In Milton, artists contra compressor

A charcoal drawing of a new gas compressor station in Detroit, by Margaret Bellafiore, in the show “The Eye Sees, the Mind Wonders: South Shore Artists Work to Save their Coast‘‘ through Sept. 30 at the Milton (Mass.) Art Center.

The gallery explains that artists from towns across the South Shore have joined to create a case against the fracked-gas compressor station proposed by Enbridge Gas Transmission for Weymouth. The artists assert that the station could destroy the Fore River Basin by filling it with toxins and sickening residents by polluting the air.

Milton's Walter Baker Chocolate Factory to the right.

The Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory, on top of Great Blue Hill, in Milton, founded in 1884, is the oldest continuously operating weather recording station in North America. It was also the location of the earliest kite soundings of the atmosphere in North America, in the 1890s, as well as the development of the radiosonde, in the 1930s.

During the Great New England Hurricane of 1938, the observatory measured the strongest wind gust ever directly measured and recorded in a hurricane in North America, at 186 mph, at which point the wind disabled the measuring device. Some have estimated that the gusts may have reached 200 mph in the storm.

The site was chosen because the elevation of 635 feet is the highest point within 10 miles of the Atlantic on the East Coast south of central Maine.