On Oct. 1, 2020, residents of Weymouth, Massachusetts, gathered on the Fore River Bridge for a socially-distanced rally. Wearing masks and waving hand-drawn posters, they were protesting a natural gas compressor station that had been built in their community by the Canadian oil company Enbridge.
“Shut it down!” their signs read. “Stop Enbridge. Enough is enough.”
It was supposed to be day one of the compressor station’s operation. Despite six years of fierce opposition from community groups, elected officials, and environmental organizations, Enbridge had finally secured the suite of permits necessary to build and operate a natural gas compressor station — a facility needed to keep gas flowing north through the company’s pipelines — in the town of Weymouth, just a few miles south of Boston.
But things had not gone according to plan. Earlier that month, on Sept. 11, a system failure had forced workers to vent 169,000 standard cubic feet of natural gas and 35 pounds of volatile organic compounds from the compressor station, releasing it into the surrounding community. Some of those compounds included toxic chemicals known to cause cancer, damage to the liver and central nervous system, and more.
Then, on the morning of Sept. 30, just one day before the compressor station was scheduled to begin operating, a roaring sound emanated from the facility, signaling another “unplanned release” of natural gas — a mechanical failure that automatically triggered the compressor station’s emergency shutdown system and vented more gas into the neighborhood.
Rep. Stephen Lynch alerted residents of the September 30 shutdown later that day. “These accidents endangered the lives of local residents,” he said in a tweet, “and are indicative of a much larger threat that the Weymouth Compressor Station poses to Weymouth, Quincy, Abington, and Braintree residents.”
Within hours, a federal agency issued a stay on the compressor’s operation until a safety investigation could be completed.
So on Oct. 1, as the Fore River Residents Against the Compressor Station (FRRACS) gathered on the Fore River Bridge, the compressor station had already been shut down — albeit temporarily. They continued with the demonstration anyway, folding the station’s system failures into their suite of objections to the project, alongside issues of safety, pollution, and environmental justice.
“2 system failures in one month!” one demonstrator’s sign read. “What the FRRACS is going on?”
Enbridge’s Plans
The Weymouth compressor station has been one of Massachusetts’ most contentious oil and gas infrastructure projects in recent years. It was first proposed in 2015 by Spectra Energy (now part of Enbridge) as part of the company’s Atlantic Bridge Project, which aimed to pump fracked gas from Pennsylvania to buyers in northern New England and Eastern Canada.
A compressor station was a necessary part of that project — it would serve as a sort of way station between Pennsylvania and northern New England, adding pressure to the pipeline to keep the natural gas flowing quickly and efficiently along its intended route. The station is standard technology: Before the Weymouth proposal, there were already five compressor stations in Massachusetts and roughly 1,400 others in the U.S.
What makes the Weymouth compressor station so anomalous is its urban location. Rather than locating the station in a rural area surrounded by few people — as most other compressors are — Enbridge wanted to build the facility in densely-populated North Weymouth, immediately adjacent to two neighborhoods that the state has designated as “environmental justice communities.” These communities, Quincy Point and Germantown, along with smaller census tracts within the Fore River Basin, are home to many residents who are low-income, people of color, or both.
Critics have argued that the compressor station’s placement here, in an already disadvantaged part of Massachusetts, is a clear affront to environmental justice. “It’s the idea that poor people and the people most impacted, get to be impacted over and over again,” said Mike Lang, environmental coordinator for the East Braintree Civic Association, in an interview with the HPR.
Industrial Proliferation
Lang, who grew up in South Boston and has the accent to prove it, lives in East Braintree, about two miles away from the Weymouth compressor station. But that isn’t the only industrial facility near his house.
“I have a Citgo terminal right up the street,” he said, referring to a petroleum storage and distribution plant on Quincy Avenue. He rattled off other nearby facilities: two power plants, a state-run sewage pump station, a sludge pelletizing plant, and a Twin Rivers Technologies chemical manufacturing facility.
Lang has spent the better part of a lifetime fighting such facilities. Some 35 years ago, he began his journey of environmental advocacy when he opposed plans from the company Clean Harbors to build a hazardous waste incinerator in Braintree, spending nine years on a campaign to cancel the company’s building proposal.
That fight was ultimately successful, but new threats were quick to replace it. Lang soon found himself sucked into a game of “Whack-a-Mole” against industrial projects — new ones kept being proposed nearby, and a wave of research was raising concerns about the impact of existing facilities.
“It’s like a black hole,” he said, referring to the never-ending need for environmental advocacy. “It just draws you in.”
