Bootleg Fire in Oregon is too large and hot to contain

From an Article by Sarah Kaplan, Washington Post, July 1, 2021

Heat waves have toppled temperature records across the nation, and firefighters are actively battling 48 large blazes that have consumed more than half a million acres in 12 states. But land management agencies are carrying out fire mitigation measures at a fraction of the pace required, and the funds needed to make communities more resilient are one-seventh of what the government has supplied.

“We’re burning up, we’re choking up, we aren’t just heating up,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) told President Biden at a meeting with Cabinet officials and Western governors Wednesday. “Across the board we have to disabuse ourselves of the old timelines and the old frames of engagement. … We can’t just double down.”

Yet fire experts say the escalation of wildfires, fueled by climate change, demands an equally dramatic transformation in the nation’s response — from revamping the federal firefighting workforce to the management of public lands to the siting and construction of homes.

“As our seasons are getting worse and worse … it feels like we’ve reached a tipping point,” said Kelly Martin, a wildfire veteran and president of the advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters. “We need a new approach.”

The West’s hot, dry start to summer has already been devastating, to people as well as trees.

On Thursday, authorities across the Pacific Northwest and western Canada said they were investigating at least 500 suspected deaths from heat illness that occurred amid the week’s record-shattering temperatures.

Thousands of residents had to be rapidly evacuated from the sprawling Lava Fire, south of the Oregon-California border, when extreme heat and strong winds caused the blaze to explode.

Many people are still missing after a fast-moving wildfire overwhelmed the tiny mountain village of Lytton, British Columbia, on Wednesday — just a day after it notched Canada’s highest-ever temperature of 121 degrees Fahrenheit.

“This is becoming a regular cycle, and we know it’s getting worse,” Biden said Wednesday. “In fact, the threat of Western wildfires this year is as severe as it’s ever been.”

‘Always doing more with less’

When Martin started her career with the U.S. Forest Service more than three decades ago, the agency had a “warlike” approach to handling wildfires. Crews used bulldozers and other equipment to cut through vegetation and create barriers that could contain an approaching front. Helicopters and big air tankers dropped retardant from high above the flames. Although land managers knew fire was an important part of most Western ecosystems, they were also under pressure to stop blazes before they reached the area’s growing population centers.

“And we were very successful at it,” Martin said. To this day, more than 95 percent of fires are suppressed before they reach communities.

But by the time Martin retired as chief of fire and aviation at Yosemite National Park last year, climate change had fundamentally altered the nature of wildfire, making the blazes that did escape containment increasingly costly and dangerous to fight.

In most forest types, the proportion of fires that are “high severity” (killing the majority of vegetation) has at least doubled in recent decades. Firefighters are seeing more and more “extreme fire behavior” — whirling “fire tornadoes,” crown fires that spew embers into the wind and blazes that move so fast and burn so hot they create their own weather.

In 2018, a veteran Redding, Calif., firefighter was killed when a vortex the size of several football fields swept down upon him as he evacuated residents ahead of the catastrophic Carr Fire.

“Watching what the current wildland firefighters are faced with, last year and this year, it is exponentially greater in terms of risk and trauma,” Martin said.

The U.S. government is the nation’s biggest employer of what are known as “wildland” firefighters. Most are temporary workers, their salaries as low as $13.45 per hour for a starting forestry technician. They spend summers traveling the country, working 16-hour days, 12 days at a time, often relying on overtime and hazard pay to make ends meet.

For decades, they’ve relied on a months-long offseason to rest and recover.

But now there is no offseason; one fire year simply bleeds into the next, as winter rain and snow is delayed and diminished by climate change. About 100 families had to be evacuated from the Santa Cruz mountains in January — usually California’s wettest month — when winds re-ignited the embers of a fire that started last August.

High pressure pipelines in residential areas are clearly a safety issue

From the Daily Local News, Chester County, PA, December 23, 2020

Following an August spill of drilling fluid at Marsh Creek Lake, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection shut down construction and told pipeline builder Sunoco/Energy Transfer to find alternative route.

