Press Release: 6 people arrested for stopping Enbridge
/FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Thursday, December 11, 2019
Media Contact: nocompressor@gmail.com
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Community members call on DEP to stop Enbridge, Inc. from removing and transporting highly contaminated soil, poisoning neighborhoods
North Weymouth, MA – Early this morning, residents of the South Shore and Massachusetts allies returned to the proposed compressor site to keep Enbridge, a Canadian company, from removing and transporting highly contaminated soil from the North Parcel. Digging up, removing, and transporting the highly contaminated soil without conducting full reviews of the toxins present nor providing plans to protect human health cannot be allowed.
A large group of residents gathered to hold signs, sing songs, and peacefully ask Enbridge to stop their activities. A large banner that read, “Keep it in the Ground. Keep it out of our air”, was displayed on the side of the Fore River Bridge.
Six community members were arrested today for stopping activity on the North Parcel, stating it's necessary to conduct nonviolent civil disobedience to stop construction since Governor Baker and his State agencies have refused to uphold their charge of office and protect our communities -especially the two environmental justice communities very close by.
Reverend Betsy Sowers, FRRACS Board Member and Minister for Earth Justice at Old Cambridge Baptist Church, explains that the proposed compressor station site is "adjacent to two Environmental Justice Communities, already suffering some of the highest rates of respiratory, heart, and neurological diseases, and cancers in Massachusetts, due to toxic emitters already in the area. They are supposedly protected from further exposure. Environmental law, in fact, requires the existing pollution of local air, water, and soil to be cleaned up. Yet MassDEP dismissed data showing local air pollution at alarming levels, saying it was not their practice to consider existing pollution when permitting a new project. Similarly, the fact that this site is a toxic coal ash dump, where digging is exposing residents to high levels of arsenic and asbestos, was dismissed as insignificant."
The Town of Weymouth has requested that the Administrative Consent Order, which took effect July of 2019, be fulfilled before any remediation or construction begins. FRRACS, along with the Town of Weymouth and the City of Quincy, have implored the Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP) to stay construction activity as well. They ask that:
The full data sets from soil testing are made available
MassDEP makes a full assessment of the recent Imminent Hazard statement by the Licensed Site Professional, TRC
A full accounting of asbestos in the soil from contaminated furnace bricks is provided
A full waste removal and traffic plan is presented by TRC
“The State has miserably failed the Fore River Basin. Now it’s up to the people to shut this down.” - Alice Arena, Executive Director of FRRACS.
The Fore River Basin is already overburdened by pollution: ten pollution-spewing industrial facilities have been dumped here over decades, including tank farms, power plants, and a sewage treatment facility. Residents are here today to say no more toxins.
BACKGROUND:
The Fore River Residents Against the Compressor Station (FRRACS) have been fighting the placement of a 7700 HP fracked gas transmission compressor station in North Weymouth for five years. The compressor station poses a major health, safety, environmental, and economic risk to the residents of the Fore River Basin in Weymouth, Quincy, Braintree, and to all of the South Shore. Recently, Eversource and National Grid have said they do not need a compressor because they can fulfill gas needs for the next fourteen years as things stand right now.
The site has been deemed an industrial waste dump site for decades. The now-defunct Edgar Coal Fired Plant dumped coal ash, furnace bricks, and coal clinkers into a small spit of land for almost 50 years. This repeated dumping of industrial waste eventually created a larger triangle of land known as the North Parcel. In more recent years, an eleven-million-gallon diesel oil tank and a six-million-gallon tank of diesel oil additive sat on the site, leaking for over a decade into the ground beneath. The DEP has no record of who took the oil or where it was transported when the tanks were removed in the early nineteen nineties. Millions of gallons of the oil still remain, approximately ten feet below the surface of the North Parcel. Enbridge is going to dig it up.