In general, Lang was frustrated by the intense concentration of industrial projects in a small number of disadvantaged neighborhoods — places like Chelsea, just north of Boston, and the Fore River Basin, south of the city. Part of the reason for this concentration is logistical; industrial facilities that are water-dependent must be housed in designated ports, of which there are only 10 in Massachusetts. But Lang posits that the other reason is accumulative: Once you start siting factories and waste facilities in one neighborhood, it gets easier to justify adding more.
“We already had the shipyard down the street,” he said, referring to a long-industrialized part of Weymouth that equipped the U.S. Navy with battleships during both World Wars. “When someone comes in and wants to put in an industrial thing, they say, ‘Why don’t you put it there? It’s already a dump.’”
This logic can set in motion toxic cycles of disinvestment and racial segregation. Indeed, large swaths of the Fore River Basin are classified as having a significant “minority population” under Massachusetts environmental justice criteria (meaning that more than 25% of the population identifies as a race other than White). Many families, especially in the communities of Germantown and Quincy Point, make 65% or less of the statewide median household income. And an influx of industrial infrastructure into the neighborhood may create additional economic strain by lowering property values, in some cases by as much as 25-50%.
Environmental Pollution
As these industry hotspots become less desirable from a housing and economic perspective, they may also become hotspots for environmental pollution.
Judy Roberts, who lived in Quincy Point for 57 years before leaving the neighborhood in 2017, attributes her 2006 bout of lung cancer to industrial pollution in the South Shore. But it took her some time to come to that conclusion — it wasn’t until she started organizing with FRRACS that she began to draw a connection between the heavy concentration of industry in her neighborhood and the pollution she may have been exposed to.
“We were uncovering the preexisting toxic legacy of that area,” she explained to the HPR, “and I said, ‘Holy shit, is this why I got lung cancer?’” Roberts recalled her mother as well, who was diagnosed in 2005 with a form of leukemia that her doctors said was caused by environmental factors.
Existing facilities in the Fore River Basin already emit a suite of problematic chemicals, and according to data collected in 2017 by FRRACS, some parts of the area show pollutant concentrations that are two or three times above Massachusetts’ recommended concentrations for human health. For example, air quality samples from East Braintree have shown concerning levels of benzene, a known carcinogen. Other substances recorded at excess concentrations include methylene chloride, 1,2-dichloropropane, 2-hexanone, hexane, acetone, alkanes, and ethanol.
As part of her personal health investigation, Roberts went with her son in 2018 to participate in a statewide biomonitoring experiment being conducted by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH). She was alarmed to find that her blood samples showed elevated levels of three of the five pollutants that the DPH had tested for: Cadmium and lead were present at nearly double the concentration found in a typical American, and her mercury levels were more than 22 times higher than the national average.
The results were similar for her son, Jonathan.
“I was devastated,” Roberts said. “It’s one thing for me to have had cancer because of this, but to see your child with those concentrations? It’s very upsetting.” Within months, she sold her house in Quincy Point and moved with Jonathan to North Easton.
For Roberts, the connection between her 57 years living in the industrialized South Shore and her health journey is simple. “Jonathan and I lived half a mile from the toxic legacy of an over-industrialized environmental justice community,” she said. “And there it was in black and white in our blood.”
But it can be difficult to prove causation at a population level. On the one hand, a 2019 health impact assessment conducted by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP) found that the four neighborhoods of the Fore River Basin had elevated prevalence of some forms of cancer, relative to statewide averages. Yet, many of those surveyed by the state also reported occupational risks of cancer, or said that they were or had been smokers.
The agency did find consistently elevated occurrence of other chronic conditions, though. In Weymouth, MassDEP reported higher rates of pediatric asthma than the statewide average, as well as a higher-than-normal number of asthma-related hospital admissions. Weymouth, Quincy, and Braintree also showed abnormally high rates of COPD hospital admissions, and higher rates of hospitalization from heart attacks — which can be triggered by air pollution.
At any rate, Roberts argues that the compressor station will exacerbate the region’s legacy of hazardous environmental pollution, potentially leading to adverse health consequences.
Enbridge’s own reports show that the compressor station will emit carcinogenic chemicals like benzene, toluene, formaldehyde, and more. Besides cancer, prolonged exposure to such chemicals has been linked to conditions including anemia, compromised immune system, nervous system damage, reproductive malfunction, and low birth weight. Exposure to particulate matter, another predicted emission from the compressor station, has been linked to increased risk of kidney disease and the progression of end-stage renal disease.
MassDEP’s impact analysis concluded that operation of the Weymouth compressor station would not contribute criteria pollutants such that their concentrations would rise above recommended exposure limits. But trust in that report was compromised in May 2019, when, two days into a hearing that would determine whether Enbridge would receive the air quality permit necessary to build the compressor station, MassDEP released a 759-page document containing previously undisclosed information about a host of pollutants that hadn’t been analyzed in the original report. Some of these pollutants were recorded at levels above health guidelines, including the carcinogen 1,3-butadiene and the chemicals chloromethane, 1,2,4-trimethylbenzene, and n-hexane.
