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 Mountain Valley Pipeline begin.
When it rains, dirt unearthed by clearing land and digging a trench for the pipe turns to mud and silt. The sediment is washed downhill, channeled by a 125-foot-wide strip cut into the mountain. Some of it reaches the streams and wetlands below.
Although much of the controversial project is completed, Mountain Valley still needs state and federal approval to cross the remaining water bodies, either by digging through or boring under them.
If the State Water Control Board grants a permit when it meets Tuesday, opponents say it will replicate a known harm.
“MVP has shown an inability to construct without violating water quality standards, so crossing streams in the remaining steepest portions of the route will inevitably bring more sediment pollution and harm to water resources,” said Jessica Sims, state field coordinator for Appalachian Voices, one of the groups fighting the pipeline.
At public hearings in September, many speakers pointed to the company’s environmental record — more than 300 violations of sediment and erosion control regulations since work began in 2018 — in urging the board to deny the permit.
Yet the Department of Environmental Quality, which cited Mountain Valley for those infractions, is recommending approval.
“DEQ does not agree that there have been widespread impacts and destruction related to the construction of MVP,” the agency said in written responses to the comments, prepared in advance of Tuesday’s meeting.
“In fact, there has never been any reported evidence of fish kill, nor has any fish kill been observed by DEQ inspectors.”
But fish kills are most frequently caused by something like a chemical spill, according to David Sligh, a former DEQ environmental engineer. Sedimentation from construction leads to displacement and slower deaths by blocking light for aquatic plants and allowing dirt and silt to settle on stream bottoms, destroying the habitat for insects that fish feed on.
“You can do great damage to the aquatic life in a stream and not have a fish kill. They know that,” said Sligh, who is now conservation director for Wild Virginia, which has joined Appalachian Voices and other groups in legal battles against the pipeline.
“If that’s their standard for determining if a problem exists,” he said, “that’s totally inadequate.”
“Paperwork violations?”
Two years ago, Mountain Valley settled a lawsuit filed by DEQ and the water board, agreeing to pay $2.15 million for the damage it had caused to Southwest Virginia’s mountains and waters.
Attorney General Mark Herring said at the time that a consent decree reached in the case “really sets a new standard for resolution of environmental damages cases in Virginia.”
A different description can be found in documents DEQ recently submitted to the water board. A majority of the infractions were “paperwork violations” that did not have any lasting impact on water quality or the environment, the agency said.
Of 345 cases of noncompliance, 42 involved sediment that had been swept off the pipeline right-of-way by storm waters, the documents state. Mountain Valley failed to repair an erosion control device 180 times, did not properly maintain piles of dirt 65 times, and installed inadequate temporary stabilization 58 times.
Sediment made its way into nearby streams in only about 20 cases, DEQ said.
Wild Virginia contends that DEQ’s assessment falls far short of reality. In a report released Friday, the organization says there have been at least 70 releases of sediment into water bodies, “degrading habitats and violating water quality standards.”
The report is based on an examination of 895 DEQ inspection reports, as well as thousands of pages of documents from a private firm contracted to help the state monitor construction. Wild Virginia obtained the reports from McDonough Bolyard Peck through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Together, the two sets of documents show “a serious problem” with DEQ monitoring and enforcement, the report stated.
Mountain Valley has blamed the runoff problems on record amounts of rainfall in 2018. Those “challenges” have since been addressed with additional protections, Robert Cooper, vice president for construction and the head of the project, told the water board at a September public hearing.
“Over the last two years, these measures have resulted in an exceptionally strong compliance record under very difficult circumstances,” he said.
The consent decree mandates stipulated penalties for additional violations. There have been 51 such cases, for a total of $85,000, from September 2019 through June, according to DEQ spokesman Greg Bilyeu.
In West Virginia, where the 303-mile pipeline begins, state regulators have fined the company another $569,000.
In its written presentation to the water board, DEQ said Virginia law does not allow a permit like the one Mountain Valley is seeking to be denied based solely on past violations.
Many of the comments to the board from opponents were “based on conjecture, based on potential circumstances versus actual circumstances, contain misinformation, and are made with a lack of understanding of construction projects in general and pipeline construction in particular,” DEQ said.
Sligh was taken aback by those remarks.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever seen DEQ, in writing, accuse the public of being dishonest,” he said. “I think it’s deplorable for a public agency to refer to people that way.”
Landowners grow frustrated
The tree cutters showed up on Jeffrey Barlett’s land in Montgomery County in early 2018. He’s still waiting for the construction workers that followed to leave.
“The pipeline is approximately 300 feet from my home and we have been looking at dirt, pipe and rotting logs for way too long,” Bartlett said in written comments submitted to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission by Mountain Valley.