Sunoco appealed the ruling and Judge Bernard Labuskes Jr. ruled that the PA-DEP should be tasked with making any final decision on a restart at the site that feeds drinking water to residents and businesses to the south along the Brandywine Creek watershed.

The PA-DEP also required Sunoco/ET to restore resources impacted by Mariner East 2 pipeline installation in Upper Uwchlan Township.

The August spill of over 8,000 gallons of drilling fluid, an industrial waste, created a 15-foot wide by 8-foot deep subsidence, adversely impacting wetlands, two tributaries to Marsh Creek Lake, and the lake itself, in Marsh Creek State Park.

The drilling fluid spill caused the park to close off 33 acres of the lake from boating and other recreational uses and access.

Two new subsidences, or sinkholes recently developed in the vicinity of the active 8 inch Mariner pipeline. One sinkhole measures 6 by 9, by 4 feet deep, and the other is 9 feet around and 11 feet deep. The active pipe is about four feet deep.

The Mariner East pipeline right-of-way weaves 350 miles from Marcellus shale deposits in Western Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia to the refinery in Marcus Hook, Delaware County. The pipe passes by more than 40 schools statewide, the Chester County Library in Exton, through a children’s baseball field and high density areas in both Chester and Delaware counties.

“These incidents are yet another instance where Sunoco has blatantly disregarded the citizens and resources of Chester County with careless actions while installing the Mariner East 2 Pipeline,” PA-DEP Secretary Patrick McDonnell said. “We will not stand for more of the same.

“An alternate route must be used. The department is holding Sunoco responsible for its unlawful actions and demanding a proper cleanup,” McDonnell said. “To the fullest extent possible under our laws and regulations, we will continue to hold this company accountable for their actions, impacts, and behavior.”

In the Notice of Violation, PA-DEP requested, among other things, that Sunoco provide plans to address the impacts of the drilling fluid spill and subsidence events.

PA-DEP reported that a pipeline reroute in the Marsh Creek area was previously evaluated by Sunoco and found to be technically feasible. The order requires that this technically feasible route be used rather than the current pathway, which has resulted in multiple drilling fluid spills and subsidence in a wetland area.

Former State Sen. Andy Dinniman, D-19 of West Whiteland fought the project for several years and recently at Marsh Creek announced for the first time that the project should be discontinued.

“While it’s good to see that PA-DEP taking responsibility for the ongoing and very severe impacts of the Mariner East pipeline project, I hope it will also reconsider and rethink the pipeline route and construction activities that have led to a series of sinkholes and other serious geologic problems along karst formations in the West Whiteland area,” Dinniman said.

State Rep. Carolyn Comitta, D-156th of West Chester, has organized several informational pipeline events.

“I applaud the PA-DEP order to reroute the Sunoco pipeline in Upper Uwchlan Township,” Comitta said. “We’ve seen the continuous violations by Sunoco on our natural resources and the disruption of everyday life in the community.

“Our residents deserve to feel safe at home and know that their right to clean air and water is protected.”

Food & Water Action organizer Sam Rubin released the following statement:

“Sunoco’s negligence has created a series of entirely predictable disasters, the most recent being the massive spill at Marsh Creek Lake. This dangerous, unnecessary pipeline does not need to be re-routed. It must be shut down entirely. The Wolf administration has given Sunoco a green light to pollute communities across the commonwealth, in order to build a dangerous explosive pipeline that only serves to deliver raw materials to make plastic junk. Sunoco’s record of negligence and malfeasance speaks for itself; the only question is whether Governor Wolf will finally protect Pennsylvania from this corporate menace.”

Kurt Knaus, spokesman for the Pennsylvania Energy Infrastructure Alliance: “PA-DEP’s order to reroute this portion of the project is no small matter, especially when you consider the pipe in this area is meant to connect two existing pipes that are already in the ground…….”

