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LETTER: Get a grip on pipeline reality

Coun. Bill MacGregor needs to get a grip on reality.

Coun. Bill MacGregor needs to get a grip on reality.  (“FVRD hears pipeline concerns,” The News, June 4.)

The risks and consequences of a spill (of the Kinder Morgan proposed pipeline) are far less than an airplane crashing on approach to Abbotsford Airport and killing dozens of people and damaging millions of dollars of property.

Does he not understand that the incident at Kinder Morgan’s Sumas Mountain facility in January 2012 was confined to a purpose-built containment enclosure?

As for local residents and their overreaction to an odour emanating from the containment enclosure, I get worse nauseous reactions when diesel buses and trucks go by me on my daily walks.

Being a tad overreactive, he calls two incidents on Sumas Mountain “alarming” and denigrates the company’s track record.  Scare tactics at their worst, in my opinion.

It is not within FVRD’s mandate to evaluate such a project. We have provincial and federal government ministries that are legislated to do that.

And “Pipe Up” should learn to “pipe down” and not bamboozle the public by trying to state that the improbable is highly possible.

More land is contaminated by oil leaking from combustion engines of all sorts everywhere than has ever been ‘spilled’ by Kinder Morgan in their pipeline’s 60-year history.

G.E. MacDonell, Abbotsford