Mass Health Care Providers Against Fracked Gas, a group of nurses, doctors, public health practitioners and allied health professionals, plans to call Tuesday for a moratorium on new gas pipeline infrastructure, pending a comprehensive health impact study.
The organization, founded this year, will call for an immediate moratorium on all new and future fracked gas infrastructure, it said on its website Monday.
Dr. Curtis Nordgaard, a pediatrician, educator and activist on the public health risks of fracked gas pipelines and infrastructure, along with Dr. Michael Cocchi, a critical care and emergency medicine physician and member of the Steering Committee for Stop the West Roxbury Lateral Pipeline, and Seamus Whelan, a Massachusetts Nurses Association member, plan a press conference at at Spectra Energy’s Metering and Regulating Station in Roxbury.
Whalen is also on the Steering Committee for Stop the West Roxbury Lateral Pipeline.
With several gas pipeline projects planned in Massachusetts — including several new Spectra lateral lines and the Connecticut Expansion Project in southern Berkshire County by the Tennessee Gas Pipeline Co. – the group says, “Human health has only been a secondary consideration for these projects, at best. Pipeline environmental reviews do not include formal health impact assessments to determine how the toxic, carcinogenic, and radioactive pollutants associated with gas pipelines might affect our health.
“Our organization is working to protect the patients, families, and communities we serve by calling for an immediate moratorium on current pipeline construction and the approval of new pipeline projects in Massachusetts until Comprehensive Health Impact Assessments become a part of the interstate gas pipeline review process.”