Iowa landowners held an educational event about carbon pipelines at the Emmet County fairgrounds in North-Central Iowa. In this small county with a populations of just over 9,000, more than 150 people showed up!
Investigative journalist Dan Zegart in Iowa
Two years ago, on a quiet winter night in the small town of Satartia, Mississippi, an invisible fog sucked the oxygen out of the air. Cars rolled to a stop. People collapsed in their homes. The culprit? A nearby carbon pipeline had ruptured, releasing a hazardous colorless, odorless gas.
I was surprised by the sheer level of chaos. Folks overcome by CO 2 were wandering around, disorientated. Their cars had stalled because CO 2 displaces oxygen. And the heroic, almost battlefield mentality, of the first responders surprised me as well. What did the accident at Satartia teach us about carbon pipelines? You can’t predict where the plume of CO 2 is going to go, or how long it’s going to be in the air. All the models that had been done to predict this were wrong.
Dan Zegart was the first nation- al journalist to investigate the catastrophe , which hospital- ized nearly 50 people. Now, he’s covering the fight against three corporations plotting 3,000 miles of carbon pipeline through Iowa. These pipelines are part of the fossil fuel industry’s newest scam: carbon capture. They claim they can fight climate change by capturing CO 2 from the air surrounding their carbon-emitting plants, trans- porting it via pipelines, and storing it underground. But it doesn’t work, and it’s not safe. Food & Water Watch Senior Iowa Organizer Emma Schmit sat down with Dan for an interview. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
You broke the story on how danger- ous carbon pipelines can be. What surprised you? The people in Satartia were not prepared. They were not notified by the company that [a rupture] could happen. They had very little
knowledge about the pipeline. That didn’t surprise me much. What surprised me was how bad the injuries were. People who had
The people in Satartia were not prepared. They were not notified by the company that [a rupture] could happen.
To those who say, “We’ve built pipelines [for other products], we can do it with CO 2 .” Nope! You can’t. In many ways, it's a much more hazardous type of pipeline. The people in Satartia were guinea pigs, sacrificed for this
COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) under control are now on inhalers full-time. People are disoriented still, have memory problems. One of the most seriously- injured people can’t recognize his friends on the street. He can’t hold a job.
Dangerous - continued on Page 3 >
2 | SPRING 2023
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