Monday, December 14, 2015

Pipeline: Too many reasons for doubt

On Saturday Dec. 5, a letter from Carol Jameson, chairman of the Richmond Board of Selectmen, was published regarding the grade error on alignment sheet TE-SEG — I-007 of the Kinder Morgan/TGP filing with Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
There is another significant error on the same alignment sheet, as well as on sheet TE-SEG — I-006; that is the location of the town line between Winchester and Richmond. The town line is plotted on both alignment sheets approximately 875 feet west of its true location. When questioned about this at the Kinder Morgan open house in Rindge recently, a company representative told me that the town lines were taken off GIS data, so if it was plotted incorrectly, the GIS data must be wrong. Having the opportunity to check the GIS maps, I find that the town line is plotted exactly where it has been for over 250 years.
This error has been on all Kinder Morgan’s documents since it changed the proposed route into New Hampshire a year ago. During the public comment period of the Kinder Morgan pre-filing on this project, the Richmond Board of Selectmen and I both wrote letters to FERC and I addressed this issue at the scoping meeting in Rindge in October 2015. Kinder Morgan obviously has made no effort to check this out, choosing to ignore the public input and public comments even when a mistake of this magnitude is pointed out to them in official documents.

Once again, Kinder Morgan has clearly shown that it has an utter contempt for the regulatory process and utter disdain for the people of the state of New Hampshire in not feeling any need to check and correct these errors. What is especially troubling is to find two such significant errors in less than a mile of the route.
How many other errors are there in the other 70 miles of the route through New Hampshire? The 400 miles from Pennsylvania to Dracut, Mass.? Is safety compromised as much in the mechanical engineering as the town line is in the civil engineering? Is the so-called need for this proposed pipeline as inaccurate and as far off as the grade over Scott Mountain & the Winchester-Richmond town line?

For the Public Utilities Commission to have rubber-stamped this project without even waiting for the official certificate filing is every bit as egregious as the blatant errors and misrepresentations that Kinder Morgan has made part of the official record.

Jennie L. Hill
\
Richmond

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