SEARSPORT, Maine — Just how far around the upper Penobscot Bay region would a controversial 137-foot-tall liquid propane gas storage tank be visible if it’s built?
A balloon test scheduled for Thursday morning aims to answer that question, which has been on the minds of many as the Searsport Planning Board weighs the application from Denver-based DCP Midstream for the proposed $40 million project. The terminal and storage tank would be constructed at the Mack Point industrial zone.
At a meeting earlier in June, planning board members requested that DCP Midstream officials do the test, according to longtime chairman Bruce Probert.
“DCP has the resources and the technology to do these things,” he said. “It should give us a little better perspective.”
DCP Midstream is a private joint venture owned equally by Spectra Energy and ConocoPhillips, and the project already has received approval by entities that include the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the U.S. Coast Guard.
It now awaits approval only from the town of Searsport.
According to Roz Elliott, spokesperson for the Colorado company, the balloon test will consist of five large helium balloons. A red balloon that’s about seven feet in diameter will be placed at the highest point of the 14-story tall storage tank. It will be surrounded by four yellow balloons that are about five feet in diameter, which will be placed to represent the height of the sides of the tank.
Once the balloons are airborne, a photographer will move around to different vantage points within Searsport to take high-quality pictures.
“Do you see it from there? Do you not see it from there?” Elliott asked. “It’s really interesting — making sure you have results that have integrity. I think it’s pretty significant.”
She said that several factors may affect the timing of the balloon test, which is scheduled to take place at about 8 a.m. Thursday. If the weather is foggy or windy, the test won’t happen.
“The point is to be able to see the balloons,” Elliott said.
Altogether, the test will take four to six hours and the balloons will be visible for quite some time, she said.
Many opposed to the project also will be taking the opportunity to snap pictures of the balloons from various points within the viewshed, according to Astrig Tanguay of Thanks But No Tank.
She said that while the test may be better than nothing, she and others would greatly prefer to have the company provide a three-dimensional scale model. ConocoPhillips is well able to afford to make a scale model, she said.
“The idea that they’re tethering the balloons up a string that you’ll barely be able to see and telling us it represents a tank that’s 14 stories tall and 220 feet wide is absurd,” she said. “All we’ll see is these dots of balloons that represent a solid, 14-story-high structure.”
Project opponents have been asked to take photos of the balloons at Mack Point from locations around the area including Islesboro, Northport, Bayside, Camden and Frankfort.
According to Tanguay, opponents will try to combine the photos using a computer program that will assimilate them into a three-dimensional image.
“I don’t understand why we’re the ones who have to do it,” she said.
Amy Browne, the news and public affairs director of WERU-FM community radio, said that people who take photographs of the balloons are invited to add them to an album on the station’s Facebook page.
Elliott said that if the weather doesn’t cooperate, the balloon test will be postponed until Friday morning.
yes tanks progress!!!!
We wouldn’t want the tourist seeing this tank now would we???
If your livelihood was based on tourist dollars you would be very concerned that they would have the “New Jersey reaction”–as in “Why should I come all the way to Maine for it to look like…”
And depending on who is doing the calculations, tourism is either the second-biggest or the biggest (after logging) industry in the state.
Yeah, let’s ruin that…
I don’t think a lot of tourist dollars are flooding into Searsport, if they were planning on putting this up beside Acadia I might be agreeing with you.
Lots of folks never get up to Acadia, or only sometimes. Some are (were?) content to get as far as Penobscot Bay: to Rockland, to Camden, Belfast, Stockton Springs, Castine, Islesboro, North Haven, Vinalhaven. Maybe they will reconsider their choice? Vermont mountains looking like a better choice?
Searsport is doing this for their “own” benefit (remember, always ‘follow the money…’) but what they are doing effects a whole region, without even a “what ya think?” to the rest of us.
I could see a real drop in land values over this. If town boards are not paying attention, and voicing their concerns now, they risk getting themselves voted out later when the proverbial waste hits the ventilator blades…
Get a grip Astrig, go back out of state where you belong. “I don’t understand why we are the one’s who have to do this” she asks. Well if you haven’t noticed your group, representing a small portion of the population, are the only one’s who are opposed to this. The majority of hard working people in the area are glad to have a business interested in providing jobs to our area residents. Give it up, you lost and the tank will be going up before long.
Were everyone to settle down and quit making like the ‘Chicken Little of Maine’, there is a solution. Take the photo’s of the balloon’s (and one would hope that either the COE or the Coast Guard is taking some of their own from off-shore) from as many locations as possible, including some from a plane if possible, add them to a sensibly demonstrated map and model of the proposed tank farm and then see where this comes out. Make sure that the public safety folk’s, of ALL AFFECTED AGENCIES’, have a ‘say’ in this model as well, and then at the very least the needed information is there for ALL to see and comment on. Transparency, done from all perspective’s, can at least reduce the hysteric’s of this. And given the hysteria of late, maybe that’s not such a bad thing, is it ?
Well, when big oil companies, backed by big law firms, sneak behind a lot of folks backs, get themselves “pre-permitted” (yeah, I know it is “legal,” but legal ain’t right!) there goes the transparency, and you wonder why people are nervous? They hoped to make it a done deal before anyone was the wiser. But we are wiser.
Some of have a long enough memory: that the tanks that were built in NY harbor in about 1983-84 ended up never being used, and were demolished, because they could not get an evacuation and safety plan approved. Why? Because the only valid safety plan was this: “Move everyone, and anything of value 25 miles away!” (In NYC, right….)
There was a reason a nuclear power plant was not built on Sears Island, earthquake faults. But this tank, just next door is OK? No way!
And have you looked at some of the research? The next smallest tank of this kind is on east Tampa bay, FL and if you google map/satellite it and you will see, sure enough, no housing within two miles, only industrial uses. In fact, it is out on a spit of land, for some ‘strange’ reason?
See thanksbutnotank dot org for much more info.
Knowledge is power, we have little enough as it is.
If you’re looking for fiction, go to the Thanks but no Tanks site. If you’re looking for facts, you won’t find them there. They are talented at spinning everything, and they have no clue. If knowledge is power, their generator wouldn’t run a mousetrap.
WERU’s Facebook page has photos of the balloons. They’re (those opposed) already saying that they think the height of the balloons were inaccurate. I can’t WAIT to see the rest of the photo’s! For 7.3 inches on route 1 you can see the top of the tank. I bet that property values are going to plummet, everyone is going to live within a disaster zone, and the tourism mecca of Searsport is no longer going to exist. And the once beautiful views of Seasport (other than the tanks) from communities like New York, oops, Islesboro, Northport, and Belfast (which you can’t see Searport) will be destroyed forever.
Exactly Jeremy! WERU is about as biased as it gets. Of course Astrig is skeptical. She’s skeptical of what’s in her breakfast cereal. The balloon test showed what we’d expect. No big deal at all. It’s on Mack Point, where it should be with the other tanks. Can TBNT finally stop now with their attacks on everyone. It’s growing thin.
Why a ballon? Don’t the engineers know spherical trig?
So now they want to send five giant helium balloons into Searsport airspace, without any public comment on the matter? Helium is a highly explosive and dangerous gas! Hasn’t anyone looked into the risk involved with this crazy experiment? Do we want a Hindenburg incident on our hands right here in midcoast Maine? Won’t someone please think of the CHILDREN! NOT IN MY BACK YARD!!!
Crazy isn’t it! And all those poor TBNT’rs who risked their lives to take pictures. What saints they are. And as we all know, their cameras and technical abilities will be far superior to anything a consultant who does this all the time has. I have such credibility in whatever they say. (NOT)