by Laurence Hammack | Jan 30, 2022 | Environment
On an overcast October afternoon, clouds cloaked the top of Poor Mountain as a construction crew worked to string a natural gas pipeline across the highest point in the Roanoke Valley. At 3,720 feet above sea level, this is one of the places where concerns about the...
by Laurence Hammack | Dec 16, 2018 | Environment
PEMBROKE — The clear, cold waters of Little Stony Creek cascaded over granite bedrock as Rick Sizemore watched from the banks and wondered. How could a natural gas pipeline run through this wild trout stream, on a piece of wooded property so sacred to Sizemore that...
by Laurence Hammack | Apr 16, 2018 | Environment
Early on the morning of April 11, Mary Beth Coffey came home to the sound of chainsaws and large pine trees crashing to the ground. Coffey knew, as soon as she read an urgent text from a neighbor and left work in a rush, that it was the day she had been dreading —...
by Laurence Hammack | Dec 6, 2017 | Environment
As she walked across a mountain meadow, Karen Scott passed a wooden stake driven into the moist soil to mark the route a natural gas pipeline will take if it slices through her family farm. Scott pointed to the nearby ridgetop of Poor Mountain, where springs fed by...
by Laurence Hammack | Jul 4, 2017 | Environment
Every day, about 2,000 cars and trucks cross a deep gorge using a bridge that is more than a million years old. It’s not really a bridge, the Virginia Department of Transportation says of the Natural Bridge, a 215-foot-tall limestone arch carved by the forces of...
by Laurence Hammack | Apr 25, 2012 | Environment
Wearing hip waders and arm-length rubber gloves, Drew Miller wades into the ripples of the Roanoke River, gripping a wooden-handled net. Miller, a biologist for the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, is soon knee deep in his work, testing the water for...