In a fiery meeting drawing hundreds of people last night, resident after resident and official after official told why Dundalk is the wrong place for a proposed liquefied natural gas terminal.
At a hearing before federal regulators, they spoke against a plan that they said would harm the Chesapeake Bay, threaten the safety of people living in eastern Baltimore County and harm the economy that millions of tax dollars have been spent to improve.
Elected officials and community leaders said they also had growing doubts about the process federal officials were using to evaluate the proposal by AES Corp., a global power-supply company that wants to construct the LNG terminal at the old Bethlehem Steel shipyard to receive overseas tankers carrying the imported fuel, and an 88-mile pipeline to Pennsylvania to distribute the gas.
"I begin by first raising serious concern with the entire FERC process, which provides that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission both develop the environmental safety impact statement and then review its own document," Baltimore County Executive James T. Smith Jr. said to applause from a crowd of about 400 people at Patapsco High School. Smith also said that he wouldn't spend county money to provide security for the facility.
Other officials, including Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger, were also critical of the process and the amount of information about the project yet to be supplied to the FERC and to the Coast Guard.
For example, a plan about where material dredged over a 118-acre area in the Patapsco River would be disposed of had not been submitted, said John R. Griffin, secretary of the state Department of Natural Resources.
David A.C. Carroll, head of the county's Office of Sustainability, estimated that it would take two years and hundreds of trucks daily to dispose of the dredge waste.
"In truth, I believe we shouldn't even be here this evening," Griffin said. "This project is too close to a major population center and too insensitive to the needs of adjacent communities."
The nearest neighborhood, Turners Station in Dundalk, is less than two miles from the shipyard. The pipeline through Baltimore, Harford and Cecil counties and Pennsylvania would be less than a few hundred feet, in some spots, from schools and houses.
"The proposed site is fraught with every negative, from threats of terrorism to environmental degradation to the awful impact on the nearby heavily populated communities that would put them at ground zero should a catastrophe occur," County Councilman John Olszewski Sr. said.
