LNG tanker port would impact island lifestyle

Other papers and units need to cover this story. The little Jamestown Press is out at the forefront here. And the danger of exposure to RI and Mass. residents is shocking!

Editorial, Jamestown Press, August 20, 2009

The U.S. Coast Guard recently approved, in concept, a proposal to build a liquefied natural gas offl oading terminal in the middle of Mt. Hope Bay.

This latest plan, put forth by Weavers Cove Energy, would have 145-ft. wide LNG supertankers navigating the East Passage of Narragansett Bay to Mt. Hope Bay. The massive tankers would dock in the middle of the bay and pump their super-cooled cargo 4.2 miles through underground insulated piping to storage tanks in Fall River, Mass.

The Coast Guard had rejected an earlier plan that required the supertankers to make hairpin turns as they traveled up the Taunton River to Fall River.

This latest proposal, which has received the Coast Guard’s blessing (with conditions), would allow LNG supertankers to cruise past Conanicut Island some 70 times a year – more than once a week. To provide security against a possible terrorist attack, the Coast Guard would escort each supertanker up the bay with a two-mile moving exclusion zone surrounding the vessel. Each shipment of the highly volatile fuel would require that Narragansett Bay be closed to all normal boating traffic. In addition, the Pell Newport Bridge and the Mt. Hope Bridge would be closed while the tankers passed beneath.

Narragansett Bay is the boating capital of New England. These supertankers would frequently disrupt sailing regattas in the summer months. Bridge closings would delay emergency ambulance trips across the Pell Bridge. There could be economic impacts, such as a decline in property values, as well.

Of course, these disadvantages pale in comparison to the danger posed by a LNG supertanker. It has been estimated that should a LNG tanker leak and explode, everyone within a three-mile radius would be killed.

There is still time to be heard. Other agencies must approve the plan and public hearings will be held. We’ll keep you informed. In the meantime, write to our U.S. senators and representatives. They need to know how you feel about these LNG supertankers sailing past your home more than once a week.

— Jeff McDonough

Defining LNG Hazards on the Narragansett Bay

Note from Greetings: This is a followup letter from another group dealing with LNG tankers in their area. It's quite sobering, as was the Jamestown Press's initial story, which I will rerun. I can not imagine why any of our lawmakers will allow this to happen, nor the Coast Guard, nor the DEP. To quote the letter below: "The Weaver's Cove Terminal would severely impact property values; it would also present serious hazards. 1/3 of a mile from the explosion.. everyone would die. 1 mile from the ship - 2nd degree burns and asphyxiation potential (all within the range of Jamestown, Newport, Middletown, Portsmouth, Bristol, Fall River, and other population centers); 2.2 miles still presents an asphyxiation hazard and potential explosion hazards. (Moving past the bay into the other RI population centers, such as North Kingstown, East Greenwich, into Massachusetts and further north.) So... WHY is this even an option?

Jamestown Press, Letters to the Editor, Aug, 27, 2009

I just read your Aug. 20 editorial, “LNG tanker port would impact island lifestyle,” and thought I should mention some misunderstandings regarding LNG hazards.

I agree with your assessment that the Weaver’s Cove LNG terminal would severely disrupt activities on the water and impact property values. It would also present serious hazards; however, the comprehensiveness of the hazard mentioned in the editorial, I believe, is considerable but overstated.

While FERC considers the hazard zones (“zones of concern”) to extend just 2.2 miles from LNG ships, Dr. Jerry Havens, who developed the vapor dispersion hazard model, believes 3 miles is probably more accurate. Havens also has indicated that FERC and LNG developers improperly calculate LNG vapor impact zones. However, the 2.2- or 3-mile hazard zone does not mean everyone within that zone would be killed. There are three hazard zones: 1) 500 meters/one-third of a mile from the ship, 2) 1,600 meters/1- mile from the ship, and 3) 3,500 meters/2.2 miles from the ship. The hazard impacts would lessen with the increased distances of each zone.

Zone 1 presents the greatest hazards, where everyone would likely be killed by cryogenic temperatures, fire, explosion or asphyxiation.

Zone 2 presents a 30-second second-degree burn hazard to unprotected skin from a pool fire due to a conflagrated release at the ship. Confined vapor explosions, fire and asphyxiation could occur if combustion did not occur concurrently with the LNG release.

Zone 3 presents an explosion hazard from confined vapors, burn and fire hazard, and possibly an asphyxiation hazard.

