Park Township Residents Oppose Gas Company Site

The proposed Nottawa Gas Company facility site in Park Township (Adapted from Google Maps screenshot|Watershed Voice)

At a regular meeting of the Park Township board Wednesday, citizens and board members discussed an in-process application to have a property rezoned for commercial use in an area that is currently mostly residential. The applicant is the Nottawa Gas Company, which would like to purchase a new property along M-60 near North Fisher Lake Road and relocate there. A group of residents opposes approval of the rezoning application.

Nottawa Gas currently operates a propane gas sales, storage, and distribution facility on combined Highways M-66 and M-86 between Nottawa and Colon. However, the lessor of its current property would like to use it for something else. As a result, the gas company is considering purchase of a parcel of land on the east side of Highway M-60 between North Fisher Lake Road and Wilson Boulevard. The parcel stretches all the way to Darr Road and is currently zoned for residential and agricultural use. It is about 1,000 feet from the nearest point on Fisher Lake.

A Nottawa Gas employee is offering the parcel for sale to the company. Earlier this year, Nottawa Gas submitted a request to have it rezoned for commercial and light industrial use to the township’s Zoning Administrator, Doug Kuhlman.

The rezoning application is scheduled for the first round of review by the township’s Planning Commission at 7 p.m. on Thursday, November 19 at the Park Township Hall. There, the Planning Commission will make a recommendation to either approve or deny the application. From that point it proceeds through an intermediate step of county-level review before going to the Township Board for final approval.

At Wednesday’s Township Board meeting, before regular agenda items were discussed, residents were already asking board members not to accept the rezoning application. During a public comment period shortly after the meeting started, seven township residents stood to speak in opposition to the proposed gas facility. They spoke on several issues, including the potential impacts of permitting increased commercial development in the area, quality-of-life issues, the potential for setting a development precedent, and potential safety hazards.

One commenter spoke for several minutes about the readability and understandability of a public meeting notice for the upcoming Planning Commission special meeting. On the same day, October 31, two public meeting notices were carried in the Three Rivers Commercial-News, she said. One, placed by the City of Three Rivers, was “short, concise, and to-the-point,” while the Park Township notice was “lengthy” and “confusing.”

In the Three Rivers notice, she said, the meeting’s purpose was stated in line two, while in the Park Township notice, it was not stated until line 31. Meeting participation information in the Three Rivers notice, she said, was simple and brief, while it occupied 25 lines in the Park Township notice. “If I wasn’t interested, I would never know where to look” for the needed information, she said. Another commenter said the “pertinent information needs to be at the top.”

The commenter asked the township to reformat and republish its notice for the November 19 meeting. Township Trustee Tom Springer said the lengthiness of the public participation information appeared to have come from copying and pasting the instructions that come with with the Zoom online meeting platform, which are typically long, detailed, and not arranged in a descriptive format.

Township Supervisor Ed English said the notice would be reformatted and published again if there is time to get it in beneath the deadlines for the Commercial-News’s twice-weekly deadlines prior to its print publication days, which occur on Saturday and Wednesday. A public notice is also available on the township website.

Two commenters said they or people they knew did not receive mailed notices about the special meeting and public hearing that were supposed to have gone out to residents who live within a 300-foot radius of the property. After further discussion, it became apparent that one letter went to an obsolete address, and English said the township would resend that letter.

Speaking about quality-of-life issues that the proposed project potentially raises, including light pollution, noise, odors, and traffic, another commenter asked, “who’s going to pay when the roads get beat up don the line from all the trucks coming in and out?” before answering rhetorically, “we are.”

The commenter said the facility would likely have lighting “like the Fourth of July” for security reasons. In previous conversations, Kuhlman said he was uncertain what lighting, if any, Nottawa Gas proposed to install at the site. Site sketches he shared with Watershed Voice over the summer did not clearly what indicate proposed lighting might look like.

The same commenter also spoke to the potential for setting a precedent that could transform the area into a commercial one.  He described the area as a “quiet residential area,” and that with respect to noise, odor, light, and traffic, “people move in out there to get away from that.” The same commenter later said, “we don’t want to turn this into the Village of Fisher Lake.”

Regarding for the potential for commercial development along the adjacent stretch of M-60, English and other officials in previous conversations have pointed to the township’s master plan, which calls for more commercial development in the interest of growing the township’s tax base. On Wednesday, one commenter asked if the same benefits could also be realized by steering the gas facility to the township’s existing industrial zone, but English said the parcels in the Industrial Park are already taken.

Regarding safety concerns, two commenters pointed to the potential for what is known as a “BLEVE,” pronounced bleh-vee. BLEVE is an acronym for “boiling liquid, expanding vapor event.” The word “explosion” is sometimes substituted for the word “event.”

