Residents of Brookfield, Connecticut, say they have opposed their town's natural gas compressor station for nearly two decades.
The purpose of the station — a collection of buildings with natural gas pipelines running out of them — is to compress natural gas to pump it through pipelines that extend beyond Connecticut’s borders.
However, families in Brookfield say they worry about the public health and environmental impacts of the facility, which is situated between residential areas and less than 2,000 feet from the town’s middle school. Namely, they fear toxic emissions.
“One of my children has asthma,” said Kerry Swift, a resident of Brookfield. Her children attended the school near the station. “[I’m] worried about the pollution that compressors emit. There are 24/7, large gas turbines running, emitting pollution all the time.”
Last week, more than two dozen advocacy groups sent a letter to the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, stating their concern over an expansion of the facility.
“Every single day that facility is emitting dangerous toxins like formaldehyde and other emissions that residents are breathing in,” said Nick Katkevich, a representative of environmental advocacy organization The Sierra Club. “It's really concerning.”
Berkshire Hathaway Energy and TC Inc. own the compressor station, but emissions reports come from the company that runs the compressor station, Iroquois Pipeline Operating Company. They show that 54,186 metric tons of greenhouse gases were released into the atmosphere in 2022.
Katkevich said he doesn’t trust those numbers and thinks there’s more to report.
“One of the asks is for air monitoring to be done in Brookfield,” he said. “So instead of just relying on the company's own data and projections, we're actually getting the real data and understanding the true impacts of this facility.”
Iroquois was fined $22 million by the U.S. in 1996 in criminal and civil fines for violating federal environmental and safety laws in accordance with the pipeline, according to a release from the federal Department of Justice. At the time, it was the second-largest environmental penalty since the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.
Swift said she’s also suspicious of the emissions data the company that Iroquois is providing.
“There’s no outside oversight,” she said. “They go in the [chimney] stack, and they test the air there. And that's all that's required. There's no ambient air testing. So we're very concerned.”
TC Energy referred questions about the facility to the station’s operator, Iroquois Pipeline Operating Company. When approached by WSHU to provide comment, Iroquois declined.
