Broadwater Island

Give it Some Palm Trees, Sand and Seagulls and It’s Okay

By Dan Rattiner

In the last several weeks, there have been numerous public hearings on the East End about whether we want to allow a liquefied regasification plant to be built in the middle of Long Island Sound. The argument is that because of our addiction to gasoline, we have to turn our attention to other means — such as natural gas — to bring us energy.

Underground gas is very plentiful. But transporting it is difficult. You have to cool it down into a liquid so it is condensed and transportable, then bring it to a regasification facility and have it heated up again. It’s a bit like how you transport orange juice as concentrate.

In any case, a company called Broadwater wants to build a plant to regasify this gas in the Sound almost exactly halfway between Riverhead, Long Island and New Haven, Connecticut. It would take place atop a kind of platform on stilts attached to the sea bottom. Ships filled with liquefied gas would come up to it and dock and offload. The gas would then be sent down to an underwater pipe to be transported between Long Island and Connecticut, to you and me and to wherever else it has to go.

I am personally opposed to putting a regasification plant in the middle of Long Island Sound because there are other places set aside for industrial activities and everybody knows where they are. If you want a vacation, come to Long Island’s East End. If you want an industrial facility built somewhere, try it out on the docks in New London, Connecticut where there are all sorts of chemical plants and sub bases and the like.

The thing is, however, that they say this regasification process can be a dangerous business and so it has to be out in open water somewhere, far from shore, yet in water calm enough for ships to dock to a platform. And it has to be far enough away from people so that if somebody accidentally lights a cigarette on the platform and the thing blows up, nobody except those on board gets hurt.

Worst-case blast, apparently, would be within a radius of two miles, although none of these facilities has ever blown up anywhere in the world yet. Therefore, the Broadwater folks have figured out that nine miles north of Riverhead and ten miles south of New Haven is a real good place. They are proposing to build a dock platform 900 feet long and 200 feet wide, about the same size as a large ocean-going cruise ship. It’s far away from population centers. And the government says that we need to find 23 spots for these degasification plants in the waters around the country in the next ten years to cover the country’s increased appetite for gas, or we will wind up up the same creek as we are about gasoline.

But people, including me, object to this here. We know it will be just a tiny thing on the horizon out there. Just, please, find somewhere more appropriate for it. Not here.

On the other hand, some of the arguments you hear against Broadwater in our neck of the woods are just plain embarrassing.

Long Island Sound is this pristine waterway with sailboats, swimmers, fisherman, canoes, rowboats, parasailors and surfers bustling around. A cargo ship coming to New York? Never heard of it.

Of course we need natural gas. But just get it here. Don’t be bothering telling us HOW. And we certainly don’t want THIS.

There are many other places where people would just LOVE to have a big ugly natural gas facility. They need the jobs. We don’t.

And what if the terrorists attack? Just sitting out there all alone, far from everybody, they could blow it up. We’d have to LOOK at it getting blown up. Ugh!

(Think about that one.)

Of course, outside the halls where they have all these meetings, there are thousands of automobiles, many of them big gas guzzlers, waiting patiently to take all the protesters against Broadwater home.

Sometimes I wonder about the human race. People fought hard to get the government to finance wind farms to create energy. So they now have made it possible for us to have windfarms and everybody still wants them, but certainly not off Montauk Point. And it’s just too bad those people down on Jones Beach didn’t have the clout to keep them from coming THERE.

And why windfarms? They’re so ugly and dangerous. What if a child gets hit by a propeller? What if an oil tanker hits one in a fog? Maybe the only reason we have windfarms (instead of say, solar power), is because people in high places have business friends who want to get rich. And it is we who will pay, where before, the wind was free.

* * *

I think the public would have no objection whatsoever, to Broadwater if they skirted it with palm trees and put a water sports roller coaster on it for the kids to use when the freighters were not around offloading liquid gas containers. They could even make that fun. The alarm would sound when a freighter approached. A ferryboat would take everyone for a spin. The “all clear” would sound, the resort would reopen, and everybody would return. Ferryboats lit with Japanese lanterns would take everybody out to this “resort” every evening — with banjo concerts on board both ways — maybe a little gambling casino in the stern, maybe a few high kicking showgirls on the poop deck and so forth. We could put it to a vote. Let the people decide. It will pass.

Except for me. I will vote against it. All those ferryboats tooting their horns, all that banging on banjos — what do people think this is?