Pipeline resistance builds as 'Thoreau' protest cabin goes up in Otis State Forest
SANDISFIELD — Same pipeline company. Same cabin. Different place.
As a vicious wind shot through the pipeline corridor in Otis State Forest today, activists began installing a 10-by-15-foot cabin on adjacent private land, a post and beam structure made famous for its year-long use in Ashfield last year to protest Kinder Morgan's Northeast Energy Direct Pipeline (NED).
While the company eventually shut down its plans for NED, citing gas demand issues, subsidiary Tennessee Gas Pipeline Co.'s Connecticut Expansion Project looks like it will make the finish line.
The cabin may not, however. Members of Sugar Shack Alliance, an anti-pipeline group, were well into construction when a town official came to tell members the structure violated local zoning laws because it is within 30 feet of the state property line. He said the state Department of Conservation Resources had just filed a complaint, according to Sugar Shack spokeswoman Abby Ferla.
It all began earlier, when just over a low orange fence demarcating the company's easement on state-owned land, workers slowly took trees down one by one with a chainsaw, guiding them with ropes to fall away from the existing corridor where a slice of private land crosses it, and where the activists have been assembling.
Read more: http://www.berkshireeagle.com/stories/pipeline-resistance-builds-as-thoreau-protest-cabin-goes-up-in-otis-state-forest,506753