“……Communities that thought this project was coming to an end now face potentially many more months of disruption, because this action has the potential of dramatically extending the construction life of a pipeline project that was nearly finished……”

“……The economic impacts are just as real. Hundreds of local jobs are at stake downstream at Marcus Hook and along the line itself because of potential construction delays. This is Pennsylvania’s largest infrastructure project and it remains vital to the entire commonwealth, which is why it needs to move forward, not backward.”

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See also: PA Pipeline Shift Will ‘Share The Wealth’ With Midwest Markets, Michael Sandoval, Inside Sources, December 15, 2020

Energy Transfer’s (ET) recent announcement that it will convert the Mariner East 1 pipeline to help transport refined products from the Midwest to Pennsylvania and the northeast will be a boon to both northeast energy consumers and midwest producers, industry analysts say.

“PA Access will utilize part of our Mariner East 1 pipeline to provide about 20,000 – 25,000 barrels per day of refined products from the Midwest supply regions through our Allegheny Access pipeline system into Pennsylvania and to markets in the Northeast,” the company said in November. The service will begin in the fourth quarter of 2020.

Mariner East pipeline to transport ethane from OH, WV, & PA across PA to the Delaware River for export to Europe

From an Article by Marc Levy, Associated Press Exclusive News, November 12, 2019

PHOTO — In this Oct. 22 photo, pipes lay along a construction site on the Mariner East pipeline in a residential neighborhood in Exton, Pa. The 350-mile (560-kilometer) pipeline route traverses those suburbs, close to schools, ballfields and senior care facilities. The spread of drilling, compressor stations and pipelines has changed neighborhoods — and opinions. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

HARRISBURG — The FBI has begun a corruption investigation into how Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration came to issue permits for construction on a multibillion-dollar pipeline project to carry highly volatile natural gas liquids across Pennsylvania, The Associated Press has learned.

FBI agents have interviewed current or former state employees in recent weeks about the Mariner East project and the construction permits, according to three people who have direct knowledge of the agents’ line of questioning.

The focus of the agents’ questions involves the permitting of the pipeline, whether Wolf and his administration forced environmental protection staff to approve construction permits and whether Wolf or his administration received anything in return, those people say.

The Mariner East pipelines are owned by Texas-based Energy Transfer LP, a multibillion-dollar firm that owns sprawling interests in oil and gas pipelines and storage and processing facilities. At a price tag of nearly $3 billion, it is one of the largest construction projects, if not the largest, in Pennsylvania history.

However, the construction has spurred millions of dollars in fines, several temporary shutdown orders, lawsuits, protests and investigations. When construction permits were approved in 2017, environmental advocacy groups accused Wolf’s administration of pushing through incomplete permits that violated the law.

Wolf’s administration declined comment on the investigation Tuesday. In the past, Wolf and his administration have said the permits contained strong environmental protections and that the Department of Environmental Protection wasn’t forced to issue the permits.

The Mariner East project, along with the overhaul of the Marcus Hook refinery and export terminal near Philadelphia, have had the support of leading public officials and business trade groups.

Wolf himself has said that the pipeline’s economic benefits would outweigh the potential environmental harm, and that the Mariner East would be part of a distribution system that the industry needed.

The state’s building trades unions have seen a huge influx of work on the Mariner East pipelines and Marcus Hook. Exploration firms drilling in the booming Marcellus Shale and Utica Shale fields shipping natural gas liquids through Mariner East pipelines and Marcus Hook have helped the U.S. become the world’s leading ethane exporter.

The roughly 300-mile Mariner East 1 was originally built in the 1930s to transport gasoline westward from Marcus Hook. It was renovated and, in 2014, began carrying natural gas liquids eastward to the refinery from southwestern Pennsylvania’s drilling fields.

Construction permit applications were submitted in 2015 for two wider pipelines, the 350-mile-long Mariner East 2 and 2x, designed for the same purpose, but stretching farther, through West Virginia’s northern panhandle and into Ohio.

Both were projected to be open in 2017. But Mariner East 2 began operating in late December, and Mariner East 2X could be complete in 2020.

The pipelines run past houses, parks and schools in southeastern Pennsylvania, and have been met with protests by alarmed neighbors worried that one leak could ignite a deadly explosion. Sinkholes along the pipelines’ route have opened on lawns and construction has contaminated streams and private water wells.

