West Whiteland Residents for Pipeline Safety

06/10/2026

Today a sinkhole of unknown extent opened up in West Whiteland Township on the path of the 20” and 16” Mariner East 2 and 2X pipelines. See pin on map below.

This is not surprising, given the underlying karst geology and is one of the reasons why this pipeline project’s route should never have been approved by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.

It is unknown if the operator Energy Transfer has notified the DEP and the Township - nor what the plan is to promptly investigate and remediate the situation before it worsens. For now, a board covers it marked “Hole” 🙄

05/25/2026

And that’s a wrap folks. Seven years after its creation, the Chester County Pipeline Safety Advisory Board appears to be kaput. No quarterly meetings since last October. Most of the seats vacant and others expired. No great loss…..

The board was formed by past County Commissioners in 2019 ( during a hotly contested election) in response to public safety concerns for Mariner East, to “review and make recommendations to the Commissioners and pertinent County Departments” related to pipeline safety and emergency response and planning.

It never lived up to its promises.

The board was to include engaged and informed members of the public - but such applicants were consistently ignored by the county commissioners. Instead seats were filled by people who never showed up or spoke up. Meetings were brief and often just promotional events by pipeline corporations, no work was done between the quarterly meetings, and most times quorum was not achieved.

The resignation letter from board member and Pipeline Safety Coalition (PSC) founder Lynda Farrell in 2021 sums it up well. In a strongly-worded letter PS Cstated it “can no longer participate in a Board that has produced no substantive work nor shown any meaningful interest in improving pipeline safety and transparency in pipeline matters throughout Chester County”

The letter further stated that that “the inclusion of pipeline companies operating in Chester County on this Board is literally akin to “the fox watching the Hen House” and expressed “concern of perceptions that the Board was a “greenwash” and a “sham””

The Pipeline Safety Advisory Board never made any improvements to its make up, procedures nor effectiveness in the year since this letter.

The board was a sham all along

Here is the letter https://drive.google.com/file/d/1howwjksdvdnGXAcbir3jsl5fbzbXh_M7/view

02/28/2026

Hard to believe this has been a decade already, as history appears to be repeating itself yet again. A reminder how former Governor Wolf and former Secretary Patrick McDonnell opened the door to the harms from Mariner East construction…..

It’s now been 10 years ago that former PA Department of Environmental Protection Secretary John Quigley was forced out of that position after refusing to issue permits to a corporation for a project that had the potential to bring great harm to the environment and communities.

With Quigley out, Governor Wolf appointed a new DEP Secretary, Patrick McDonnell. Shortly thereafter, the permits were issued for the Mariner East pipeline project despite hundreds of deficiencies. And under McDonnell’s leadership, the DEP allowed violations to occur again and again, documented concerns from impacted community members and environmental organizations were ignored, and when permits expired they were promptly re-issued. These violations eventually led to 48 criminal charges against Sunoco/Energy Transfer.

➡️ Email exchanges between the governor‘s office and former Secretary Patrick McDonnell which led to an ethics investigation pull back the curtain on the issuance of the permits https://www.witf.org/2018/01/26/mariner-east-2-texts-raise-questions-about-wolf-administration-role-in-permitting-process/

📍Mariner East is a case study on the failure of our government to do its job to protect Pennsylvanians. Something to remember as the DEP under Secretary Jessica Shirley’s leadership promises “the highest level of service and urgency” to Amazon and other tech and energy corporations looking to profit off our land, water and energy resources for a massive buildout of data centers.

02/01/2026

DCED was behind the push for Mariner East. Now they’re pushing hyper scale data centers.

Contact your State Rep now and urge them to vote no on HB2151, especially if it’s Rep Chris Pielli - he is a member of the committee that will be voting on Wednesday, along with another ChesCo Rep Paul Friel

On Friday afternoon, it was revealed that a data center bill will be rushed to a committee vote on Wednesday, February 4 at 10am in Harrisburg.

When the cosponsor memorandum was released in October, the bill sounded like it might be good: “Currently, there are no consistent statewide standards that require data centers to mitigate these impacts. This gap leaves communities vulnerable to quality-of-life concerns when facilities are sited nearby”. (The memo gave no indication though of how that would be done).

But the devil is in the detail details and those details became known just over a week ago when the bill language was released .

HB2151 will do none of the good things the cosponsor memorandum claims.

Instead, it distorts the purpose of the Municipal Planning Code, and even more concerning, it hands the authority of writing this statewide data center ordinance guidance to the Department of Community and Economic Development ( DCED).

DCED‘s role is not to ensure zoning integrity nor to protect residents. DCED’s role is to advance and facilitate industry. And for months, if not years, they have been working hand-in-hand with Amazon and others, making backroom deals to fast track and advance data center development in PA. (See image and note below)

✅ contact your State Rep now and urge them to put protecting communities and the environment ahead of corporate interest and vote NO on HB 2151. There is no amendment that can turn this into a good bill - putting DCED in charge of writing a data center ordinance makes it bad to its core.

Instead, we need a statewide moratorium on data centers to give time for municipalities to pass their own ordinances for this new use and for guard rails on this industry to be put in place at the state level.

📍Find your state rep here: https://www.palegis.us/find-my-legislator

📍Find the bill here: https://www.palegis.us/legislation/bills/2025/hb2151

⭐️ Share this post to helps spread the word and get others to take action

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🏭 Image below is just one of the emails obtained through a recent RTK request between Rigel Sigel (who leads DCED), members of his staff and Amazon Web Services executives.

💧 SRBC in the email refers to the Susquehanna River basin commission. They oversee and issue permits for withdrawals from this critical water resource for Pennsylvanians - one that is already subject to drought.

12/29/2025

The Delaware County Chamber of Commerce just honored Energy Transfer, the Texas-based corporation that received 48 charges for environmental crimes by AG Josh Shapiro during Mariner East construction. And it was the Delaware County DA who made the referral to Shapiro.

And in January of this year it was discovered that a pipeline owned by Energy Transfer had been leaking jet fuel in Bucks County from a repair sleeve, undetected by ET for over a year, contaminating private water wells and leaving a neighborhood in Upper Makefield now facing an estimated 10 years of water and soil remediation. One home’s well had 12 feet of jet fuel atop its water.

44 locations with the same repair sleeves and of the same age as the one in UpperMakefield were identified along the pipeline route across Delaware County, Chester County, Montgomery County, Bucks County and up to to Newwark NJ.

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