New NYC natural gas pipeline has Chelsea residents fearful of explosion

A major new pipeline that will bring natural gas into New York City has Chelsea residents fearful of a potential explosion, DNAinfo reported.

At a Community Board 4 meeting attended by DNAinfo Wednesday, members focused on a stretch of the project on 10th Avenue between Gansevoort and West 15th Streets. The infrastructure for the pipeline – which will run 20 miles from Linden, N.J. to Manhattan and bring in 800 million cubic feet of gas daily — is being built by Houston-based Spectra Energy, and members blasted both Spectra and Con Edison for what they said was a failure to demonstrate the system’s safety. 

“We are in a learning mode with the Spectra pipeline and the ConEd pipeline,” Maarten de Kadt, co-chair of the board’s Waterfront, Parks and Environment Committee, said at the meeting. “We don’t know enough to say that ConEd’s system is safe.”

ConEd said that the area’s infrastructure was only ten years old, but neighbors countered by saying many gas distribution pipes in the area were over a century old, leading to frequent problems such as leaks.
“There’s not one week of the month that we do not have a ConEd truck on my block,” Deley Gazinelli, a longtime neighborhood resident, told DNAinfo. [DNAinfo]  —Hiten Samtani