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Pipeline Distresses Residents

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By MARK HOLAN, The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 4, 2007

TAMPA - Central city residents say they will raise their concerns about a proposed jet fuel pipeline through their neighborhoods with the Tampa City Council, starting with today's council meeting.

'Our lives and our future is being mapped out behind our backs,' Carol Josephs Marshall, president of the V.M. Ybor Neighborhood Association and Crime Watch, said during a Wednesday night briefing by Houston pipeline company Kinder Morgan.

Several of the 20 or so at the meeting said they were blindsided by news reports of the proposed 9-mile pipeline to Tampa International Airport from the Port of Tampa near downtown.

Project director Jacque Williams said a consortium of nine airlines requested Kinder Morgan build the pipeline as an alternative to the pipeline from Port Tampa, near MacDill Air Force Base, that has supplied TIA since 1971.

'The airlines should have been here out of respect to the community,' said Harriett McCray of the Old West Tampa Community Development Corp.
Kinder Morgan has briefed most council members privately about the project. Today, members are to be updated about a proposed franchise agreement that would pay the city for allowing the company to install the pipeline in the right of way.

Route Touches Several Neighborhoods

About two-thirds of the proposed route cuts through city neighborhoods, including sections of Ybor City, Tampa Heights, Old West Tampa and Northeast Macfarlane. The pipeline would pass in front of five schools, including Blake High. Williams said school officials have been briefed.

Williams said the company explored seven routes, trying to avoid buried utilities and residential streets as much as possible.

'Basically, nobody wants it on their streets,' he said. 'It would never get built if we had to avoid that.'

Portions of pipeline would be about 4 feet deep, others could be 20 to 30 feet deep.

At Wednesday's meeting at Stetson University College of Law, several people questioned the company's safety record, including a Sept. 15, 2005, rupture of its 85-mile fuel line from the Port of Tampa to Orlando.

More than 37,000 gallons of diesel fuel from the buried pipeline gushed to the surface or polluted groundwater near Charles Wilkinson Lane and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, west of Plant City. A dozen homes were evacuated within a 3-acre area, where cleanup efforts continue more than two years later.

'I want the people of Tampa to know it's not as rosy as they paint the picture,' former Plant City Mayor Terry Ballard, who owns a storage business next to the spill site, said during a Tuesday interview. 'People need to know what could happen.'

Company Suspects Other's Error

Jerry Aycock, Kinder Morgan's remediation and emergency response director, said in a Wednesday interview that his company thinks the pipeline was nicked by somebody else's workers months or years before the break.

More than 14,000 gallons of polluted groundwater and 15,000 tons of contaminated soil were removed from the site, with heavy equipment digging out some areas to about 8 feet deep, according to records and residents' photos.
Kinder Morgan built a small water treatment system on Ballard's property that continues to clean polluted groundwater. The company also plans in the coming year to make chemical and biological injections into the soil to break apart and disintegrate pockets of diesel fuel that could not be removed during the original cleanup, Aycock said.

Aycock said the cleanup could take until 2010 and cost $6 million to $7 million, including the purchase of one property and settlements with residents.

Reporter Mark Holan can be reached at mholan@tampatrib.com or (813) 835-2102.

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