Food & Water Action Pennsylvania Director Sam Bernhardt released the following statement after the story was published:

“Whether it is provided by the federal judicial system, county District Attorneys, or Governor Wolf himself, justice for communities harmed by Energy Transfer and their Mariner East pipeline means shutting this pipeline down for good.,” he wrote. “The Wolf administration fast-tracked this dangerous, disastrous project, putting communities across the Commonwealth at risk. We have seen sinkholes, spills and water contamination, and a grassroots opposition movement has pushed his administration to stop the project before further disasters strike. Governor Wolf has refused.”

Meanwhile, county and state prosecutors are investigating the pipeline. Chester County’s district attorney, Tom Hogan, opened an investigation last December. In March, Pennsylvania’s attorney general, Josh Shapiro, said his office had opened an investigation on a referral from Delaware County’s district attorney. His office already had an environmental crimes investigation under way into the natural gas industry.

Wolf’s administration also has had run-ins with Energy Transfer in which it accused the company of willfully violating state law.

Still, when the Department of Environmental Protection issued the permits, environmental advocacy groups warned that it would unleash massive and irreparable damage to Pennsylvania’s environment and residents. In general, the permits are required to protect waterways and wetlands from pollution, runoff and obstruction stemming from heavy construction.

Within hours, the Clean Air Council and other environmental advocacy organizations appealed the permits, saying the DEP had approved incomplete and inaccurate permit applications that violated the law “in response to heavy and sustained political pressure.”

At the time, Wolf denied applying pressure to approve the pipeline permits. Rather, he said he had simply insisted the department stick to its own timeline to consider them and that he believed the department had done its due diligence.

The environmental groups’ request to halt construction was denied, but they did win additional protective steps in a settlement.

In depositions and internal documents that became exhibits in the appeal, department employees said the schedule to consider the applications had been sped up, but none said they had been forced to approve permits over their objections.

Pipeline companies lack proper justification to take private land

From Carolyn Reilly, Bold Alliance, February 26, 2018

Washington D.C. — Bold Alliance and a collective of more than 50 landowners in the Appalachia region have filed a motion asking a federal court to schedule a date to hear oral arguments and expedite the proceeding in their lawsuit challenging the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) over its unconstitutional abuse of eminent domain in pipeline permitting.

Carolyn Reilly, a regional organizer with Bold Alliance stated: “We’re demanding that the justice system follow through and give we, the people, complete due process under the U.S. Constitution. We have explicitly and repeatedly declined to engage with these pipeline corporations seeking eminent domain for their private gain, and we deserve to be heard in court to defend our inalienable rights under the fifth amendment.”

Bold’s lawsuit, filed in the Federal District Court in Washington, D.C. against FERC and corporations backing the proposed Mountain Valley and Atlantic Coast pipelines by landowners whose properties the projects would pass, challenges problems in the FERC certificate program that impact all landowners near all pipelines that seek to utilize eminent domain authority to take property against landowners’ wishes.

Bold’s motion asks the court to expedite a hearing on the constitutional challenges in the case.

Separately, Bold Alliance late last week also filed motions requesting rehearings by FERC Commissioners of their issued notices to proceed for the proposed Mountain Valley Pipeline and Atlantic Coast Pipeline.

Bold argues in the motion that FERC’s granting of a notice to proceed while challenges remain pending violates landowners’ due process rights. By issuing the notice to proceed, the motion argues that FERC has also created confusion for landowners, who may believe FERC’s order is the final say needed by MVP to proceed. When in fact, MVP has not yet gained possession of many parcels of land, and cannot commence construction on parcels that it has not yet acquired.

View the motion for expedited hearing, requests for FERC rehearings by Bold Alliance here.

See background on landowners’ eminent domain lawsuit against FERC here.

See also Motion to Expedite.
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Carolyn Reilly, Pipeline Fighter, Appalachia Region
Bold Alliance, Carolyn@BoldAlliance.org
www.BoldAlliance.org