Upper Makefield residents call for answers on Energy Transfer pipeline leak

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Residents in Upper Makefield Township are calling for answers and a speedier response from Energy Transfer in the aftermath of its pipeline leak that tainted water with jet fuel in six private wells in the Mount Eyre neighborhood in Bucks County.

More than 50 people attended a meeting Thursday night to hear from Energy Transfer representatives, officials from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, and federal officials from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), which regulates the pipeline.

The leak was identified after DEP responded to complaints of residents smelling gas Jan. 9, and requested an investigation by PHMSA and Energy Transfer. The company started its investigation and found a leak on Jan. 31.

Energy Transfer said they repaired the leak and restarted the pipeline on Sunday. They’ve hired Lancaster-based Eurofins to carry out water sampling in the area near the leak to test for contamination. The company has also set up a 24/7 hotline for residents to call: 877-397-3383.

At Thursday’s meeting, many residents expressed concerns over the company’s leak detection technology and called for the pipeline to be shut down until more is known about the nature of the leak and the extent of the impacted area. Officials said the Pennsylvania Department of Health, which was not represented at the meeting, will be working to address residents’ health concerns.

Dan La Hart, a neighborhood resident, said he and other community members have been leading a grassroots effort to let their neighbors know what is going on and press Energy Transfer and officials for answers. At a township Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday, La Hart said he and other residents submitted a list of 81 questions to the company for them to answer.

“How long has it been leaking? How much is leaked? How long has this been going on?” were among those questions, La Hart told WHYY News. “And they couldn’t answer any of those questions then. They couldn’t answer any of those questions now.”

Energy Transfer representatives at the meeting said they would start a website with an FAQ section to share with community members by Feb. 11. The company said the investigation is ongoing, and they might not have answers yet to all of the residents’ questions by then. A Sunoco Logistics representative, whose parent company is Energy Transfer,  also promised “more boots on the ground” to reach out to residents throughout the area.

Some neighborhood residents reported smelling gasoline in their water as far back as September 2023. At Thursday’s meeting, one impacted resident passed around a water bottle which he said was filled with water from his well. The water smelled strongly of gasoline, which he said was the case when he moved into his home six months ago.

Kristine Wojnovich lives directly across from where the leak was discovered. She said she first called the Sunoco emergency hotline in September 2023 when she and her husband noticed their water smelled like gasoline. Subsequent sampling did not find any contamination in the water, but Wojnovich said all of the testing was done from the hose at the bottom of the well, and in the recent investigation, jet fuel was found floating at the top of her well.

“We know it was not a slow drip,” she told the officials Thursday night. “And we know that your pressure monitoring devices did not pick up on the leak for years. The safety measures do not work.”

No hydrocarbon contamination, or toxic compounds, was found in those samples. But Wojnovich said she and her husband decided to put in a carbon filtration system on their own to remediate the smell of the water. Still, since September 2023, they have been using only bottled water to drink and cook.

“I feel very, very badly that we didn’t do more at the time, that we maybe could have done something more, or that we would have made more noise or done something differently, that it wouldn’t have expanded,” Wojnovich told WHYY News. “I mean, we would have had this problem no matter what, but for it to become such a community thing. I mean, it’s been going on for years, and they acted like we were crazy.”

La Hart said he wants a full-time crisis management team to coordinate the response and advocate for residents; answers to the submitted questions; more thorough door-knocking and testing in the area; and the pipeline shut down until its safety has been thoroughly reviewed.

He also said the pipeline, which was built in 1956, should be replaced.

“There are at least four different repair zones in the community that the community members … know about,” he said. “Those sections are cut and paste and fix and test. This is a band-aid on a band-aid on a band-aid. The entire pipeline needs to either be replaced or decommissioned.”

Energy Transfer has a history of pipeline safety violations in Pennsylvania, including an explosion in the western part of the state in 2018. It was held criminally responsible for dozens of violations during the construction of the Mariner East pipeline.