In addition, actual impacts would probably not be symmetrical and would not entirely fill the areas of each of the hazard zones. The LNG vapors would likely be driven by wind, so the impacts would occur in relation to the wind direction and topography.

Another issue that may interest you is that the Weaver’s Cove Energy site violates world LNG industry terminal siting best practices. The Society of International Gas Tanker and Terminal Operators (SIGTTO; www.SIGTTO. org) represents over 95 percent of the world’s LNG industry. They research and promulgate best practices. Their publication “Site Selection and Design for LNG Ports and Jetties” (available only in hard copy for around £30 via Witherby’s Seamanship International) clearly states that, for the health of the LNG industry, LNG terminals should not be sited where vapors from a large LNG release would affect civilian populations. They also state that LNG terminals should not be sited up long and winding inland waterways where navigation hazards are greater. Also, in another publication of best practices, they indicate terminals should not be sited where there are conflicting uses of the waterway – now and into the future. Weaver’s Cove Energy clearly violates these best practices (see my LNG Terminal Siting Standards Organization website: www.LNGTSS.org).

Unfortunately, the U.S. Coast Guard and FERC ignore SIGTTO. They justify this by stating SIGTTO is merely advice and not law. Paradoxically, the U.S. Coast Guard spends considerable energy advocating adherence to best practices when it comes to other navigation issues.

LNG-related zone terminology is frequently misunderstood. Exclusion zones refer exclusively to LNG terminals, and are intended to prevent burn/fire injury to civilians and civilian assets. LNG ships have moving safety and security zones intended to prevent LNG ships from colliding with other vessels and to prevent attack from other marine sources. Also, while it would seem to make sense that the three LNG ship hazard zones should protect the public equally as terminal exclusion zones, they are based on different parameters. Exclusion zones are much smaller than hazard zones. Exclusion zones are designed (generally) to prevent civilians from the impacts of an LNG release, while hazard zones are not prohibited from engulfi ng large civilian populations who could be killed or injured.

I hope this information is useful.
Robert Godfrey
Researcher and webmaster
Save Passamaquoddy Bay
3-Nation Alliance
Eastport, Maine

What would Sarah Palin want with Rhode Island?

Note from Greetings: Please! Alaska! KEEP HER! We do not need her disinformation, dishonesty, and her willingness to incite people to the brink of riot. We have a happy, peaceful state... AND NO POLAR BEARS!

She is not needed for public office either, based on her previous lies, and... besides.. she quit her last post! We don't need to be another stepping stone.

By Matthew Shaer 08.20.09, The Christian Science Monitor

The latest rumor wending its way around the Interwebs – and it’s a doozy – has Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin ditching Anchorage for the suburbs of the Rhode Island. According to the Anchorage Daily News, Palin would fund the move to blue state America “with $7 million from her book and a contract with FOX. And, oh yes, she’s never running for office again.”

Silly, right? After all, just a month ago, Palin was using Twitter to wax poetic on the enduring beauties of her home state: I’m “tasting a nibble of AK’s bounty,knowing AKns are never bored;so much to do & discover [sic],” she tweeted. The gossip, for now, is just gossip — the Palin team has remained mum. Still, the Providence Journal thought enough of the rumors to run its own article.

The Journal’s Randal Edgar even tracked down Rhode Island Republican Party Chairman Giovanni Cicione for a quote. Cicione, a conservative marooned in a very blue New England state, wondered what would compel Palin to choose the Ocean State. “Anyone who wants to move to Rhode Island, we would have to question their sanity,” he said.

So what would Palin find if she moved to Rhode Island? A whole lot of Democrats, for starters. As Tabassum Zakaria of Reuters notes, Rhode Island has gone for the Democratic candidate in all but four presidential elections since 1928. According to RI.gov, the state went blue in a major way in 2008 — some 63 percent of the ballots were cast for Barack Obama. Compare that to the 35 percent of Rhode Islanders who voted for the John McCain and Sarah Palin ticket.

On the plus side, compared to the harsh winds of Alaska, the New England winters will feel positively balmy.

A Plantation to Be Proud Of - Rhode Island

By SARAH VOWELL, NY Times

LAST month, Rhode Island’s Legislature approved a proposal to allow a ballot referendum in 2010 to change the state’s official name from “State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations” to simply “State of Rhode Island.” According to The Providence Journal, “Proponents of the name change say the word ‘plantations’ is offensive to the African-American community because it conjures up images of slavery.”

