12/26/09 - While Block Island residents await a state Supreme Court ruling on the proposed 3-acre Champlin’s Marina expansion in the Great Salt Pond, environmentalists on the mainland are embroiled in a struggle regarding a plan to install a liquefied natural gas (LNG) platform off Narragansett Bay.

Weaver’s Cove Energy, partially owned by Amerada Hess Corporation, has plans to dig up more than 70 acres of the bottom of Mount Hope Bay, an estuary connected to the Narragansett Bay, to erect a platform for the storage of LNG.

Public ownership of the bottom of bays is clearly spelled out in state law in both Rhode Island and Massachusetts, according to John Torgan of the nonprofit organization Save the Bay. The constitutions of both states guarantee public ownership of the land on the bay bottoms, he said. To take a portion of that land for its own use, a private company must show that their project has a compelling public interest.

Yet, it seems, as soon as one battle to preserve the public’s ownership of a bay bottom is fought and won, another begins. Recently a decade-long fight over water discharges from New England Power’s Brayton Point Power Plant resulted in a half-billion dollar settlement. Brayton Point is the largest fossil fuel plant in New England, Torgan says, and its use of the Narragansett Bay waters resulted in an 86 percent decline in the winter flounder population during the l980s and 1990s. In 2007, the company agreed to build cooling towers to protect the flounder habitat in Narragansett Bay.

The winter flounder species was severely depleted, and now the Weaver’s Cove Energy project threatens it again.

“These shallow muddy estuaries are the best remaining habitat for these fish,” Torgan said. “You can’t restore fish population by removing habitat.”

A recent ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals found that Rhode Island’s Coastal Resources Management Council let the clock run out on its review of the Weaver’s Cove Energy application, which means it lost its chance to weigh in on the project. However, there is hope that the project will not pass Massachusetts or federal regulatory bodies, in part because the winter flounder grounds are covered under “essential fish habitat” of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, the federal law that governs marine fisheries management in the United States.

If the storage facility receives favorable rulings from regulators, its tankers would pass to the east of Block Island. According to Torgan, they would not interfere with the island’s ferry or pleasure boat traffic, and they have a good safety record.

They would pass, however, under the Newport Pell Bridge and Mount Hope Bridge as they travel to and from the platform at the end of Mount Hope Bay. Other vessels and pleasure boat traffic there will be disrupted, however, by a moving safety exclusion zone two miles ahead, one mile astern and 1,000 yards on either side of the transiting ship, as would traffic traveling over those bridges.

Save the Bay’s Director of Marketing and Communications, John Martin, disagrees with “the idea that a private company can take a private resource and make it theirs forever. We object to the process in which people who enjoy the use of the bay become marginalized.”

Save the Bay has undertaken a radio and print campaign to oppose the liquefied natural gas platform. The organization’s website can be accessed at: www.savebay.org.