SEARSPORT, Maine — From the Sears Island Causeway, the five yellow and red weather balloons that floated peacefully over the treeline on Mack Point Thursday morning had a cheerful, almost festive air.
But the people who prowled around the region armed with cameras and binoculars didn’t all think that the brightly colored balloons — designed to show just how high a proposed liquid propane gas storage tank would be if approved — were innocuous.
“The balloon test — I find it a little bit benign,” Victoria Miller of Searsport said before leaving the causeway. “You don’t see the impact. You don’t see the clearcutting. You don’t see what it’s really going to look like.”
The Searsport Planning Board had asked Denver-based DCP Midstream to do the balloon test as part of their review of the controversial $40 million project’s application. The terminal and storage tank would be constructed at the Mack Point industrial zone, but according to the balloons, they will be located much closer to Angler’s Restaurant on Route 1 in Searsport than to the existing tank farm there.
The red, central balloon, which marked the highest point of the proposed 137-foot-tall structure, seemed to loom out of the woods just behind the popular seafood eatery, with the four yellow balloons denoting the height of the tank’s sides hovering around it.
If the project is built as proposed, the company will clear-cut some acres in the woods for the tank and also for a safety berm around the tank. The firm will need to leave a buffer of trees between the facility and the shoreline at Long Cove in order to meet Searsport’s ordinance, according to Searsport Code Enforcement Officer Randy Hall, who also was scoping out the balloons.
The project already has received approval by entities that include the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Coast Guard. It now awaits approval only from the town of Searsport. The planning board is reviewing the 700-page application.
“I am not opposed to progress, as long as it’s done the right way,” Hall, who will not be asked to approve the project, said. “If they approve it, it’s my responsibility to make sure it’s done properly. That’s why I’m here today.”
Searsport Selectman Dick Desmarais also was on the causeway. He said that because the balloons appeared to be visible from few parts of town, he initially thought they had been placed too low by the balloon testing company.
“I’m pleasantly surprised to see that it’s as low as it appears to be,” he said. “It’s been overhyped.”
In fact, a private contractor doing the test for DCP Midstream said Thursday morning that the top of the tank would be at the level of the bottom of the balloon. He was driving around Searsport, taking photographs of the balloons for the company and the planning board to use.
One location where the balloons appeared almost startlingly close was off Old Route 1, a road on the western side of Route 1 that climbs into the hills.
The balloons looked large behind Lorraine Brooks as she worked in her tidy front lawn on Porter Street.
“My husband and I are fine with it,” she said. “It’s not bothering us. I grew up here — we always had the tank farm. We’re not upset or concerned. Actually, I’m glad there’s some business wanting to come to Searsport.”
Those opposed to the project have cited safety concerns, negative impact on tourism and worries about increased traffic on Route 1 from additional propane tanker trucks coming and going from the facility.
Many people checking out the balloons Thursday reiterated those concerns.
“We will see these huge, wide things, plus the other buildings, and the flare,” said one Stockton Springs woman standing near the Irving gas station on Route 1 who did not share her name. “But we’re concerned not only about the way it looks, but about the safety, the hazard, the trucks going down this road. The potential for an accident also worries us.”
Negative effects on tourism? Please! Do you really think this thing is going to keep people away? Talk about over hyping something! Out of staters will continue to come. This thing won’t make a bit of difference. Let it hapen. If it provides one job that’s one less unemployed person.
And I saw the balloons today. Not even half as bad as some projected it would be.
You know, we both live here, so who are we to say that it will or will not keep people away?
But tourism is the second biggest, or the biggest industry in state. The one thing we do have is scenic beauty. Mess that up and you do not get it back… Maybe the tourists want to not see big tanks from Penobscot Bay? Lots of boaters out there.
Many unanswered questions: safety, electric grid tie-in (gas must be kept -41F at all times), evacuations plans, costs to neighboring towns for greatly increased fire and EMT budgets, due to mutual aid agreements, many more heavy trucks on Route 1, etc…the list goes on and on.
I read that the way you get a job building, or running, a tank facility like this is to have lots of experience: you sign up online, and compete against all those guys who have experience in Houston, the Gulf, oil rigs, etc. Not many carpenters from Maine needed, I am afraid.
I lived and worked in Searsport before I moved away for a job with pay I could live on. While Maine is a tourist destination I don’t think they all come here to visit Searsport. People pass through headed to the Mall, Acadia National Park, Fort Knox, etc. They will still drive through just like people drive through places in NJ, NY, MA. etc in order to get to their vacation spot.
Added costs to neighboring Fire Departments and EMS, what costs? They have a mutual aid agreement that says they will respond when asked. It doesn’t say you must have a certain number of Fire Fighters, EMT’s or what kind of equipment. They don’t have to change anything. They can also provide notice they don’t want to be in a compact with Searsport. They law allows towns to withdraw from mutual aid contracts.
