A victory for the little guy

‘We said we’d never stop fighting until we won,’ opponent says

Colin Hawks vividly remembers company president David Birkett telling him and others that the Alton Gas Natural Storage Project was going to happen despite the best and most strenuous efforts of those opposed to it.

“(He) told us that we had no means to stop this and that we were wasting our time, but we said we’d never stop fighting until we won,” Hawks said Monday from his automotive repair garage on Brentwood Road.

“If you look at the hardships that we have gone through and the amount of work that people have put into this, this wasn’t an easy win and this isn’t a win that I will take lightly. This was something that took circumstances and a whole lot of help from so many different people.”

Birkett’s prediction came seven years ago and the win by Hawks and like-minded people who opposed the natural gas storage project finally came Friday when Altagas announced it was decommissioning the project.

Hawks and his wife Valerie have lived on Brentwood Road, just off Highway 2 between Stewiacke and Brookfield, for more than 17 years. For the past seven years, they and many others have vigorously opposed a plan by Alton Natural Gas Storage to construct a system of huge underground caverns to store natural gas.

The proposal would pump 10,000 cubic metres of water daily from the Shubenacadie River at Fort Ellis to the Brentwood Road site 12 kilometres away.

The salt would be dissolved a kilometre below the surface, and the brine,

including 1.3 million cubic metres of salt, would be pumped back to the river site for gradual discharge nto Shubenacadie River estuary over a two- to three-year period.

“Happy, elation to some degree,” Hawks said of his reaction to the decommissioning announcement Friday. “On the other side, there is still some work to be done. Decommissioning of the properties has to be done properly so it's not over. I feel happy that they are leaving. I feel really good for the people who have been involved in this.”

Hawks said the decommissioning marks a win for the little guy against big business.

“The little guy down the road, the little girl down the road actually does make a difference,” Hawks said. “It's not about one of us, it's about all of us. This is a company that took advantage of a situation. We had never dealt with natural gas storage in Nova Scotia, we didn't have a full understanding of it. We always chased the permit.”

Hawks maintains the project was doomed to fail from the onset, which dates back more than 15 years and was provided legitimacy when the Progressive Conservative government of the day approved the project in December 2007.

Since then, Hawks said there has been ample company and government failure to go around.

In May 2013, the NDP government approved a 10.8-kilometre natural gas pipeline to connect the storage facility to the existing Maritimes and Northeast lateral.

Hawks said the company posted two newspaper notices about their proposal and affected stakeholders were given two weeks to respond.

“We did not even know about the project, nor were we given time to understand the project. You give us two weeks to respond to that and put up a response that was educated and informed. It took us six months to actually understand what they were doing, never mind whether we agreed or disagreed.”

Hawks said opponents of the project dug up thousands of pertinent documents.

“All this information that should have been looked at by the government but never was. They refused to look at it because they didn't have to.”

Hawks said the underground salt deposits near his home are not pure salt domes and the impurities in the deposits make it impossible to avoid leaks that could damage the water supply.

“I can blame the company all I want but the government is the one. PCS, NDPS, Liberals, none of them looked at this entire project and denied them (permits), none of them looked at the actual information. The permit was allowed and they (government) wouldn't go back on the permit.”

Environmental studies, impact statements on area residents and businesses and visual reports were either omitted or not accurate.

“Within two kilometres of this site was approximately 100 homes and 30 businesses. None of that was put forward to the government and the government did not check it.

“Highway 2 runs 1.2 kilometres from the site. The only railway line through Nova Scotia runs about a kilometre from the site. Highway 102 is approximately two kilometres from the site.”

Hawks said an evacuation for an industrial emergency would cover a minimum of two kilometres, “which means you shut down all of Nova Scotia if we had a failure.”

“If government had done their proper due diligence, they would have walked away 15 years ago,” he said.

Now, residents are left with three holes almost two feet in diameter drilled deep into the underground, two of which were shut down because of pressure failure, Hawks said.

The company had initially intended as many as 15 caverns that would be 60 metres in diameter and up to 80 metres in height.

Hawks said the holes bored pass through the water supply and, with a series of underground lakes in the area, the drilling and leaks could cause a problem in the future.

“The detrimental effects could be tomorrow, they could be 50 years down the road. There is no way to completely decommission these projects properly. You'll never put this back to what it was.”

Hawks said he plans to put a proposal to the company for the 80-hectare property to be used for something beneficial.

“I'd love to see it used for green energy, that's something we all could have stood behind. This (Alton Gas) was a project that was 20 years behind and was never going to work for anybody but the company.”