Dominion rejects claim that pipeline project would harm mountain ridges in path

Richmond Times-Dispatch
by Michael Martz and Robert Zullo

Dominion executives are confident the Atlantic Coast Pipeline is headed to federal approval and the beginning of construction by fall, but opponents are sounding a new alarm about potential dangers to mountain ridges in the project’s path through western Virginia.

The contrasting narratives collided on Thursday, as leaders of the company proposing to build the 600-mile natural gas pipeline held a news conference touting its benefits an hour before a coalition of environmental groups publicly warned of dire effects on the mountain ranges it would cross.

Diane Leopold, president and chief executive officer of Dominion Energy, said the $5.1 billion project “continues to move forward on all fronts.”

Leopold cited as examples “favorable” assessment of the project by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in its draft environment impact statement, as well as preliminary endorsement by the U.S. Forest Service of a plan to drill through the Blue Ridge Mountains beneath the Appalachian Trail and Blue Ridge Parkway.

“We believe the process has worked and it will lead to final approval this fall,” she said.

But environmental groups contended less than an hour later that construction of the 42-inch-wide pipeline would partially remove mountaintops along 38 miles of ridges in Virginia and West Virginia, creating the equivalent of 247,000 truckloads of leftover rock and dirt, called “overburden,” and causing damage to slopes that the company can’t repair.

“Dominion plans to build its pipeline right along the ridge lines of some of the steepest mountains in the Appalachians,” says the report, by the Dominion Pipeline Monitoring Coalition, Appalachian Mountain Advocates, the Allegheny-Blue Ridge Alliance, the Chesapeake Climate Action Network and the Friends of Nelson.

That work will require creating a wide and flat surface for earth-moving and trenching machines, a process the groups likened to “decapitating” the mountains.

“When you’re blasting and breaking up all the rocks on these mountains … it really expands greatly in volume,” said Ben Luckett, an attorney with Appalachian Mountain Advocates. “You can’t just stack it back up. It’s not stable at all. What you have is an incredible amount of excess spoil.”

Dominion spokesman Aaron Ruby pushed back against the assertion that the project would require “mountaintop removal,” a term usually applied to strip mining for coal and other minerals.

“These groups have grossly exaggerated what our construction activity is going to look like on ridgetops,” Ruby said. “They deliberately use loaded terms like ‘mountaintop removal’ to mislead the public about what we’re doing.”

Dominion officials said they plan to temporarily flatten steep terrain for work areas and then use the spoil primarily to restore the land to its original contour, an assertion that doesn’t comfort Joyce Burton, a board member of the Friends of Nelson.

“It’s not practicable to do it,” Burton said. “I don’t think it’s at all likely that things are going to be returned to the way they were.”

The environmental groups estimated that construction of the pipeline would create “millions of cubic yards” of excess debris, which they say could increase the potential for landslides and wash sediment into streams.

Rick Webb, coordinator of the Dominion Pipeline Monitoring Coalition, said the analysis shows that pipeline construction would remove 19 miles of mountain ridge in Virginia, including 2 miles in the George Washington National Forest in Highland County that he said “will directly affect two of Virginia’s remaining native brook trout streams.”

The groups base their estimate of damage on the entire 125-foot-wide right-of-way for the pipeline corridor, as well as data on elevation, slope steepness and ridge line width.

Dominion officials say they would blast only in a trench 8 feet wide and deep, as well as clearing for temporary work areas that later would be restored with the rock and other debris from construction.

“There will not be ‘247,000 dump truck loads’ of construction debris removed from the mountains,” Leslie Hartz, Dominion’s vice president for pipeline construction, said.