On the one hand, as a person who spends a minimum of 20 minutes a week furious with President William McKinley, I feel that these, the historically minded, bleeding-heart hand-wringers leading this movement, are my people.

On the other hand, as New York City’s biggest, or perhaps only, fan of the founding of Providence Plantations, I feel compelled to stick up for its noble legacy of religious freedom.

As your average Rhode Island government spokesman and/or persnickety history buff will point out, in 17th-century English, “plantation” was a synonym for “colony” or “settlement” — just as a legal charter was a “patent” and “whore of Babylon” was a kicky pet name for the pope.

In his farewell sermon to the colonists leaving England to settle Massachusetts Bay in 1630, “God’s Promise to His Plantation,” the Rev. John Cotton evoked the word’s biblical roots, quoting the second Book of Samuel: “I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and I will plant them.”

Providence Plantations’ founder, the young Puritan theologian Roger Williams, arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631. The Boston church immediately offered him a job as a minister, which he turned down because he deemed the congregation not quite puritanical enough. In a community of religious fanatics, the outspoken Williams became the guy who all the other Puritans wished would lighten up about religion.

Williams harangued the Bay Colony’s government for making everyone, even nonbelievers, attend church; he denied a government’s legal authority to prosecute violations of the Ten Commandments having to do with worship, including keeping the Sabbath holy.

He bristled when the magistrates made everyone, even nonbelievers, swear an oath at court; he considered an oath to be a covenant with God and thought that a nonbeliever making a simple pledge to tell the truth in the eyes of God about the 17th-century equivalent of a parking ticket was taking “the name of God in vain.” He wrote of a “wall of separation” between the church and the state long before Thomas Jefferson did, though to opposite ends. Williams yearned to separate “the garden of the church from the wilderness of the world.”

Because he refused to shut up, the General Court of Massachusetts Bay banished Williams from the colony in 1635. Terrified and rejected, he fled south on foot through the snowy wilderness. It was perhaps the loneliest march in American history up until pretty much every day in 1962 that James Meredith walked into the University of Mississippi’s cafeteria for lunch.

Upon his arrival in Narragansett Bay, Williams was supposedly greeted by an Indian who called out, “What cheer, netop?” It was a mishmash of old English and Algonquian meaning, “How’s it going, friend?” Without the friendly aid of the Narragansett, Williams would have surely perished.

He got the tribal chiefs’ permission to live there, and named his new home Providence. One of the Puritans’ favorite words, it conveys the generosity and wisdom of their God while at the same time admonishing lowly mortals to suck it up and accept God’s will even if one had a bone to pick with the magistrates of Massachusetts Bay.

Proud that no money changed hands between the Narragansett and himself, Williams later boasted, “Rhode Island was purchased by love.” By which he meant Providence Plantations! His community would eventually join forces in the 1640s with towns like Newport and Portsmouth on the nearby island known as Aquidneck or Rhode — possibly named for either the Greek isle of Rhodes or the Dutch word for red, not that anyone is sure. The whole shebang appears as the official name Rhode Island and Providence Plantations on the royal charter of 1663.

African and American Indian slaves were eventually forced to work in towns and on farms both in Providence Plantations and on Rhode Island. The ports of Providence and Newport were both major points in the slave trade triangle. In other words, Rhode Island itself has as much culpability in the history of slavery as Providence Plantations. But the supporters of the referendum object to the tone set by the word “plantation,” even though there was no slavery at Providence Plantations’ founding — just one weird white man with a dream.

Williams’s settlement offered what he called “soul-liberty.” A man with the narrowest of minds presided over the most open-minded haven in New England. His own unwavering zealotry made him recognize the convictions of others, however wrong-headed. Others not sharing his beliefs would be tortured eternally “over the everlasting burnings of Hell,” and this, he figured, was punishment enough. And so Providence and its environs soon became a refuge for regional outcasts — Puritan dissenters like Anne Hutchinson who got kicked out of Massachusetts, as well as Quakers, Baptists and Jews. (Newport boasts the country’s oldest, and perhaps prettiest, synagogue.)

In 1663, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations obtained an unprecedented charter from Charles II that guaranteed its residents would not be “molested, punished, disquieted or called in question for any differences in opinion in matters of religion.” This sentiment, written more than a century before the First Amendment, is a premonition of one of the finest ideals of the imperfect country that was to come. If there is anything to be learned from the life of an admirable crank like Williams, it’s just how wise the founders were to link freedom of speech and religion together in one legal guarantee.

