"In the Rockaways, Pipeline Debate Takes a Contentious Turn"

"FAR ROCKAWAY, N.Y. — On the night of Sept. 9, 2010, a 30-inch natural gas pipeline buried underneath the city of San Bruno, California, exploded. The fire was so large and the corresponding roar so loud that many residents thought a plane from the nearby San Francisco International Airport had crashed. ...

The San Bruno disaster is what activists point to when they talk about the dangers of natural gas pipelines. And it’s here in the Rockaways — a working-class beach community off the coast of Brooklyn and Queens — that the discussion has taken one of its most contentious turns.

A new pipeline called the Rockaway Delivery Lateral Project is under construction in the Rockaways. It will deliver 647,000 dekatherms of natural gas to New York City each day — enough to power 2.5 million homes. Activists, organized into two loosely affiliated groups, the Coalition Against the Rockaway Pipeline (CARP) and No Rockaway Pipeline, say the project is inherently dangerous and is just the latest sign of a broken approval and monitoring process for the United States’ energy infrastructure. They say if the history of pipelines and of the company building this pipeline is any lesson, residents of the Rockaways have reason to be concerned."

Peter Moskowitz reports for Aljazeera America August 20, 2014.