Fore River Basin Delegation Letters 9.22.2020 Re: Compressor Station Concerns

September 22, 2020

The Honorable Maura Healey

Attorney General of Massachusetts

1 Ashburton Place, 20^th Floor

Boston, MA 02108

Dear Madam Attorney General:

We hope this letter finds you well. We want to begin by thanking you for your staunch advocacy of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, especially through these last few months which have truly tested all of us.

We write today with regard to the ongoing effort to operate a natural gas compressor station in the Town of Weymouth to alert you to issue areas where intervention of your office is merited. Enbridge, Inc. is currently at the end stage of the construction process and the compressor station is expected to be turned on this week. Over the course of permitting, planning, and construction, there have been instances where the Town and adjacent communities were excluded from the notification process.

There have been multiple occasions where abutting Environmental Justice (“EJ”) neighborhoods were not duly notified of hearings and comment periods. In one instance, EJ neighborhoods in Germantown and Quincy Point were not notified of the second public meeting for the Health Impact Assessment (“HIA”) being held at Quincy High School in late October of 2018. The HIA coordinator was notified of this problem by a local organization of resident activists, known as “FRRACS”, and they replied that they had no way of making this communication to the EJ communities.

FRRACS took it upon themselves to notify the EJ residents by canvassing Germantown and Quincy Point, dropping hundreds of pieces of literature at community centers, libraries, restaurants, bars, and a Mosque. They made a particular effort to translate the notices to Cantonese, as a large portion of these communities is primarily Cantonese-speaking. If FRRACS had not carried out this responsibility that belongs to the HIA coordinator and our state agencies, this EJ community would not have known about the hearing.

In another instance, in preparation for the most recent Public Involvement Plan (“PIP) meeting, the licensed site professional (“LSP”), TRC Companies, Inc., was required by DEP regulations to notify the public of the meeting 14 days beforehand in the local press. They were also required to notify EJ communities in their primary language. The meeting was posted in a local newspaper on July 15 with no Cantonese translations, and over the following days FRRACS made the additional effort to have TRC re-print the notice in the appropriate languages and an proper notice was not posted until July 24, leaving the EJ community with a mere 5 day notice for the July 29 meeting. This same problem is outlined in a Title VI complaint from East Boston against the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs (Greenroots, Inc. and Conservation Law Foundation, Inc. v. Mass. EEA, Mass. DPU, and Mass. EFSB).

EJ communities are not being notified about projects that carry extreme environmental threats, which directly contradicts their designation as an EJ community. It can be strongly argued that these actions are not only a violation of policies and regulations, but also that they may be in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Your office’s report from May of 2020 effectively highlights the impact of COVID-19 on EJ communities, especially in the context of air pollution. A compressor station of this size and placement will create a significant added burden on air quality in an already overindustrialized region that abuts two EJ communities. This past Friday, a gasket on the site burst as a result of failed operational testing, releasing 260,000 cubic feet of methane gas into the air. With this being just the first week of testing for the compressor station, it would be contrary to the interests of not only adjacent EJ communities, but also the Fore River Basin community as a whole, to allow operations to continue until after the COVID-19 pandemic is passed. To the point of your report, EJ communities will be doubly affected by the virus and by additional pollutants if this compressor proceeds to operate while the pandemic is still a present threat.

For these reasons, we respectfully request that you intervene on any or all of these issues pertaining to due notice and threats posed to EJ communities that abut the Weymouth compressor station. We sincerely appreciate your time and consideration of this request. We hope to establish a line of communication on these issues as we watch Enbridge move forward with testing and operations while the pandemic wages on.

Sincerely,

Patrick M. O’Connor John F. Keenan

State Senator State Senator

Plymouth & Norfolk District Norfolk & Plymouth District

Walter F. Timilty James M. Murphy

State Senator State Representative

Norfolk, Bristol & Plymouth District 4^th Norfolk District

Ronald Mariano Mark J. Cusack

House Majority Leader State Representative

3^rd Norfolk District 5^th Norfolk District

Joan Meschino Bruce J. Ayers

State Representative State Representative

3^rd Plymouth District 1^st Norfolk District

September 22, 2020

Secretary Kathleen Theoharides

Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs

100 Cambridge Street, Suite 900

Boston, MA 02114

Dear Secretary Theoharides:

We hope this letter finds you well. We first want to thank you for your public service to the Commonwealth during these extremely difficult times, and we offer you our support in efforts to protect Massachusetts’ environment.

Today we write to you as legislators representing the Fore River Basin with regard to recent events that have transpired at the newly constructed compressor station in North Weymouth. On Friday, September 11, a gasket on the site burst as a result of failed operational testing, releasing 260,000 cubic feet of methane gas into the air. This occurred within the first week of testing in preparation for full operation of the station. In the wake of this malfunction, there are questions that we as legislators and residents of the Fore River Basin deserve to have answered.

Residents of the region had raised concerns before the accident about the volume of gas that would be processed by the station in the short time frame proposed. The parent company Enbridge is now proposing to release 265,000 scf in a ten minute time frame into the Basin’s atmosphere as part of the testing of the blowdown system. The concern was with this concentration of gas flowing over the adjacent Fore River Bridge and the probability of spontaneous combustion sparking from a passing car on the bridge.

Since the accident last week, questions have arisen about anticipated gas releases. The first question pertains to Enbridge’s calculations for gas releases per hour and the calculations for pounds of volatile organic compounds (“VOCs”) contained in recent releases, which are vastly different than what was in the application. The most recent version of the air permit from May 2018 lists the maximum natural gas release rate as 20,000 scf per hour. According to a notification released by Enbridge on September 3, the planned Emergency Shutdown test would have released gas at a rate of 1,590,000 scf per hour. This difference carries safety implications, and the public should be fully appraised of why there is such a substantial discrepancy between the application and the actual operation of the facility.

The second question pertains to the calculations of per release. Based upon the average hourly composition of natural gas provided by Algonquin for their May 2018 application update, the amount of VOCs released in a 265,000 scf emergency shutdown event would be 264 pounds. Since these calculations are based solely upon data provided by Algonquin, they and MassDEP need to clarify why the quantities of VOCs Enbridge claims are released with a 200,000–265,000 scf gas release are an order of magnitude smaller than what would be expected from their application.

The third question pertains to Algonquin’s safety protocol for commissioning. Algonquin should inform concerned members of the public and the Town of Weymouth as to whether natural gas monitors were in use at the time of the recent manual emergency shutdown, and if so then what were the observed concentrations of natural gas. These data would be an essential part of the safety review for that incident. If there was no monitoring at the time, then Enbridge should clarify why.

With this being just the first week of testing for the compressor station, it would be contrary to the interests of not only adjacent Environmental Justice communities, but also the Fore River Basin community as a whole, to allow operations to continue until these pressing questions are answered and discrepancies are remedied. We request that the DEP require all operations at the site be halted until necessary clarifications are made and safety can be ensured.

Thank you in advance for your consideration of our request. Please do not hesitate to contact us directly if we can be of assistance in disseminating information or replies.