Transco Stopped Monitoring Air Quality While Building Fracked Gas Pipeline

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- This week, the Sierra Club notified the Wolf administration that Transco has suspended air quality monitoring at two locations during its construction of the fracked gas Atlantic Sunrise Pipeline. In a September 20, 2017 letter to FERC, a Transco attorney tucked the disclosure into a footnote that read, “(e)ffective September 13, 2017, PM10 and PM2.5 monitoring at Compressor Station 520 is suspended until the completion of the Atlantic Sunrise construction project” and, “(e)ffective April 3, 2017, monitoring at Compressor Station 190 is suspended until the completion of the Atlantic Sunrise construction project.” Both locations are in a region the American Lung Association considers one of the most polluted in the country.

The Wolf administration already let Transco circumvent a crucial air quality safeguard by allowing them to use offset credits from a shuttered facility in Maryland toward their activities on the Atlantic Sunrise Pipeline in Pennsylvania.

In response, Sierra Club Pennsylvania Chapter Director Joanne Kilgour released the following statement:

"Governor Wolf and his Department of Environmental Protection have already dangerously permitted Transco to circumvent life-saving air quality standards, but this latest development would permit the company to hide the air quality from one of America’s most polluted regions. Our Commonwealth must protect the air we breathe, not the profits of corporate polluters. Fracked gas projects like Transco’s Atlantic Sunrise Pipeline are dirty, dangerous relics of last century’s energy production and have no place polluting our air when clean energy sources like wind and solar are already affordable and abundant.”