As for Searsport needing more equipment then have the tank farm provide it. I recall when the natural gas power station was built in Veazie they paid for a new ladder truck for the town. Plus they pay a lot of tax $$$$ for the town.
It all comes down to I don’t want to see it, I don’t want traffic, I don’t want to be bothered, let it be in some other town, not mine.
As for Angler’s, nice place, nice food. If you move I am sure another business will step in and take up the slack.
Be glad someone wants to provide jobs and tax base, a lot of places would bend over backwards for it, then again, there would be some NIMBY’s there too.
Law n Disorder said it well. Anyone who has been following and not criticizing the whole time, would know these things. And if you went to the jobs and trades fair like a bunch of us, you would have learned how they hire people well in advance and train them for over a year. That’s commitment. And the trades around here know how to build these. They have built pipelines, boilers, tanks, etc. Don’t sell your local talent short. Maybe you just don’t mix with everyday hardworking people. You have no idea what goe into building one of these. The trades do. And we’d like the work, thank you. So we can be home with our families instead of looking for work far away. I take this seriously. This is food in my kids’ mouths.
The Angler will always pack em in!
Thanks Bud!
It will keep people away from Searsport. Nobody is going to drive all the way to Maine to see something that you can see in New Jersey.
You don’t GO to Searsport. You drive through it on the way to other places. Have you listened to all the tourists who have said it doesn’t make a difference to them? One guy visting yesterday on the pier said to me as much.
Well written and balanced article..kudos.
I noticed that to. Good job Abigail Curtis!! It’s nice to read a NEWS article for a change.
Keep ’em coming.
The only thing I didn’t like about the article was the use of “clear cutting”…. If Walmart came to town or a business that needed a parking lot, like Bank of America or Athena Health she wouldn’t have used clear cutting. It would have simply been clearing the land or something trivial. Using “clear cutting” just gets everyone worked back up that this is an environmental tragedy…. Which it’s not. Remove trees, build tank. But it was a balanced article. Nice to see for a change.
“My husband and I are fine with it,” she said. “It’s not bothering us. I grew up here — we always had the tank farm. We’re not upset or concerned. Actually, I’m glad there’s some business wanting to come to Searsport.”
Now there’s someone who gets it. Way to go, Lorraine Brooks!!!
Real Mainers!
I drove south on Rt 1 today and it certainly is going to change the skyline from the Long Cove side of the project as you are coming down the hill. Of course when a tourist is traveling in that direction I suppose they are on their way back home from Bar Harbor and have already spent all of their tourist dollars, so perhaps its a moot point.
Its going to make a very big difference to the town and the way it is viewed, and people certainly do have the right to be NIMBY on this eyesore. And the safety concerns are legit also, as you are creating hundreds of more vehicles carrying hazardous materials. Do the math before you consider this a harmless project.
“Those opposed to the project have cited safety concerns, negative impact on tourism”
Speaking as a tourist that visits Searsport (and other parts of Maine) every year I can tell you that a tank is not going to stop me from visiting.
Has anyone considered another approach? That is, make lemonade out of the lemons given to you? We all know that tanks are hardly the ideal hunk of metal to have parked in one’s dooryard.
However, back in the 1970’s when I was in college in Boston, I used to drive through Dorchester, Mass, and Boston Gas had these huge tanks – I think there were two at the time – that had been turned into murals. It looked as if a giant had taken an artist’s paintbrush and painted colorful, free-flowing lines across the tanks. Personally, I thought it was very clever and made otherwise boring tanks not only attractive but a noted landmark. We have a few of those “landmarks” in Maine. I don’t think there is a Mainer around who doesn’t know where the “BFI” is located. Perhaps, this proposed tank, appropriately attired could be another such landmark.
I was unfamiliar with the history behind the tanks in Dorchester but here is a good article on the subject. It involves a nun and the anti-ware movement. Apparently, one tank is being retained even though it is no longer in use. I imagine they long ago reached the end of their useful lives.
http://aesthetic.gregcookland.com/2007/10/sister-corita-kent.html
My suggestion: Turn the tank into a work of art (by Maine artists, of course!) to draw those tourists. Hey, it worked for me. It is 2012 and I still remember the tanks from 1973!
It’s not a bad idea Chuck…however, it has to be considered with safety in mind. The regulations oversee that because of the effects of paint color, etc. But there are ways to have something on it that’s tasteful. I think that is up for consideration. Anything would be better than that hideous mermaid sign outside Searsport Shores.
Cheap shot about the mermaid sign, Whale. You wouldn’t just happen to be still joining in with that cowardly smear campaign against some of the tank opponents that was led by the former Searsport fire chief, would you? You know the blowhard bully I’m referring to, don’t you, the one whose true loyalties have been with a company based in Denver, not with the people of Searsport who he was sworn to help protect, the same one our selectmen most appropriately decided recently to send packing? You aren’t him, are you?