Enbridge was ultimately granted its necessary air quality permit, but the issue has remained a point of contention between advocates and opponents of the compressor station.
The Risk of Disaster
Besides the long-term health consequences of industrial pollution, FRRACS and its allies have argued that the compressor station imposes an unacceptable risk of disaster onto the community. “They’re trying to plant a bomb in our neighborhood,” one resident said at a public hearing before the station was built.
The possibility of a catastrophic accident is neither negligible nor unprecedented. Most significantly, compressor malfunctions can cause highly flammable natural gas — including significant amounts of methane — to accumulate inside the facilities, raising the risk of a massive fire or explosion. That exact scenario unfolded in December 2020 when a Morris Township, Pennsylvania, compressor station caught fire, burning for more than two hours and causing a temporary evacuation.
Over the past few years, similar explosions have rocked Armada Township, Michigan; West Union, West Virginia; and Ward County, Texas, where a particularly bad explosion in 2018 claimed a man’s life. One report compiled for New York reported 11 more recent accidents at compressor stations across the country, from Utah to New Jersey.
The natural gas pipelines feeding into the compressor station may pose an even scarier safety threat. According to the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), pipelines have caused more than 11,000 accidents since 1996, leading to more than $6 billion in damages and killing nearly 400 people.
Before merging with Enbridge in 2017, Spectra Energy itself already had a history of accidents and safety violations, many of which were documented by the citizen group SpectraBusters. A 2015 pipeline rupture released nearly 4 million cubic feet of natural gas along the Arkansas River, while later that same year, Spectra was fined nearly $100,000 after a Canadian regulatory agency discovered that the company had committed almost 30 safety violations in just 15 months.
In one incident in 2013, a Spectra-owned compressor station in Maine experienced a massive malfunction on New Year’s Eve. One nearby resident, whose home was just 1,200 feet from the station, said she thought she was living through an earthquake. “It was absolutely the most terrifying experience I’ve ever had,” she told the Bangor Daily News.
Notably, most cases directly involving compressor stations have not resulted in community-wide property damage or death. This is because many of these facilities have been located far from urban centers — in large fields, for example, where there is less risk of a fire or explosion impacting a surrounding community.
Weymouth is another story. Enbridge’s compressor station there is located on a small peninsula in a residential-industrial area, within half a mile of some 900 homes. More than 3,100 students attend school less than a mile away, and within that one-mile radius, there is also an elderly housing facility, a nursing home, and a mental health facility. Additionally, the compressor abuts Weymouth’s water treatment plant and a power plant owned by the company Calpine, and pipelines feeding into the compressor run directly underneath the four-lane Fore River Bridge — which is crossed by more than 30,000 vehicles each day.
“How the hell could you put something like this in an extremely populated urban area?” said Alice Arena, the political organizer who founded FRRACS, in an interview with the HPR.
A 2019 report from the group Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility laid out a frightening suite of disaster scenarios that could be triggered by a compressor station malfunction. A fire or explosion could trap workers and civilians on the 4.3-acre peninsula where the compressor is sited or damage the nearby bridge.
In a worst-case scenario, the report said, an explosion could engulf nearby infrastructure, igniting the Calpine plant’s diesel tanks and — if the timing was right — catch fire to tankers full of gasoline that routinely travel through the Fore River, “within a stone’s throw” of the compressor station. In such a case, fuel and chemicals could spill into the water, still on fire, and travel upriver toward an electric power station and the Citgo petroleum terminal, passing multiple homes along the shore.
“If something happens,” Arena said, “it’s going to be a chain reaction that would just knock your socks off.”
New Hope from FERC
Despite protests from a strong opposition movement, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) — the agency responsible for approving interstate oil and gas infrastructure projects — gave Enbridge the green light in November 2019 to begin construction of the Weymouth compressor station. The company had secured the necessary air quality, wetlands, and waterways permits from MassDEP, leaving little in the project’s way. Construction was completed in less than a year.
Since then, the fight against the compressor station has changed dramatically. Two emergency shutdowns in September prompted a federal safety investigation, which even the FBI was invited to participate in, delaying the date by which Enbridge would be allowed to take the compressor online. The plot thickened when a third system failure in April 2021 spurted 10,000 standard cubic feet of natural gas into the Weymouth community, fueling a new wave of scrutiny over the project.
Perhaps most significantly, a change in leadership at FERC has reinvigorated anti-compressor activists and sparked hope that the project could still be shut down. When President Joe Biden took office in January, he appointed a new chair for FERC, environmental justice advocate Richard Glick, who quickly turned his attention to the compressor station.
