By STEPHANIE McFEETERS
@mcfeeters
NORTHAMPTON — A group of environmentally minded neighbors recently stumbled across some data online they found shocking: There are 91 natural gas leaks in Northampton, including two on Massasoit Street, where many of them live.
“They’ve just been spewing out gas, some for decades, we don’t know how much gas,” said Marty Nathan, 65, at her home on Massasoit Street Monday afternoon.
Nathan is part of a neighborhood group that formed last fall, around 16 households that call themselves “twodegrees@greenneighbors. earth.” During their preparations for an upcoming Earth Day fair, the group members came across information about natural gas leaks in the city and decided they needed to do something.
Last week, the group sent a letter to Steve Bryant, president of Columbia Gas of Massachusetts, demanding action on the leaks and answers to several questions.
“This is startling and dismaying to us for several reasons,” they wrote of the leaks, describing them as dangerous, unhealthy, contributing to climate change and expensive for customers. They pointed to a 2012 natural gas explosion that injured more than a dozen people in Springfield, as well as methane’s potency as a greenhouse gas.
“We may be fighting like crazy to stop burning fossil fuels, but the methane may cause us to lose the race and get inexorable climate change and ruin life on Earth as we know it,” Nathan said. “Those are the stakes for our itty-bitty leaks.”
Nathan cited a recent article by Bill McKibben in The Nation, which builds on a Harvard research paper to suggest the U.S. may be wildly underestimating how methane leaks in the country’s natural gas infrastructure are contributing to climate change.
Pipe replacement
Officials with the utility and the city say they are taking the group’s concerns seriously, but stress that none of the leaks poses a public safety hazard.
Columbia Gas of Massachusetts is pouring significant resources into replacing all cast iron and bare steel pipes across its service area, said Andrea Luppi, a western Massachusetts spokeswoman for the company.
“We have a very aggressive plan,” she said. “We’re spending $80 million a year to get as much pipe replaced as we can.”
The company is replacing about 45 miles of pipe every year, Luppi said.
Leaks are graded on a scale, Luppi explained, noting that most in Northampton are Grade 3 and do not pose a risk — “so small that there’s no danger whatsoever to the environment or to people.”
“We’re not required to repair them,” Luppi, the utility representative, said of the Grade 3 leaks, which are monitored on a regular basis. “We’re required to monitor them and make sure they don’t advance, they don’t get to the point where they need to be repaired.”
Information about the 91 Northampton leaks comes from Home Energy Efficiency Team (HEET), a Cambridge nonprofit that has used data submitted by utilities to map leaks across Massachusetts, finding thousands of them — some of which have been sitting unrepaired for years.
It’s an issue plaguing much of the state’s aging natural gas infrastructure. A new state law requires utility companies to report the age and location of all known gas leaks, and Boston has by far the highest number: 1,853 unrepaired leaks, the oldest dating to 1985, according to HEET. A map of Northampton shows 91 active natural gas leaks as of Dec. 31, 2015, data taken from an annual report Columbia Gas of Massachusetts filed with the Department of Public Utilities. The oldest dates to 1999.
Seeping out through old, corroding pipes, these leaks are potentially explosive, kill trees, hurt human health and damage the climate, the Cambridge nonprofit states.
Utility companies are well aware of the issue, and are required by law to immediately fix leaks that could cause an explosion. Following state legislation passed in 2014, utilities are also required to repair some leaks during street construction that exposes pipelines, and focus on fixing leaks near schools.
Safety, cost
Still, locals were surprised to find there were so many leaks beneath the city’s streets.
Jim Levey, 68, and Christine Olson, 65, members of the neighborhood environmental group, said they’re concerned not only about the safety and climate issues posed by the leaks, but by the cost to customers.
A report released by U.S. Sen. Edward Markey in August 2013 said Massachusetts residents paid up to$1.5 billion between 2000 to 2011 for gas lost in leaky pipes.
Luppi said the company is taking the Massasoit Street group’s concerns into consideration and gathering information. She said Bryant spoke with Nathan on the phone Monday and has agreed to meet with the group.
Northampton Mayor David Narkewicz also expects to meet with Bryant soon, according to Chief of Staff Lyn Simmons. The city’s fire chief and building inspector have been in touch with Columbia Gas about the issue, and are confident that there are no public safety hazards, Simmons wrote in an email.
While the Northampton leaks may be important locally, they are minimal when thinking about climate change nationally or globally, said Raymond Bradley, a geosciences professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who directs the Climate System Research Center.
“However, the sum total of all small leaks around the country, and around the world, probably make a significant contribution to the global increase in methane that we have observed over recent decades,” he wrote in an email.
Fellow UMass Amherst geosciences professor Michael Rawlins said these leaks are a small piece of a much bigger pictures.
“The global climate impacts of leaks of this type are minimal when compared against worldwide methane emissions,” Rawlins said. “We should not get sidetracked from the important issue of reducing massive human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide, which are the dominant driver of global warming.”
Stephanie McFeeters can be reached at smcfeeters@gazettenet.com.