Granted, I’m just an out-of-stater living in a city purchased with a measly string of beads and not with love, but I hope the citizens of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations vote against erasing the grandest part of their state’s name from the margins of subpoenas and Web sites. Silent, bureaucratic antiquities have their charms. Even though I would never call Sixth Avenue its official name out loud, sometimes when I’m walking home past those grandiose Avenue of the Americas street signs, I feel a momentary kinship with Peru. That never happens on Third.

Sarah Vowell is the author of “Assassination Vacation” and “The Wordy Shipmates.”

Carcieri Plans to Cut Taxes: Uses Obama's Stimulus Bill to Bridge Shortfall

I read in the Newport Daily News and Providence Journal that Governor Carcieri, who criticized Obama's stimulus bill, intends to use the "Bush policy" of cutting all taxes to corporations, the wealthy, while facing an $866 million deficit.

Carcieri's plan is to follow Bush's "trickle down" policy, which seems to have gotten us into the trouble we're in with the entire country. Caricieri would

• Cut the corporate tax rate to drop, from 9 percent to 7.5 percent, increasingly each year, until it is eliminated completely


• The top personal tax rate will drop by nearly 1/2 from 9.9 percent to 5.5 percent.


• Reduce the inheritance tax by Increasing the amount to be deducted from inheritances to $1 million before facing a tax

How will Carcieri make up the shortfall with an already $866 million deficit and nearly no taxes available in the future? Initially he will:

• Cut $55 million in funding to cities and towns


• Refuse to repay money to the rainy day fund


• Tap , temporarily, to replace (for 2 years) $31 million to cities and towns, from the Obama stimulus fund, that Carcieri criticized heavily (But this will still leave a funding deficit to cities and towns of $24 million per year, and it will only last 2 years, causing further problems, stated below)

This will cause cities and towns to lose money for their operating expenses and for schools. Carcieri belives his "black box" ideology will magically create jobs.

Even so, the cities and towns, without funding, would almost have to increase taxes, institute a city income tax, or increase already high property taxes significantly. They could not do any of these things, but there would be no money then for police, refuse pickup, fire departments, and other city services, as well as no money for schools. All of these would, of course deteriorate quickly.

City services and school quality would decline OR real estate taxes would increase dramatically. Even IF corporations settled here.. and at 0 percent, I am sure they would... it is unlikely anyone could afford to LIVE here. Living over the border in Connecticut or Massachusetts would be desireable at that point, while working on any "black box" jobs created for corporate tax havens.

So perhaps our tiny state of Rhode Island COULD be the Republican "stimulus package" (read no, stimulus - eliminate taxes to coroporations and the wealthy, cut off funding to cities and towns and social services, and "hope for the best").

With no funding to cities and towns, as stated, and no funds to the state, I simply wonder how the state would decrease their already $866 million deficit. Creating jobs in the state with the 2nd highest unemployment rate in the country is desireable, but if everyone has to move to Massachusetts for city services, schools that are funded and any quality of life needs that any human being would want, what is Rhode Island?

It will be a haven for Corporations, the wealthy, and those who have made deals with them, and it will not house anyone under a $300,000 income, or more.

Carcieri's hypocrisy in using the Obama funds he criticized to make his plan "look presentable" for 2 years until it is too late, is quite sad.

Now.. expand this to the U.S. Where will everyone with under $300,000 salaries live? Mexico?

I look forward to the "Republican black box plan" taking effect in such a small state as ours. If it succeeds, certainly, the Republicans can "show everyone the way". But if it fails... while we here in Rhode Island will suffer (or become Massachusetts residents)...the country will have had its second test of the "Bush economic doctrine". The past 8 years were the first test. But if it takes us to remind you all of why we're in this trouble, it's the least we can do.

But if we DO suffer in order to test it once more for the rest of you... will you please use your stimulus package to help out a neighbor?

Greetings From Pennsylvania is Now Greetings From Rhode Island

With a move to Rhode Island, Greetings feels it can't properly rep the PA citizens. (Although we're glad for the Steelers Superbowl win, still. Sorry, New England.. you'll hook us eventually.)



So "Greetings From Pennsylvania! Out of the Blue... state"



is now "Greetings From Rhode Island! Out of the Blue... state"



We can still discuss national politics, arts and technology, along with our new state of Rhode Island, which we dearly love.