Lovelace SOS

I wish you could see my home. It’s on 22 acres of mixed woodlands near the top of Brush Mountain in Northfield, Massachusetts. We have a fish pond and a stream. We have a fox den off the side yard and I have dozens of photos of adorable fox kits playing around the woodpile.




My husband Gordon and I are simple people. Uncomplicated people. We enjoy playing endless games of cribbage on the deck while the hummingbirds fight over the feeder. At night it’s so dark you can see the Milky Way with all its brilliant clarity. Our home life is simple, but it’s awesome and it is our American dream come true.

Monday that changed. We received a warning letter from the Tennessee Gas Pipeline Company. It included a map which showed our home only about 1,500 feet from the planned gas compressor station, by far, the biggest ever planned East of the Mississippi. We were solidly in the Extreme Impact Zone.

We were alarmed at this prospect, as you might imagine. So we contacted our attorney, our mortgage banker and our homeowners insurance provider. What we found out devastated us. As of the date of receiving this letter, our home is effectively CONDEMNED. We cannot sell because many banks will not approve a mortgage in the Impact Zone and who on earth would buy a home this close to the "blast radius"? Our homeowner’s insurance provider will keep us on until the compressor station is built, but after that we just don’t know how we would get insurance. (Massachusetts has a pool for hard to insure homes near hazard areas, but we understand they are prohibitively expensive.)



When we asked our attorney if Tennessee Gas Pipeline would buy our now unsellable and uninsurable home, he said there is a long expensive process for this. He has given us the name of an attorney in Washington D.C. who is a FERC Law Specialist who would file the paperwork to force TGP to compensate us for our home. We don’t have the money to retain her, so next week I will cash out part of my retirement account to pay her to try to get back what was ours less than a week ago.

We believe the retainer for the FERC lawyer will be around 5,000, and this will help get the application moving.  Any help getting us through this process is much appreciated.

Holly and Gordon Lovelace