Maryland Business

By: Danielle Ulman

Pirates could soon find their way to the waters of the Chesapeake Bay. That’s assuming that a liquefied natural gas terminal gets built at Sparrows Point.

The folks over at the LNG Opposition Team have long said that building an LNG plant on the shores of the bay would surely invite terrorists to attack. They say a recent increase in piracy off the Somali coast is fodder for their argument.

Despite those and other complaints about environmental issues, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission gave AES Sparrows Point the green light (with many conditions) in January to try to get the necessary permits to build, while the state and others have requested a rehearing on the matter.

To help provide “information that will assist the commission in its decision-making process,” the LNG Opposition Team submitted an affidavit for FERC’s review with new arguments on the piracy threat, which “can now be fully appreciated in light of the ongoing wave of piracy of vessels taking place on the high seas.”

The affidavit, written by Charles S. Faddis, a CIA officer who retired in 2008 as the head of the weapons of mass destruction terrorism unit, suggests that Al Qaida and Sunni extremist groups are the biggest threat to the proposed project.

Faddis notes that Somali pirates often attack tankers “hundreds of miles at sea,” so it would be nearly as easy for Chesapeake Bay pirates to attack the Sparrows Point facility as it would be to attack a tanker in transit.

One of the major concerns opponents have voiced about the LNG project is that no public safety agency has claimed responsibility for handling any attacks. Faddis suggests that if terrorist commandeered a tanker as it approached Sparrows Point, it would only take an hour to sail that ship into the Inner Harbor, leaving a short amount of time to notify the authorities and come up with a plan.

 ”In reality, of course, this is nothing like enough time, and we would probably still be trying to find all responsible parties and deliberating on a response, when the entire heart of downtown Baltimore went up in flames,” Faddis said.

Sounds like a Die Hard movie waiting to happen.