No, this is NOT the place, for a pipeline

Emigration Canyon residents recently found surveyors for the oil company HF Sinclair poking around their yards. Sinclair wants to lay a new 12-inch gasoline pipeline through the canyon and foothills of Salt Lake City carrying up to 4 million gallons a day of gasoline and diesel.

Since 2010 the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) has counted 9,329 fossil fuel pipeline leaking incidents, an average of at least 1.7 events per day. Even that official statistic is a vast underestimation, as Texas alone reports an average of nearly 30 pipeline leaks per day.

These statistics are not an abstraction or theoretical risk to long-time residents of Salt Lake City. In 2010, two oil spills six months apart from a Chevron pipeline rocked the city. In the first spill, 33,600 gallons of crude oil escaped from a half-inch hole in a 10-inch pipe and poured down Red Butte Creek, smothered Liberty Park Pond and continued into the Jordan River. Chevron did not respond to the leak for over 10 hours, and it took another 10 hours before they could get the pipeline shut down. The encore released 21,000 gallons of Chevron oil — same pipeline, same area.

People with homes on the creek were sickened by the toxic vapors and had multiple symptoms for years afterwards. In perhaps the most affected household, with the windows open that night, a teenager was taken to the ER with sudden blindness which lasted for several hours. In that same family, the father, previously healthy in his late 50s, died five years later of pulmonary fibrosis, almost certainly caused by the exposure. A healthy 40-year-old church groundskeeper who frequently worked near and in the creek for several years after the spill, came down with leukemia. Water sampling over a year later still found carcinogenic chemicals in some spots 400 times higher than the EPA’s “acceptable limits.”

People exposed to VOCs (volatile organic compounds) from oil spills show decreased lung function, more lung scarring, impaired heart and liver function, abnormal blood counts, and are plagued by chronic symptoms like headache, shortness of breath, skin rash, cough, fatigue, painful joints, and chest pain that can persist for years.

The most vulnerable targets are the brain, bone marrow, and chromosomes, damage that can be permanent. I’ve been an expert witness in litigation on behalf of several patients with severe neurologic impairment appearing after these exposures. The most heartbreaking are those involving children.

At least 150 toxic chemicals like benzene, ethyl benzene, toluene, and xylene (BTEX) are found in both crude oil and its refined products. Generally the chemicals in gasoline have smaller molecular weight, and therefore may be slightly less toxic to adults, but more toxic to a developing fetus. Benzene, the most well studied, is prominent in gasoline, diesel, and crude oil, and, as with other potent toxins like lead, there may be no safe level of exposure.

However, in the proposed pipeline location spilled gasoline is likely a greater hazard than crude oil. It penetrates soil and subsurface geologic formations more easily, increasing the risk of contaminating the well water that 300 Emigration homes depend on and the entire Parley’s Mountain Dell watershed serving nearly 400,000 people. Gasoline is far more flammable than oil and its vapor is explosive, adding greatly to fire risk in a canyon with only one exit road and an “extreme” fire risk rating.

Chevron dodged paying for a long-term health study of exposed Red Butte residents. Sinclair may enjoy even more immunity thanks to the Utah Legislature recently passing HB591 which prohibits common-law civil claims for public and private “nuisance,” a critical tool for plaintiffs suing companies for damage they cause.

Sinclair’s pipeline is intended to increase sales in Nevada and California. It is not to deliver more product to Utah, nor is that needed. Twenty-three percent of Utah’s refined products are shipped out of state and instate demand is projected to fall by at least 19% by 2054.

Much like Granite Construction relentlessly pursuing a new mine in Parley’s Canyon and dozens of tech companies forcing their AI data centers on communities all over the state, this is yet another example of a billion-dollar corporation force feeding Utahns from a trough of environmental gruel to fatten their own bottom line — socializing the risks and privatizing the profits.

Rather than fight for a paltry crumb of justice after the inevitable spill, Salt Lake City residents should demand that local and state officials protect their interests, not Sinclair’s. The eminent domain that Sinclair would like to invoke on property owners requires the pipeline be a “common good.” City officials need to understand it is the opposite. No, Emigration Canyon is not “the place” for a pipeline.