The Philly Chapter of PA IPL meets each month on second Tuesday evenings at 7:00 PM EST via Zoom. The next meeting will be held on October 12th:
“Bomb Trains” through Philadelphia
Transporting Fracked Gas to Gibbstown, NJ
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
The Gibbstown Liquefied Natural Gas [or LNG] Export Terminal is proposed for a deep water port on the Delaware River, south of Philadelphia and north of Chester in Greenwich Twp., NJ. The project’s footprint begins in the Marcellus shale in northcentral PA where shale gas would be extracted from fracked wells, then liquefied at a plant they want to build in Bradford County. From the proposed plant in Wyalusing Twp., PA, trains and trucks would carry the LNG about 200 miles through dozens of communities including densely populated Wilkes Barre, Reading, and Allentown, through Philadelphia neighborhoods, across the Delaware River to New Jersey and south through Camden and other communities. From the proposed terminal dock, the LNG would be transported in enormous ships down the Delaware and overseas for sale.
Up to two 100-tankcar trains per day would traverse Philadelphia – trains that are so dangerous that the federal government banned their use for LNG transport up to now. They are referred to as “bomb trains” because the explosive force of the LNG should there be an accident would impact all the City, with the most intense and swiftest catastrophic effects along the train route, unjustly impacting Black and Brown and low income communities.
Our presenter, Tracy Carluccio, is Deputy Director and a founder of the Delaware Riverkeeper Network (DRN), a non-profit founded in 1989 with the mission of protecting and defending the Delaware River, its tributaries, habitats, and communities, both human and nonhuman. DRN is one of the organizations leading the fight against the Gibbstown LNG terminal and the bomb trains that would supply it. Tracy will be talking about the LNG project, its adverse impacts, the potential for disaster, how something so dangerous got approval, and what can be done now to stop it.