Breaking: We’re suing National Grid and NYS
Sane Energy Project and Cooper Park Resident Council filed a massive lawsuit today against New York State and National Grid over the liquefied fracked gas (LNG) facility expansion at the apex of the controversial North Brooklyn Pipeline.
The esteemed University Network for Human Rights and Pace Environmental Litigation Clinic are representing us in this fight.
As you know, we have been fighting the North Brooklyn Pipeline for well over a year, aiming to halt construction across five densely-populated neighborhoods of predominantly Black and Brown families. According to pipeline analysts at Fractracker Alliance using their data mapping tools, 153,000 people live in the evacuation radius of the pipeline if the pipeline were to rupture. This includes 63 schools, 81 daycare facilities, 9 healthcare facilities, and 3 nursing homes.
Sane Energy and our allies in the No NBK Pipeline Coalition, Frack Outta BK, and Brownsville Residents Green Committee spent our last year hosting teach-ins, halting construction with direct action, building our story in the media with community-driven artful protest, organizing unanimous elected officials in the districts including the Mayor of NYC (who still needs to come out against the LNG expansion!), and filing over 39,000 public comments with City and State agencies in opposition to the project and the rate-hike National Grid wants to charge us to pay for it. Our activism has temporarily halted the final phase of this pipeline that National Grid desperately wants to build.
Now, the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) is standing in our way by not listening to climate science or abiding by our laws and turning a blind eye to the massive LNG facility at the head of the pipeline.
So we’re suing them.
1. Our lawsuit alleges that the proposed LNG expansion has been illegally segmented from the North Brooklyn Pipeline.
The DEC claims National Grid’s application to expand its liquefied fracked gas depot at the apex of this pipeline (which locals dub “the head of the black snake”) poses no significant risk to the 701 families who live in the Cooper Park Housing complex adjacent to the facility and tens of thousands of residents living within the evacuation zone. The DEC is also not questioning National Grid’s claim that this is a completely separate project from the pipeline, despite being directly connected. We call this illegal segmentation. A tactic that the fracking industry is notorious for.
2. Our lawsuit alleges that the proposed LNG expansion violates environmental justice and climate laws.
Our City and State laws -- that frontline residents worked so hard for years to write and pass with our legislators -- are completely being ignored by the DEC. DEC failed to take legally mandated environmental justice protections and the state’s climate law into account when making decisions on an air permit that this corporate utility has applied for to expand the LNG facility in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