A BLEVE is a type of explosion that occurs when a liquid is heated to the point that it would boil under regular ambient conditions, but because it is sealed inside a tank under pressure, it remains in a liquid state. Either after sufficient heat and pressure build up inside the tank, a fire outside weakens it, or both, the tank fails.

This instantly exposes the liquid inside to outside pressure. Because it is at boiling temperature but suddenly no longer under compression, the liquid expands explosively into a cloud of gas. This can be tremendously forceful, since the gaseous form of a material often naturally fills a volume thousands of times that of its liquid form.

The effect is considerably more dramatic if the liquid in the tank is flammable. The same heat source that makes it boil would normally also ignite the liquid, but because it is starved for oxygen inside the tank, it does not burn. When the tank fails, the flammable material ignites explosively as soon as it comes into contact with oxygen.

Thus, in a BLEVE, the liquid is essentially exploding in two ways at the same time, through rapid expansion from the instant change from liquid to gas, and because it is instantly catching fire all at once. For tanks of several thousand gallons, the result can be a fireball hundreds of feet across, along with other types of explosion damage spread across an area that can stretch for thousands of feet.

Although dramatic and destructive, BLEVE-type failures are statistically rare, and when they do occur, they are more likely to happen in railroad tank cars and other moveable tanks because those are more vulnerable to damage. In addition, propane storage tanks often include a number of safety features designed to protect against certain kinds of accidents and prolong the time it would take to reach the failure point in case of fire.

However, township residents who spoke Wednesday pointed out that the nearest fire station is in Three Rivers, and the nearest Park Township fire station is beyond Three Rivers. Even the type of small tanks used to supply propane gas grills, one commenter said, can pose a life-threatening hazard, especially when stored together in numbers.

A commenter who first discussed the Nottawa Gas issue with Watershed Voice this past summer, Pam Hughes, said, “I know there are safety regulations out there, we understand that, but accidents still happen.” Hughes said current safety standards from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security would require evacuation of a half-mile radius around the proposed facility in the event of a fire. That radius, she said, contains 214 parcels of land.

Another commenter said that in the case of a BLEVE that occurred in Ohio, the windows in his brother’s home were cracked six miles away. Putting the gas facility on the proposed site would not just be “inconsistent” with current zoning and property uses in the area, “it would be irresponsible.” Had he known the proposed site were available, he said, he “would have bought it.”

One commenter called the issue a question of “proper placement.” A commenter who said he lives 75 feet from the proposed property said the complex would contain storage capacity for a total of 250,000 gallons of propane. “We shouldn’t have to point out that no one would want this. You wouldn’t want this next door, and therefore, it shouldn’t be difficult to recognize that no one would want to buy a home next to it,” the commenter said. “The short-term economic gain does not justify the long-term economic loss. It simply is not a good plan. Do the right thing and say no.”

A resident who lives near the Darr Road side of the proposed property asked those in attendance Wednesday to “imagine what it would feel like to feel like a sitting duck every day of your life.” She said, we are hardworking people, and we pay our taxes, and we’re hones, and we do all these things. Our home is our haven. That’s our safe place from everything htat goes on, the pandemic, everything that’s going on, that’s our safe place. To feel like that could be gone, and just to constantly feel like the city, I don’t know anyone who would want to live that way.”

English and Trustee Mike Kinne, who  said the decision is far from being made yet, and the township board has not yet had a role in the process beyond having begun looking over the gas company’s rezoning application and the booklet of materials Kuhlman prepared for the township’s Planning Commission. “Everybody on the Planning Commission got that book, like, yesterday,” Kinne said. “And we’re reading it right now. I’m halfway through it.”

“The process is the process,” English said. “We’re just following the process that we have to follow.” Kinne said whatever decision the Planning Commission produces next week is “just a recommendation,” and the Township Board will have the final say.

For next week’s public hearing with the Planning Commission, which will also include a public comment opportunity, English said public attendance will be available to “as many as will fit” in the township hall’s largest room, with the caveat that total capacity will be limited by social distancing requirements from the ongoing pandemic. For those who will not fit or cannot attend in person, the meeting will be streamed live on Zoom. Written comments can also be submitted to Township Clerk Pat Henderson in advance.

During Wednesday’s discussion, discussion among residents and several Township Board members indicated the township would post the packet that Board and Planning Commission members are current reviewing on its website. As of publication time, the rezoning application packet was available through a post on the website. The linked PDF document did not include any additional meeting information or any supporting materials beyond those which came with the application, except a title page and a fee schedule. Watershed Voice will provide follow-up coverage as the situation progresses.

Dave Vago is a writer and columnist for Watershed Voice. A Philadelphia native with roots in Three Rivers, Vago is a planning consultant to history and community development organizations and is the former Executive Director of the Three Rivers DDA/Main Street program.