“The Weymouth compressor station raises serious environmental justice questions, which we need to examine,” Glick tweeted in January. “The communities surrounding the project are regularly subjected to high levels of pollution & residents are concerned emissions from the station will make things worse. … In 3 years at FERC I’ve seen little more than lip service paid to environmental justice. That needs to change.”
Activists at FRRACS, which has previously called FERC a “rubber stamp agency enabling the fossil fuel industry to destroy communities,” have been pleasantly surprised by this rhetoric.
“Did he just say that?” Arena told the HPR.
In February, Glick was joined by two other members of the five-seat commission in calling for a “paper briefing process,” whereby stakeholders could submit comments on the compressor station and its impacts on surrounding communities. Dozens of individuals and organizations — including FRRACS, elected officials, public health experts, and environmental NGOs, as well as proponents of the compressor station like oil and gas companies — signed up to submit their own briefings with comments on the project.
According to Gillian Giannetti, a senior lawyer at the Sustainable FERC Project, such a move has little precedent, especially since FERC was already reconsidering the compressor station’s permit as part of a broader rehearing process. “It is very rare,” she told the HPR, “a significant departure from how FERC has treated some of these issues in the past.”
The problem, according to some environmental advocates, isn’t that equity was omitted from previous evaluations of the compressor station; federal law has long required FERC to consider the environmental justice implications of its actions. Rather, critics say that it has largely been an afterthought for the commission. James Coleman, an associate law professor and energy expert at Southern Methodist University, noted that FERC’s 2016 environmental assessment for the Atlantic Bridge Project — a 348-page document — included just two paragraphs on the project’s environmental justice consequences, concluding that there would be “no significant cumulative impact on Environmental Justice Communities.”
“You could absolutely weight [environmental justice] more heavily,” Coleman said. “It’s completely reasonable to say that they’re not taking it seriously enough.”
With Glick at the helm, FERC has already begun taking steps to remediate this history of environmental justice “lip service.” Within just weeks of being appointed, Glick moved to fund and open an Office of Public Participation at the commission, stated that he would nominate a director of environmental justice, and added a supplemental comment period for FERC’s ongoing review of its policy statement on interstate natural gas pipeline proposals, including an entire set of questions about the commission’s environmental justice duties.
With regard to the Weymouth compressor station, it’s unclear how these changes — or the paper briefing and reevaluation process — will manifest. According to Giannetti, it is within the realm of possibility for FERC to revisit and perhaps rescind the compressor station’s authorization to go into service — and even for the commission to revisit Enbridge’s certificate for construction.
That is certainly what many activists, including Arena, are hoping for. If FERC decided to take back its previous approval of the compressor station and the Atlantic Bridge Project, finding that they were incompatible with the country’s environmental justice priorities, it could have a cascading effect through the fossil fuel industry.
“It would be a great opportunity if [FERC] decided they were actually going to be serious about this climate change thing,” Arena said. “I hate to be an optimist, but maybe things are changing.”
Climate Justice
To Roberts, the evolving situation with the compressor station feels like a sign of a changing zeitgeist around climate action. “Even though we’re clearly in a race against time,” she said, “climate change is now front and center.” Battles are being waged all around the country against fossil fuel infrastructure projects, and environmental justice has never been a higher national priority for a presidential administration.
In addition to the immediate and long-term impacts to South Shore communities, Roberts and others situate the fight against Enbridge within the overarching context of global climate justice. This is the broadest arena on which the fight against Enbridge is unfolding: A natural gas compressor station and the pipelines associated with it — both of which are intended to last for decades — are incompatible with the urgent need for a transition away from fossil fuels. Investments in polluting infrastructure will lock in future greenhouse gas emissions, which are set to disproportionately impact non-White and low-income communities around the United States and the world.
Plus, there is the inherently destructive and dangerous work of extracting oil and gas. “Our brothers and sisters in Pennsylvania have been decimated by fracking,” said Arena, referring to people living near the state’s shale deposits, which are intended to provide the Weymouth compressor station with natural gas. “If we can keep it in the ground, it’s going to help all of them.”
For now, she and others at FRRACS are waiting for updates from federal regulators. In April, the organization submitted its own 36-page brief to FERC, enumerating its many arguments against the compressor station. It’s unclear what the outcome will be, but hopes are cautiously running high.
“I’m looking forward to it being a stranded asset,” Arena said. “Let Enbridge swallow that $110 million that they spent on it.”
Image obtained with permission from FRRACS.
Correction: May 25, 2021
An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the origin of the fracked gas as tar sands in Pennsylvania. The gas does originate from Pennsylvania, but it does not come from tar sands.
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