The company said it sent letters again the next year. And in July 2022, King received a letter from the company asking for her easement along with a $9,000 compensation offer for pipeline construction 50 feet from her fence. Two months later, she received a notice that the company would begin construction by eminent domain.
She worries for her son and two middle school-aged nephews who live with her and the schools and churches in the subdivision.
"It makes me feel ignored, as if I am not even a human — that they're walking all over me as if I do not matter. That my voice is nonexistent," said King, 55, who is medical billing and coding worker.
Both she and community activist Brittney Stredic, 28, have met with city officials and the company demanding detailed safety plans. They’ve started a petition and website to spread awareness of their concerns.
CenterPoint said it has several safety strategies in place at the storage facility that it shared with residents. Those plans include an alarm system; smoke, gas and flame detection; and emergency shutdown protocols.
The pipeline project is set to be completed by the end of the year. It's proposing to install the pipelines at least 4 feet underground.
“We are following federal code to install the pipeline to meet or exceed the requirement established for this type of installation,” the company told USA TODAY in a statement. “CenterPoint Energy representatives have participated in multiple community meetings and have attempted to meet via phone and/or face-to-face with all the area residents.”
But Stredic said she felt the plans didn’t consider the neighborhood she’s called home her whole life.
“To me, there was never a consideration about the community that they were placing it in,” she said. “That endpoint is a business.”
A spokesperson for CenterPoint Energy said the system will traverse many neighborhoods, "both affluent areas and underprivileged areas."
"Regardless of the location in our service territory, our decisions when evaluating new construction projects or system enhancements are based on several key criteria: If CenterPoint Energy owns the property or has easement rights; proximity to area that will be served by our equipment or facility; technical and existing natural gas distribution system design considerations as outlined previously; and optimization of our system operations. We do our best to treat all our customers fairly and equitably," spokesperson Alejandra Diaz wrote.
City officials deferred comments to CenterPoint Energy, but a spokeswoman confirmed the city "was made aware of the resident's concerns."
Residents’ concerns ‘based on science’
Experts say residents’ fears reflect the reality of a wide range of environmental hazards disproportionately faced by communities of color across the nation.
In a study published last year in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology, Casey and a team of researchers found formerly redlined neighborhoods were twice as likely to be oil and gas well sites, showing how federal policies continue to fuel structural racism.
“Their concerns are based on science. I wouldn't want this facility in my neighborhood,” Casey said.
Ryan Emanuel, an environmental justice expert and hydrologist at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, has studied natural gas pipelines and their locations in relation to communities. The Great Plains are home to Indigenous communities often subjected to oil and gas industry infrastructure, but Emanuel also studied the issue in states like North Carolina, where he found a quarter of all American Indians in the state lived within the area of the Atlantic Coast pipeline project plan that folded in 2020 .
In another study published in 2021 in the journal GeoHealth , Emanuel and his team found that counties with higher social vulnerability factors such as low income also had greater pipeline densities.
“Those are places that don't have the ability to deal with disaster, public health issues or have limited resources to recover when things go wrong. These are the communities that are saddled with more of this harmful and polluting infrastructure,” he said.
While that study focused on interstate natural gas pipelines, Emanuel said the findings echo the larger issue.
"It's a bigger picture that's related to the decisions that we make about energy and public participation in decision making process,” he said. “It's not a collection of anecdotes. This is the result of our public policies and corporate policies, frankly, over many decades.”
Reach Nada Hassanein at nhassanein@usatoday.com or on Twitter @nhassanein_ .
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