The Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission (PVSC), which is a state agency, wants to build a frack gas-fired power plant in the Ironbound (East Ward) of Newark, an Environmental Justice community with some of the worst air pollution in the country. This project is part of the PVSC’s resiliency plan to build a backup power source to allow the existing PVSC facility to continue processing wastewater in times when the central electricity grid is down, like it was in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. While we support the goal of building resilient wastewater treatment systems, we simply can not achieve real resiliency by building new fossil fuel infrastructure. The emissions from a new fracked gas power plant would further exacerbate the climate crisis and lock us in to even more extreme weather events in the future. And it would increase the pollution burden in the Ironbound community, who already suffers from the deadly consequences of decades of environmental racism.

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