Activists Use New Tactics To Stop Coal Trains Leaving Worcester

HARVARD, MA — A large group of climate activists delayed a coal train headed to a New Hampshire power plant for hours overnight Thursday by erecting scaffolding over tracks near Route 2 in Harvard. This was the Climate Disobedience Center's sixth train blockage since early December, and the most risky to date.

The demonstration ended early Friday morning with the arrest of four activists who refused to come down from the scaffolding. Several more members of the demonstration were detained by police and told they would receive summonses for trespassing.

The group's broader goal is to shut down a coal-fired plant in Bow, N.H., called Merrimack Station. The plant barely gets used — it only operates about 23 days a year, according to the Concord Monitor — but is the only one in New England without a shutdown date.

The night's demonstration began late Thursday afternoon at a private home in Harvard. A group of about 30 people, all with different roles, crammed into the home's living room to talk about strategy, legal issues, and appropriate behavior — all the participants were asked to pledge not to do things like drive too fast, use drugs or alcohol, or use verbal or physical violence.

"We want to make it clear that we're peaceful," Climate Disobedience Center co-founder Jay O'Hara told the group.

The demonstrators came from all over New England, from Orono, Maine, to Natick. Many of the activists were veterans of other direct-action protests involving climate change, and were prepared to be arrested.

Sabine von Mering, a Brandeis University professor from Wayland, said she's been a climate activist for 20 years. She was arrested in Ayer on Dec. 8 during a two-day demonstration where activists delayed three different coal trains. She was also arrested in West Roxbury years ago protesting a natural gas pipeline. She risks arrest, she says, because she has the ability to.

"This is the least I can do," she said. "I'm pulling the emergency brake — we're on a fast train to extinction."

Thursday's action was the sixth attempt since Dec. 7 at stopping coal trains headed to Merrimack Station. On Dec. 16 in West Boylston, the action was thwarted when a coal train refused to stop. On Dec. 28, 10 demonstrators were arrested in Worcester for blocking a train. Amanda Nash, of Gloucester, was one of them. She came to Thursday's protest knowing she could get thrown in jail for more than one night because of the charges pending from Worcester.

"But I can't predict what's going to happen," she said of the risk she was taking.

A small number from the group went into the protest planning to get arrested. Alyssa Bouffard, 32, of Medford, was one such volunteer. She began protesting over the last year, she said, due to a feeling of "grief and anger about the state of the world."

"Nothing else has worked so far, and this is something I'm able to do," she said. "I know direct action is the way to go if you're trying to make change."

Under a bright half-moon, and with temperatures still in the upper 30s, a caravan of activists drove to the end of Depot Road just after 8:30 p.m. Once there, they unloaded dozens of pieces of scaffolding and carried them a 1/2 mile south along a freight rail line owned by Pan Am Railways.

Pan Am's section of the railroad begins in Worcester, then heads northeast to a junction in Ayer, where it heads northeast to Chelmsford, and then due north to Bow, which is in the Concord area.

When the scaffolding was up around 10:30 p.m., O'Hara called Pan Am Railways to tell them about the blockage, and to ask them to stop the train. He reported to the group that dispatcher told him "I'll try" to stop the train.

At 11 p.m., the railroad dispatcher called back to report that the train was stopped — the dispatcher also asked O'Hara to confirm his location, which the demonstrators knew meant police were on their way. Still, they stopped to celebrate successfully blocking another coal train. (Also near 11 p.m., the scaffolding collapsed, narrowly missing one demonstrator — but no one was hurt.)

Near 1 a.m., two railroad police officers drove up to the scaffolding in a road-rail vehicle. One of the officers bantered with the protesters, asking why they weren't protesting the waste-to-energy plant in Pittsfield. He then issued a final warning that anyone who stuck around would be arrested.

While four people stayed behind in the scaffolding to be arrested, a larger group of demonstrators walked back toward cars parked along Depot Road. Two Harvard police officers stopped the group along the way, took IDs, and told the demonstrators to wait by the cars. Even after IDs were handed back more than an hour later, police and firefighters blocked the demonstrators from leaving the area.

At 8 a.m., the blocked coal train, carrying an estimated 10,000 tons of coal, rolled by the Depot Road parking lot on its way to Merrimack Station — about eight hours behind schedule.

"Stopping the train is a tactic within the overall structure of shutting down the power plant," O'Hara had told the activists in meeting before the demonstration. Shutting down the plant, he said, is a tactic in stopping the "reign of fossil fuels."