salty water will sit 400 feet above Seneca Lake. Brine is an after-product of salt mining and currently sits in the unused caverns. It will be pumped out to make room for LPG and be used to pressurize the caverns.
Seneca serves has the source for drinking water for thousands living along the lake. A breach in the brine pond could taint that supply. The DEC raised a number of concerns about the structural integrity of the pond - and Inergy has since move to a double-liner system with leak detection sensors.
Large pumps still wrapped in plastic sit on the US Salt property just off of Route 14, right next to a large pile of piping. Finger Lakes LPG engineer Barry Moon said they never expected the permitting process to take so long. And since some of the equipment can take a year to arrive, they had to order it a long time ago.
The process is going to take at least a few months longer. The DEC will hold a public hearing in the Watkins Glen high school on Sept. 27th at 7 p.m. before deciding whether to grant an underground storage permit. The Reading Town Planning Board still has to separately grant a land-use permit as well.
CORRECTION: An older version of this story incorrectly stated Inergy has never had an accident at any of its New York storage facilities. Inergy officials were referring to no accidents occurring from gas storage along Seneca Lake. An accident at Inergy's facility near Bath, NY in 2008 injured four workers.