Gas pipeline poised to slash through NYC National Park

Imagine a magical playground just a subway ride from your home. Sandy beaches, children playing in the surf, a community garden filled with birds and butterflies, shady picnic tables nearby. Places to canoe and kayak and fish. Miles of bike paths and nature trails. A big old fort to explore, a campground, a skating rink, even golf!

 

This playground actually exists, right on the edge of New York City. It’s Gateway National Recreation Area, the oldest national urban park on the East Coast. And in addition to all these wonders, it will soon have its very own high-pressure gas pipeline. Seven miles of pipe running straight from the Atlantic Ocean through the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens to Avenue U in Brooklyn.

 

Williams/Transco is building the Rockaway Lateral and National Grid is building the Brooklyn-Queens Interconnect. Two different companies, two different pipelines. But it’s all one project, with a single mission –­- to bring more natural gas to Brooklyn and Queens.

 

 

The arguments given to justify this project are the ones we’ve all heard before: We need the gas. Gas is clean energy. Gas is cheap.

 

But why in a national park? One obvious reason: nobody lives there. No private residents or businesses to displace. Nobody to complain or threaten to gum up the works, particularly if they’re kept in the dark until the trucks move in and the digging begins.

 

Yes, there were public notices and meetings and articles in the local papers—but Gateway has 10 million visitors a year. How do you reach all of them? You don’t. In fact, the National Park Service (NPS) went out of its way to keep quiet about the project. Throughout 2012, NPS was actively seeking comments from park users about its future plans for Gateway, but in all its meetings and glossy pamphlets and online surveys it didn’t once mention the pipeline.

 

Initially, the Park Service didn’t want the project in Gateway, but that changed. Maybe it just seemed  inevitable; maybe it had something to do with money. After years of government underfunding and stagnant budgets, NPS is broke. Transco, on the other hand, has lots of money – it’s an energy company, after all. So when Transco offered to pay rent for housing its metering and regulating station in one of the abandoned hangars on Floyd Bennett Field, and renovate it to boot, well, this was clearly a win-win situation. . . .

 

 

But there are hidden costs – costs that are shifted into the future or onto other shoulders. These costs are called “externalities,” and they are far higher than any of us should be willing to pay. Let’s start with the cost to our national park.

 

 

Jamaica Bay Ecowatchers is a highly respected organization that has worked closely with government agencies and environmental groups for years to restore and protect this area. Vice president Dan Mundy Jr. is very concerned about the fate of the artificial reefs located in the general path of the pipeline. These reefs, which Transco initially dismissed as man-made “obstructions,” are covered with northern coral and provide vital habitat to an abundance of marine life.

 

“Our organization regularly conducts dive operations in this exact area,” writes Mundy in his comments to FERC, “and what we observe on a regular basis are lobster, various spider crabs, skates, rays, fluke, and flounder on the open ocean bottom.” Transco’s poor-quality videos of the ocean floor and grab samples taken in December – the least active time for marine life – revealed none of this.

 

Transco plans to trench this area using a jet sled, characterizing any disruption to the seafloor as “temporary.” Mundy says otherwise: the reefs, the coral, and “all marine life in the path of this trench will be blasted by the high-pressure jet or buried under the pipe.” The jet sled will stir up toxic heavy metals buried in the ocean floor and a million cubic yards of sediment, “with a high probability of burying and destroying the large artificial reefs to the east of the planned trench.” Thousands of dollars and millions of hours of volunteer labor would be undone.

 

 

The Rockaway Lateral ends where the Brooklyn-Queens Interconnect begins, at the northern edge of the Jamaica Bay inlet. This is an odd place for the pipeline to switch ownership. It’s still in the national park, and the gas still has to pass through Transco’s metering and regulating (M&R) station on Floyd Bennett Field before it is ready for local distribution.

 

But more significantly, the bay and the ocean are one system: destruction in the offshore area will inevitably affect the bay.

 

Jamaica Bay’s 100 acres of restored wetlands serve as both nursery and habitat to small marine organisms; at high tide larger marine organisms travel into the bay to feed and spawn. The bay is habitat to several species listed as endangered, threatened, rare, and of concern, among them three species of sea turtle, Atlantic sturgeon, and horseshoe crabs. Recently Ecowatchers has restored oysters to this area; each oyster cleans 40 gallons of water a day.

 

The wildlife refuge is a birder’s paradise: it’s part of the Atlantic flyway, a stopping point or nesting ground for over 300 bird species and 50 species of butterfly, including a host of marine and shore birds, peregrine falcons, the endangered piping plover and roseate tern, and the threatened checkered white butterfly. A single spill of drilling fluid or a gas leak, like the National Grid spill in nearby Paerdegat Basin last fall, could put all this at risk.

 

 

Like the rest of Gateway, Floyd Bennett Field suffered a major assault from Hurricane Sandy, and it took a second hit during the clean-up period that followed: the city turned it into a garbage dump and staging ground for emergency crews and then authorized an open burn of 15,000 trees downed by the storm.

 

Transco’s 60,000-square-foot M&R station threatens to be a further setback: a continuous source of noise, pollution, and fugitive methane emissions.

 

This is not a deserted area: it is heavily used by schoolchildren, campers, gardeners, veterans groups, aviation buffs, and visitors to the Aviator sports complex. The nearby community garden -– the largest one on the East Coast, with over 400 gardeners and 500 plots -– is a major habitat for birds, beneficial insects, bees, and bats.

 

Yet Transco has no plans for on-site security other than cameras and barricades, and a telephone hookup to company headquarters. In the event of an accident, a break-in, a gas leak, or a fire, the public is on its own. Many of the fire hydrants don’t work, water pressure is poor, and evacuation is problematic.

 

And one more problem: Floyd Bennett Field narrowly escaped flooding in Hurricane Sandy, but it may not be so lucky the next time. Problem is, M&R stations are prone to explode if they flood when they are operating.

 

 

The Rockaway is just one of thousands of pipelines that are being built all over this country. The natural next step for Big Energy is exporting liquefied natural gas, and it’s already happening. We now have two LNG export terminals, one in Louisiana and one in Texas; 26 more are awaiting approval. What’s driving this huge build-out in gas infrastructure? Fracking, of course. And unless we can turn off the spigot on shale gas we will lose not only Gateway but countless other magical places.