A major big city daily? A local newspaper of record along the proposed pipeline path? Nope: the Valdosta State University student newspaper, The Spectator, has done what its bigger newspaper colleagues have not dared: oppose the Sabal Trail fracked methane pipeline and demand renewable energy instead. Where students lead, maybe their elders will follow.

Editorial in The Spectator 1 May 2014 (I added the links and images), Pipeline a risk to Valdosta,

“My first thought was it’s a nuclear bomb, we’re dead,” Kim Krajniak said in a 1994 New York Times article. “No words could ever tell you how frightening it was. My sliding glass door was like an oven. People were running out in their underwear. It was bedlam. People running and falling, kids naked. I felt like an animal running scared for my life.”

On the morning of March 23, 1994, a Texas Eastern Transmission gas pipeline erupted next to an apartment complex in Edison, New Jersey. The chaos that ensued resulted in $25 million in damage and left 128 families without homes.

Now, Texas Eastern Transmission’s parent company, Spectra Energy Corp., wants to build a pipeline that will cut straight through Valdosta’s backyard.

Spectra Energy is engaged in joint-venture with NextEra Energy to construct the $3 billion Sabal Trail pipeline.

It goes on to mention central Florida’s Green Swamp and the Florida[n] Aquifer.

“My mom and dad taught us that we are the caretakers of our land, and I feel if we don’t protect our land — protect our water and our ecosystem — we’re going to lose it,” Roselyn Beasley Bridges, property owner in Mitchell, Worth, Colquitt and Dougherty counties, said in an interview with the Albany Herald. “Every person in this region who turns on a faucet and gets a glass of pure, clear drinking water should thank God. And that, more than anything, is what I feel is at stake here.”

After rehearsing Spectra’s “spotty safety record” and the ecosystems the pipeline would cross, the Spectator summarizes: “the risks are just too great”.

The editorial concludes:

VSU students, find your voice. Write to your local state representatives, and let them know that it is time to usher in a new age of renewable energy.

There’s also an election going on. Why not make it a campaign issue?

-jsq

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