Emigration Pipeline Comments to the Salt Lake City Council
Dr. Brian Moench joined the October 20th Salt Lake City Council meeting to raise concerns about the proposal for a pipeline through Emigration Canyon and across Salt Lake City.
Please feel free to utilize the information in our comments to send your own message to your elected officials.
At last week’s Sinclair presentation, I was very impressed with questions the Council asked, and your preparation. You did your home-work. But there is still more important information.
Time and again Sinclair made vague claims about commitments to the highest standards, industry is tightly regulated, they don’t want a catastrophic leak, they live here too, blah, blah, blah. Chevron would have said the same thing before their pipeline ruptured twice in 2010. In fact they did say the same thing in multiple meetings we had with them when I was part of the community working group formed to design a longitudinal health surveillance on behalf of the harmed residents.
But according to the US Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, there were at least 9,329 fossil fuel pipeline leaks nationwide from 2010 to 2024. That’s an average of 1.7 a day. But the real number is even much higher than that because Texas alone reports an average of 30 pipeline leaks per day, and no doubt everyone one of them involves a company that makes the same promises Sinclair does.
I was an expert witness for a Red Butte Creek plaintiff. His teenage son woke up early that morning blind, and that lasted for several hours. The father was a healthy, middle-aged male who died of pulmonary fibrosis five years later, likely caused by the hazardous VOCs. Lung, bone marrow, brain and chromosomal toxicity are known consequences of benzene exposure. 13 months after the spill we measured carcinogenic chemicals in the creek, 400 times higher than what the EPA considered safe. Many residents continued to have various symptoms years later.
In so many ways a gasoline spill is even more hazardous than crude oil. Salt Lake’s future doesn’t depend on more gasoline, it depends on protecting its diminishing water supply. Salt Lake City would take all of the risks and receive none of the benefits of Sinclair’s proposal.