Press Release: Community members block entrance to construction site
/FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Thursday, December 5, 2019
Media Contact: Laura Ashley, nocompressor@gmail.com
Community members call on DEP to stop Enbridge from moving contaminated soil, poisoning neighborhoods
Local community members block entrance to the compressor site in Weymouth in an effort to stop construction on the station
Weymouth, MA – Residents of the South Shore and their allies from around the state rallied early this morning at the proposed compressor site in Weymouth to stop Enbridge from beginning removal of highly contaminated soil in order to build the compressor station. A large group of residents held signs and peacefully told Enbridge to stop their activities.
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.
The site has been deemed an industrial waste dump site for decades. Coal ash, furnace bricks, and coal clinkers were dumped on the parcel for almost 50 years. The coal pile that was used in the Edgar Coal Fired Plant, now Calpine Energy, sat on this same 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 soil 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 remain approximately ten feet below the surface of the site.
Enbridge, a Canadian energy company, recently filed the final Release Abatement Measure (RAM) plan in order to begin cleanup of arsenic and oil laden soil to begin construction of the compressor station. FRRACS, along with the Town of Weymouth and the City of Quincy, have implored the Department of Environmental Protection to stay the activity until the full data sets from soil testing are made available, a full assessment of a recent Imminent Hazard statement by the Licensed Site Professional, TRC, be made by the department, a full accounting of asbestos in the soil from contaminated furnace bricks be done, and a full removal and traffic plan be presented by TRC. The Town of Weymouth also has requested that the Administrative Consent Order, entered into in July, be fulfilled before any remediation or construction.
Four residents risked arrest today to stop activity at the site. Stating that, as residents, it was necessary to begin nonviolent civil disobedience to stop the construction when Governor Baker and the state agencies refused to uphold their charge of office to protect the communities from harm. Ten pollution-spewing industrial facilities have been dumped in the Fore River Basin, including power plants and a sewage treatment facility. Residents are here today to say no more poisons. The community is overburdened by pollution, including two Environmental Justice Communities in Quincy Point and Germantown, which are within the half mile notification zone of the compressor site.
Alice Arena, Executive Director of FRRACS, said, “We were serious when we said that we would not be moved from this site. This land belongs to the people of the Basin, no matter whose name is on the deed. In the original agreement in mitigation for Sithe’s (now Calpine) operating license, this parcel was not to be altered without the express consent of the Town of Weymouth. The State has failed the Town and the people. Now it’s up to the people to shut this down.”