As for painting the tank, DCP Midstream also showed its manipulative two-faced strategy on that one, initially assuring the community that, of course, they’d be willing to paint it in some magical way that would somehow tone down the sheer massive obtrusiveness in a traditional-looking small Maine town of what would be the largest such refrigerated gas tank in North America. But just last week, the company decided it could get away with revealing, no way, this 14-story-high expanse of steel must be entirely painted a glaring white.
Of course, the company knew this from the start and, in fact, the reason why makes a lot of sense. The only practical way to confine nearly 23 million gallons of liquefied propane is to refrigerate it to below minus 44 degrees Fahrenheit, its boiling point, and place it in an unpressurized tank insulated as efficiently as possible. That includes making the tank as thermally reflective as possible — blinding white.
In such a facility, the liquid propane is constantly boiling off and a bank of compressors is constantly collecting this gas that is freed, converting it back to a liquid and returning it to the tank. If this is built, let’s all hope we don’t have an ice storm such as the one we experienced in 1998 when local power was out at least a week. In its permit application to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, DCP acknowledged it won’t have emergency generator potential to power the compressors.
That means the free gas must be vented up a 75-foot flare pipe and burned off. If the flare can’t handle all the escaping gas, then it must be vented directly into the atmosphere in an unburned state through special emergency vents. Otherwise, the tank would rupture and a catastrophic ocean of liquid gas would burst across the landscape and probably explode, at first as a function of rapid phase shift due to the extraordinary temperature differential, then conventionally through combustion at supersonic speed.
It’s very peculiar how even without an ice storm or other unusual circumstances causing major long-term power interruption DCP still expects that in the course of a year the Searsport facility would experience what it calls “emergency” conditions lasting a total of up to 500 hours, conditions that would require sending a 50-foot plume of flame out its flare stack. Do the math and you’ll discover 500 hours is about three weeks out of the year, almost 6 percent of the time. That’s an awful lot of emergency the people of Searsport could expect as a matter of course to have to live with.
Sadly, the MDEP thought this was all perfectly reasonable and, in fact, fast-tracked DCP’s entire application. It so happens that Patricia Aho, Gov. LePage’s hand-picked choice for commissioner, spent the previous nine years as chief lobbyist in Augusta for the American Petroleum Institute. Do you suppose there might be a connection?
hate much? talk about slander. Only bullies I see around here are you and your gang. If anyone is dividing this town, it’s you and your hatefulness.
Really? Two whole paragaphs about the color? “Blinding white”? Hyperbole, thy name is Peter Taber.
Guess what…we’re in Maine. We’re 96% “blinding white,” especially from October through May.
Great example of why the residents of this area don’t take you or TBNT seriously.
I believe many of the opponents to this project, as well as those for it, routinely place themselves in more dangerous situations on a daily basis by simply driving down the highway. How about the person in the oncoming auto, who is texting illegally, the driver reading, applying makeup, reprimanding children, to much alcohol consumption, drugs. Many things distract drivers everyday. I personally would feel safer living near a propane tank than I do on the highway.
An eyesore? Perhaps not the most pleasant view. However do you ever notice the condition of some yards, and buildings as you pass by?
As for trucks moving the Propane, these drivers are some of the most safety conscious and well trained people on the highway. Their biggest problem is other drivers being in to much hurry and not allowing enough room to do their job safely. Yes, there is an occasional bad driver, and they are quickly removed, but on a percentage basis, there are many more bad drivers in automobiles.
I believe the tourists will come, they may want to see what all the excitement is about. (A propane tank in little ol Maine. Did not think they were this advanced). (tongue in cheek).
No matter what is being proposed, there are those who oppose it, and often over-hype to get their point across. With this type of response, one might wonder how strong their argument really is.
If we are to advance, it is necessary to accept some risk in anything we do.
does anyone know the size of the area that would be effected if it was to explode ? I saw a small one explode on the news and that one wiped out a good sized area .
There have been some noteworthy explosions but I thought the last LP tank explosion was about 25 years ago in Texas? None since. Very good point, though.
It’s not going to explode. This is a different kind of tank that the ones that are high pressured. People need to understand the difference and not be freaked out by the spin of TBNT. The feds and state already looked at all the safety of it. They wouldn’t approve it if it had risks that couldn’t be managed. Hell, I’d be more worried at the small propane tank on an RV than I would about this.
The federal government thinks it’s capable of exploding. The scientists think it’s capable of exploding. But you, who apparently have no such expertise but would like to go work for DCP, you think it can’t. Even if I knew nothing about this, I doubt I would take your comments very seriously.
DCP is no friend of Maine.
These anti development fanatics are no friend to their own neighbors.
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