Carolyn Jones, president of an umbrella group of community associations in Dundalk, is fired up. She's copying articles and government studies for residents about the pitfalls of having a liquefied natural gas terminal in eastern Baltimore County.
Activist Sharon Beasley is helping with the research. Lee McClelland has launched a petition drive.
These Dundalk residents are gearing up for a fight.
Less than a month after officials with Arlington, Va.-based AES Corp. announced that they want to build an LNG terminal on the site of the former Sparrows Point shipyard, activists and neighborhood groups are rallying together to figure out how best to defeat the proposed project.
"Communities all over the U.S. have been fighting and defeating these projects for a reason," Dan Krepp, a board member of the Greater Dundalk Alliance, told a group gathered last week at Dundalk High School to watch an anti-LNG video created by a California couple opposed to a similar project off the coast of Malibu. "This is another `dump it on Dundalk project.' "
The proposal by AES calls for building a $400 million LNG terminal at Sparrows Point. Shipments of the super-chilled liquefied gas would arrive by tanker, and 1.5 billion cubic feet of natural gas would be pumped daily from the plant through an 85-mile pipeline to a distribution center in Pennsylvania.
Some Eastern Baltimore County residents say they are worried about the potential effects of a leak, about terrorist attacks on the tankers or terminal, about dwindling property values and about interference to recreational boating and fishing from the tankers.
McClelland, a retired iron worker who fishes and crabs in the area, and others have also said they're concerned about the environmental impact on Bear Creek from dredging the shipping channel so that the tankers can get to Sparrows Point.
Residents in Dundalk, especially those living in the Turners Station neighborhood, less than two miles from the proposed terminal, say the LNG facility shouldn't be so close to a heavily populated area.
"It's not that we want to be alarmist," Beasley said at the meeting. "This can't be 50 or 100 people out fighting. We need the entire community. ... And to fight a battle of this size is going to cost a lot of money."
