When: Saturday, 16 January 2016 – 11 AM with hike at 1 PM
Where: Suwannee River State Park
3621 201st Path, Live Oak, FL
15 miles west of Live Oak on US 90
Maryvonne Devensky, Chair of the Suwannee-St Johns Group of the Florida Sierra Club, says:Please come to educate yourself about this pipeline that will transport natural gas. It will affect yourself and your family. It will change the environmental make up of your county for years to come. It presents some dangers to the North Florida environment, to human health, and it is not a done deal!!! Sierra Club is already part of a lawsuit in Georgia to oppose the Sabal Trail pipeline. Sierra Club also participates in a coalition named Spectrabusters. For more information about the Sabal Trail pipeline, go to www.Spectrabusters.org. Most of all Sierra Club has a major campaign to stop fossil fuel as a source of energy: Solar Energy is the renewable energy of choice. We will decide on several actions to take to oppose this project. See you at the Park on Saturday!Sierra Club made a significant contribution to the WWALS Watershed Coalition legal fund for WWALS v Sabal Trail & FDEP, and Maryvonne spoke at a recent Suwannee County Commission meeting. She notes that the fracking well spewing methane for four months into the sky above Los Angeles, finally causing both Los Angeles County and the state of California to declare states of emergency, may bring some attention to the huge problems of the fossil fuel industry. Spectra Energy, which wants to drill under the Suwannee and Santa Fe Rivers in Florida, last May had a pipeline blow out under the Arkansas River in Little Rock. Kinder Morgan (KMI) wants to expand its Florida Gas Transmission (FGT) pipeline to 36 inches in diameter like Sabal Trail, from Suwannee County to Jacksonville, in what KMI calls the Jacksonville Expansion Project (JEP). KMI’s application to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for JEP says that Sabal Trail can connect if it wants to. A mere 4″ FGT pipeline blew up in a fireball in Bell, Florida in 2012 when a tree fell on it. Sabal Trail or JEP would carry 80 times as much fracked methane. In 2009 an FGT pipeline blew up between the Florida Turnpike and I-95, flying a 104-foot piece of 18-inch pipe through the air, shutting down both roads, and fortunately missing a high school. That’s even before getting into the risks to the fragile karst limestone containing our sole source of drinking water, the Floridan Aquifer. As the Florida, Georgia, and Alabama Sierra Club chapters wrote in March 2014,
The Sunshine State, which will be the sole recipient of the fracked natural gas transported through this pipeline, should expand energy efficiency measures and solar power capacity rather than increase its dependence on natural gas which already accounts for more than 60% of Florida’s electricity generation.
Contact
Maryvonne Devensky, Chair, Suwannee St Johns Sierra Club maryvonne.deven@gmail.com, 352-871-1606 Debra Johnson, Board member, SpectraBusters Inc., debrastartech@gmail.com, 386-209-5886 John S. Quarterman, President, WWALS Watershed Coalition Inc., wwalswatershed@gmail.com, 229-242-0102, see also WWALS blog post Merrillee Malwitz-Jipson, Policy Director, Our Santa Fe River, merrilleeart@gmail.com, 352-222-8893, see also OSFR blog post===
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