Setting record straight on Nether Prov Sunoco concerns
To the Times: I am writing to correct inaccuracies and misperceptions in your Feb. 13 article about Nether Providence Township’s recent vote on whether to join their neighbors in surrounding municipalities to pass a referendum of concern regarding the nearby Mariner East 2 pipeline.
To begin with, the headline is very misleading. Reading “Nether Providence balks on concerns about pipeline,” one would come away with the impression that the board of commissioners flat-out rejected the Resolution of Concern if one didn’t read the article to discover the vote was a 3-3 tie, with one abstention. Hardly “balking.”
I don’t know if Councilman Much was misquoted or misinformed, or if the reporter is guilty of lazy journalism, but Mr. Much’s ward is not the closest ward in Nether Providence to the pipeline. A simple look at a map of the pipeline reveals that Ward 3 (represented by Micah Knapp, who voted yes to passing a resolution) and Ward 6 (represented by Robert O’Conner, who voted no) are the two closest wards, and are far closer (one-anda-half miles) to the pipeline than claimed by Sunoco during the meeting, which used the township’s government building as a point of reference instead. This information could be easily gleaned from Sunoco’s own map distributed at the meeting. This mistaken distance was used to further dismiss the concerns of residents, to portray the pipeline as too far away to be of concern to Nether Providence residents.
The reporter then repeated practically verbatim the carefully crafted talking points presented by Sunoco, with little to no verification as to their veracity. The presentation by Sunoco in fact was more of a sales pitch about jobs and less about safety, though ostensibly the presentation was to address the safety concerns of the community. What little discussion there was about safety was a repeat of previous Sunoco talking points with very little time spent answering questions that had been submitted ahead of time, though the article leaves one with the impression of the opposite. The bulk of Sunoco’s talk emphasized jobs, with safety merely being a secondary concern.
Sunoco in effect divides our community like it has so many others along the pipeline route, by presenting it as a choice between jobs or safety. It should be emphasized that no one concerned about the pipeline’s safety desires to take away anyone’s job. The point of the resolution is to address safety concerns about a 20-inch pipeline (larger than any other pipeline in the area) made of a far thinner material than previous pipelines, carrying much more volatile and dangerous contents than has been carried through any pipeline here before, even going extraordinarily close to schools in Delaware County (and putting other schools, including those in the Wallingford-Swarthmore School District, within a potential evacuation zone should there be an accident).
Residents who are concerned about the safety of such a project shouldn’t be dismissed as misinformed alarmists and patronized as such; indeed it seems only common sense to want to be assured of such a dangerous project’s safety. In the opinion of myself and countless others in Nether Providence and throughout the pipeline’s planned route, the onus should be on Sunoco to prove this project’s safety, not for us to prove that it is unsafe. Recent pipeline explosions in Louisiana and Texas – both pipelines are very similar to the one Sunoco Logistics wants to build here, and were in far less densely populated areas – confirm that this pipeline could have disastrous consequences for this area if something were to go wrong.
It is unfortunate that neither Sunoco Logistics nor the Daily Times has accurately reflected our concerns or investigated Sunoco’s claims for their accuracy.