Broadwater Says the Beauty of the Sound Isn't that Important

If the big liquefied natural gas facility that Shell and TransCanada want to put in the middle of Long Island Sound is hideous to look at and mars our view of the Sound essentially for ever, that shouldn’t bother us enough to make us oppose the facility.

Do you buy that? Broadwater wants you to.

John Hritcko, senior vice president for Broadwater (an Orwellian name if ever there was one), is now arguing that the beauty of the Sound shouldn’t be an important consideration.

Here’s what WTNH in New Haven reported:

Broadwater also told us that the issue of visual pollution on the shoreline is not really relevant.

"This is going to be a facility to provide a dependable supply of natural gas for the people of Connecticut and has broad impact, so we can't just make a decision based on the fact that it might look ugly."

The next time you are crossing the Hudson River on the Bear Mountain Bridge, look north into the Highlands, one of the most beautiful places on earth. What you do not see is the Storm King power plant, which Con Ed proposed almost 50 years ago and which was defeated largely because activists along the Hudson were appalled at what the plant would do to view.

Now look south, where the river opens up at Peekskill Bay and narrows again at Verplanck’s Point. It’s a beautiful riverscape too, except that your eye inevitably falls on the two big industrial facilities that somehow were allowed to be built on the bank of the river – the giant garbage incinerator that serves Westchester County and the Indian Point nuclear power plants.

There were a lot of reasons to oppose those two facilities, but if the people who approved the construction had paid more attention to the way they would mar the beautiful river, their decisions might well have been, “Sorry, come back when you’ve found a more appropriate place.”

Hritcko doesn’t want us to make up our minds now, because it’s premature – the environmental studies haven’t been done yet. And he doesn’t want us to emphasize the way an industrial facility in the Sound might look.

Those of us who oppose Broadwater should come to an agreement with John Hritcko. We won’t make up our minds on the environmental issues if he doesn’t either. And as a tradeoff, we won’t let aesthetic issues cloud our judgment if he doesn’t let corporate profits cloud his.

In the meantime, the Stamford Advocate thinks the LNG terminal is a bad idea too.