Nashville Wildlife Rehabilitator on Compressor Battle: “We’re Fighting For Our Lives.”

Nashville, TN– Wildlife rehabilitator and Nashville singing star Lane Brody says if a noisy natural gas compressor is built near her charity’s property it likely would force her organization to move.

Brody, the director of Walden’s Puddle says she fears loud “blow downs” would frighten the injured animals and cause them to fling themselves against their enclosures in a futile effort to escape. A “blow down” is when a compressor station vents pressurized natural gas into the air, and it can be as loud as a jet-plane takeoff.

“We’re just fighting for our lives,” Brody said.

SELC is representing Concerned Citizens for a Safe Environment and Keep Southeast Nashville Healthy in urging the state to let Nashville make its own decisions to protect the health of its citizens. Kinder Morgan is one of two natural gas companies asking to build compressors near populated areas. Kinder Morgan is asking the state to reject a Nashville ordinance that would prohibit gas compressors near neighborhoods, parks and community centers.

Nashville Mayor Megan Barry is supporting the citizens’ push to keep their neighborhoods free of these industrial compressors.

Brody, a country singer best known for her duet hit, “Yellow Rose of Texas,” oversees a charity that takes in 3,500 injured and orphaned animals a year. Most are kept outside in enclosures as they are nursed back to health. The wildlife sanctuary is about a mile from the site of the proposed Joelton compressor.

“We have asked Kinder Morgan for mercy, to go to a location that would be safer for all of us,” she said. “Away from this area that we got zoned through the hard work with city council.”

Kinder Morgan has not indicated it is willing to consider a different location.

Brody was among the 150 people who attended a public hearing to support Nashville’s ordinance.  All but one person urged the state to uphold Nashville’s zoning rules. The lone dissenter was a lawyer representing Kinder Morgan.

The proposed compressors would pressurize fracked natural gas and speed it through pipelines to the Gulf Coast for export, providing virtually no local benefit.

Neighbors worry the fumes and emissions could cause breathing problems for those with asthma. But it is the noise that worries Brody.

“They (Kinder Morgan) never came here and talked to me,” she said. “They never asked for a meeting. They never did anything to try to find out what it would be doing to us here.”

The Tennessee Air Pollution Control Board could decide as early as December whether Nashville can use its clean-air ordinance to block the proposed compressors.

Brody, however, is appealing to a higher authority.

“I have to always trust in (God),” she said. “I’ve always given glory to Him for everything I’ve done. I feel He is going to watch over us and protect us.”