The Night of Light

(December 2020)

It was 10:00 on an quiet, mundane Saturday night in December 1970. The movie had just let out at the Lane Theater in New Dorp on Staten Island, N.Y. and my cousin Don and I were engaged in a lively analysis of the latest action movie as we made our way out to the street. It was very cold as I recall and being a few years away from a driver's license I decided to call my dad to pick us up. Besides public transportation on Staten Island in those days was a joke. A person could actually freeze to death on a night like that waiting for a bus or train.

After a short soda and a long wait at the candy store up the street, my dad pulled up in his lead gas burning, fuel guzzling car and my cousin and I jumped in. My parents were entertaining a couple of friends, so the husband took a ride with him.

My cousin Don lived in the Annadale section, which in the 1970s was a very beautiful wooded area. Of course this was before all the unchecked suburban over development that was to take place on Staten Island years later.

After a twenty-minute ride, we turned on to his dark wooded street, with his house being only one of two. The night as I recall was especially dark, when suddenly there was a light so bright that it lite up the night. It was as if someone flipped a switch and turned on the sun. We all just screamed or yelled as I remember. My dad's friend blurted out some expletives that I will not repeat here. This brilliant light lasted for only two or three seconds before becoming dark again. We could not believe what we had witnessed and all wondered what it was.

After my cousin jumped out of the car, my dad raced home as quick as was legal. When we reached my house I ran in to tell my mom and the spouse of my parent's friend what we had seen. Then I switched on our television to find out that it was a powerful explosion that ripped through a portion of the Humble Oil & Refining Company facility in Linden, N.J. The authorities said that the blast originated in a catalyst reactor at the plant and while no one was killed, there were numerous injuries.

I have never forgotten the events of that night. The mighty power of that industrial explosion has always remained in the back of my mind. Years later I heard the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer as he witnessed the first detonation of a nuclear weapon on July 16, 1945. Upon seeing the massive atomic mushroom cloud push upward into the sky, he thought of the line from the Bhagavad-gītā, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”.

It would be only three years later that another industrial disaster would rock Staten Island. This time on a Saturday afternoon in February, when a 600,000-barrel LNG tank was being repaired and a fire broke out. Natural gas trapped inside the tank fueled the fire and led to an explosion killing forty workers.

Today, December 9, 2020, I sat on a Zoom session and witnessed the Delaware River Basin Commission, a US government agency made up of the states of Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, and New York charged with managing and protecting the Delaware River, approve the Gibbstown LNG Export Terminal project. This time, LNG processed at a facility in Wyalusing, Pennsylvania would be transported in trucks or rail cars over a 200-mile stretch through some of the most densely populated areas to a terminal in Gibbstown, New Jersey before being shipped overseas.

After the approval, I listened as environment groups and concerned individuals one after another angrily voiced their opinions in opposition to this project. However, the one voice that resonated with me the most was that of a woman who lived in Gibbstown. She spoke of the dangers of an operation such as this but more importantly, she spoke about her two young sons and how she worried about their safety. It was at that moment that the thoughts of the events of my past came racing back to me.

And so, on this day, in this year, on this planet, it really all just comes down to our families and our towns. Therefore, I hope, and I pray that some day our decision makers see the light, so that we never see the light in the night.