Letters

The needle seems stuck on your coverage of the Southampton Town Board’s Canal battery energy storage system meetings.

A few months back, you alluded to Hampton Bays “hysterics” when my neighbors first questioned the safety of 100 million watt-hours of battery storage in our residential community. Last week, you described my neighbors’ performance as “boisterous.” Translation: Those Hampton Bays rubes are on the rampage again.

I must have been at the wrong meeting. I listened to 30 three-minute, well-prepared, fact-filled presentations. Toward the end, two presenters criticized the Planning Department, and the remarks got personal. But two minutes of ad hominem in two hours does not a “boisterous” meeting make … particularly when Supervisor Jay Schneiderman maintained decorum and voiced his support for the Planning Department, which frankly says more about his loyalty than his judgment.

Rather than conducting unbiased, rigorous due diligence, the Planning Department has been cheerleading the unprecedented jamming of an enormous combustible facility into a peaceful, residential neighborhood of wood-framed houses. The real news is that the complaints were so muted.

The true story of the meeting is not about a momentary dust-up at Town Hall. Rather, we’ve witnessed a rare, honest-to-goodness, feel-good story. Our elected leaders listened to their constituents. They weighed the facts and had the courage to reverse direction.

There are enough heroes to go around in this saga. Councilwoman Cyndi McNamara did her homework. She listened. She evaluated input from all sides. She formed her common-sense judgment and helped lead her colleagues to a unanimous, community-friendly consensus.

My neighbor Brigid Maher is nobody’s idea of a firebrand. She’s not boisterous or hysterical. She’s a good person who saw a threat to her neighbors and stepped forward to take the leadership of a newly formed Between-the-Bays Community Association. Under that banner, we recruited a solid team of homegrown Hampton Bays talent with professional credentials, energy and dedication to explore the issue and move the town in the right direction.

The Canal BESS moratorium is not the final chapter. Large-scale energy storage is an industrial application. As we’ve seen from explosions across the state this summer, BESS belongs in an industrial zone, where malfunctions can be managed safely.

There will be a call to backslide during the moratorium, to downsize Canal BESS, to change the chemistry and add safety features. For years, modifications have been made in this evolving technology. Yet they keep burning.

Any sized BESS in a residential community is a terrible idea. The summer blow-up sites were all much smaller than Canal BESS. Some burned for days and released toxic clouds — but in industrial zones, where BESS belongs.

Bill Muir

Hampton Bays