Dear fellow residents of the Hudson Valley, New York State, and beyond,
While our so-called moratorium on fracking continues, the gas industry is already industrializing rural New York State.
Forests are now being clear-cut to pave the way for hundreds of miles of enormous distribution pipelines that will carry fracked gas from the Marcellus Shale to market. The industry plans to export the gas from terminals proposed on the Atlantic coast.
The movement of gas requires football-field-sized compressor stations every 50 miles. These stations pressurize the gas using noisy, smelly diesel turbines that spew pollutants into the air 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The Minisink Compressor Station is currently being built in Orange County. It will destroy the rural quality of life there. It is being resisted valiantly by the residents (see http://www.stopmcs.org). It would boost gas gathered there from Marcellus Shale gas wells to a pipeline connector that is proposed to run north through Orange County to Shawangunk in Ulster County, then northeast through Plattekill and Lloyd and under the Walkway Over the Hudson, into Dutchess County. The goal is to get the gas to Pleasant Valley, to a main pipeline that runs from NYC to Canada, and also to a gas-fired electrical power plant in Dover Plains. This plant has been approved by the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), the Public Service Commission (PSC), and the Town of Dover.
Pipelines mean federal eminent domain to seize private property. So much for home rule! This could affect you and your neighbors, your children and your grandchildren.
Pipelines equal fracking. The moratorium is an illusion. Please, let's stop the fossil fuel madness and make the switch to renewable energy sources today.
It's 2013. It's time to do the right thing.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Susan Holland
Ulster Park
