Hundreds of Eastside citizens gathered in Bellevue City Hall Tuesday night to express continued concerns with the looming Energize Eastside project.

Energize Eastside, a project proposed by Puget Sound Energy (PSE) intended to increase electrical reliability as usage grows on the Eastside, has come under considerable heat as it has tried to move forward.

Currently, the project is in the phase two scoping period, in which the deciding entities look at the environmental impact of selected alternatives. Bellevue, with help from Kirkland, Redmond, Newcastle and Renton, is leading the environmental impact statement process.

In the phase two period, only the “no action” and controversial Alternative One are being looked at.

No action is self-explanatory, but the Alternative One is an 18-mile high-voltage transmission line running through the Eastside from Kirkland to Redmond.

John Merrill, vice president of Coalition of Eastside Neighborhoods for Sensible Energy (CENSE) said the limited view of the scoping period was unacceptable.

“We feel the process has not fairly evaluated the 21st Century solutions which CENSE has provided,” he said.

CENSE is a group of concerned Eastside residents who want to prevent the Alternative One from becoming reality. That project would run through 29 neighborhoods in an existing utility corridor and would condemn more than 8,000 trees along the route.

Many of CENSE’s members showed up wearing orange at the scoping meeting, safety was a major concern for the group, as the proposed 230-kilovolt (kV) line would share a utilities corridor with the Olympic Pipe Line Company. Merrill recalled the 1999 Bellingham Pipeline explosion which killed three young men on Whatcom Creek in his concerns.

“That was in a park,” he said. “What if it happened in any one of the 29 neighborhoods? It would be so much worse, and the Bellevue Fire Department isn’t prepared for a fire of that magnitude.”

The power lines and pipeline (which is underground) are separated by 50 feet in the corridor. Jens Nedrud, senior project manager with Energize Eastside, said that the proposed plan would actually move the lines further away from the pipeline than they are currently.

Dorian Zimmerman is a Bellevue native who became invested in CENSE and Energize Eastside because his family was concerned with the project.

“I’m here to make sure PSE is held accountable,” he said. “I think [Energize Eastside] is a single issue which is part of a larger issue — how do we approach our utilities?”

Ken Nichols, founder of Portland, Oregon’s EQL Energy, spoke to the Bellevue representatives about the numbers which PSE had put forward, claiming that the peak loads the utility company had claimed were much farther away than the low-end estimate of winter 2017.

Still others were concerned about losing trees, views, and even their homes.

Gretchen Alibadi, a communications manager on Energize Eastside, said she understood the concerns, but many of them weren’t founded in fact. An outreach program to houses along the proposed route (PSE’s preferred middle route of “Willow 2” would not condemn any properties) left most homeowners with questions answered.

“We have no motivation to do this if not safely,” Alibadi said.