Almost 3,000 people who submitted public comments condemning a proposed Ohio River barge dock for hydraulic fracturing waste are saying they’ve been told their comments are meaningless.
The dock — set to be located just downriver of the fork of the Ohio and Hocking rivers in Meigs County — has activists and local politicians heated about its potential negative effects on the regional water supply. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers accepted public comments regarding the dock from June 27 to Aug. 24.
The Corps instructed commenters to submit letters as hard copies or emails. However, nearly three-quarters of the 4,000 commenters chose to submit their letters through an alert on the Food and Water Watch website, an environmental advocacy group.
The Corps has invalidated those letters and will only count the fewer than 1,000 letters that came via email and mail, according to Heather Cantino from the Athens County Fracking Action Network.
Cantino said the the Corps hasn’t set a deadline for a decision on the building of the dock, but a release from ACFAN added that Teresa Spagna, a Corps project manager, told group members that she would now accept letters until the decision date.
“They alone are making the choice to sit on the letters,” Cantino said. “The Food and Water Watch comments include names and contact information that make them just as valid as the emailed and mailed comments.”
Cantino has sent out a press release asking that the excluded commenters request the Corps to count their original letters.
The barge dock would hold waste from hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracking, directly on the Ohio River by GreenHunter Resources, a Texas oil field management company that activists have long pinpointed as a threat to local flora and fauna.
GreenHunter already owns and operates a waste storage site in Washington County, northeast of Athens.
The Corps must approve GreenHunter’s application before the dock can be built.
Members of Athens City Council passed a non-binding resolution in late July condemning the move. At the time, Mayor Paul Wiehl said he was bracing himself for a worst-case scenario, in light of the water crisis in West Virginia this winter, when thousands of gallons of a chemical spilled into the Elk River and kept hundreds of thousands of people without drinkable water.
Representatives from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers could not be reached for comment by press time.
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