Bartlett asked that the company be allowed to finish work so that he and other affected property owners “can finally be rid of this mess.”
All of the starts and stops in construction caused by legal challenges from environmentalists have disrupted farming operations along the pipeline’s route, according to another landowner.
“Our cropping and dairy operations have been adversely affected on too many occasions to count,” Roger Jefferson of Pittsylvania County wrote.
Mountain Valley contends that completion of the pipeline, which will involve final restoration work such as vegetation being planted on the right of way, is the best way to resolve environmental problems.
Many people agree. Of nearly 8,000 written comments submitted to DEQ as part of its public comment session, about 5,400 supported the granting of the permit, Bilyeu said. Approximately 2,500 comments were made in opposition. Nearly 7,500 of the comments were form letters.
The results were much different four years ago, when DEQ solicited public input for an earlier permit for Mountain Valley. Of more than 8,000 comments, only about 100 expressed clear support for the pipeline.
DEQ officials said at the time that a decision would not be based on a popular vote, but rather a scientific analysis of whether water quality standards could be met.
The board, composed of seven citizens appointed by the governor, voted 5-2 in December 2017 to approve a permit that covered work in upland areas. That allowed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to issue a blanket permit a few weeks later that applied to all stream crossings.
Mountain Valley completed more than half of nearly 1,000 water body crossings in Virginia and West Virginia before a federal court threw out the federal approval.
Under a new plan submitted earlier this year, the company is proposing to ford the remaining streams and wetlands by one of two ways: either with an open-cut method, which involves temporarily damming the water flow and digging a trench along the bottom of the water body, or by a “trenchless” operation in which a tunnel for the pipe will be bored beneath a stream or river.
Permits for the open-cut crossings will be decided by the Virginia water board and then the Army Corps; the boring method will be governed by FERC, the lead agency overseeing pipeline construction.
Mountain Valley has 236 remaining stream crossings in Virginia, 92 of which will be done by boring, spokeswoman Natalie Cox said.
If the water board approves a permit at its meeting Tuesday, similar action would have to be taken in West Virginia before the Army Corps would then make a final decision. A boring decision by FERC must also be made before Mountain Valley can complete the pipeline, which it hopes will happen next summer.
A bureaucratic logjam
Since a joint venture of energy companies first proposed building Mountain Valley in 2014, getting the pipeline across streams and wetlands has been one of the largest regulatory dams.
After running into legal issues with its blanket approval issued by the Army Corps, Mountain Valley decided to seek to seek an individual permit, which requires a stream-by-stream analysis by both federal and state agencies.
In May, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wrote in a public comment submitted to the Army Corps that the latest application does not meet its guidelines.
Although the letter has been described by pipeline opponents as a major blow for Mountain Valley, its language is actually more nuanced.
Jeffery Lapp, head of the wetlands branch for EPA’s Region III, wrote that the agency recognizes the need for the pipeline, and that it looked forward to working with Mountain Valley to resolve any problems.
In a follow-up email sent to DEQ in October, EPA said its earlier concerns dealt with the impact on aquatic resources, and whether they complied with the Clean Water Act. The agency suggested changes that, if made, “will assure that the project can proceed.”
DEQ has since revised its draft permit to accommodate “all EPA concerns that can be addressed within the authority of state law,” Bilyeu said. The Army Corps is working with Mountain Valley on the matter, a spokesman said.
Even if it makes it across streams, Mountain Valley may not be out of woods yet.
The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is considering two other legal challenges from environmental groups. One contests an opinion by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that found endangered species would not be jeopardized; the second questions a permit that allows the pipeline to pass through the Jefferson National Forest.
Decisions are expected by later this month or early next year.
A ruling against Mountain Valley could further delay the project, which was originally forecast to be completed by late 2018.
Capstone, a global policy analysis firm for corporate and investor clients, recently cited the uncertainty in lowering its odds from 75% to 39% that the pipeline will be completed next year.
Roanoke cites concerns
Long before bulldozers broke ground for the largest natural gas pipeline ever built in Virginia, city officials in Roanoke were worried.
The pipeline will cut through the heart of the Roanoke River watershed, burrowing under about 130 major and minor tributaries. It will cross the river proper in the Lafayette area near the Roanoke-Montgomery county line, about 12 miles upstream from where the river enters the city from west.
According to Mountain Valley’s own estimates contained in a FERC report, sediment equalibriums will increase by at least 2% — about 1,000 more tons per year — in the part of the river that flows through Roanoke.
In 2017, the Roanoke City Council passed a resolution asking DEQ to require Mountain Valley to either completely control runoff or to pay for cleaning it up. The cost was estimated at $36 million or more.
However, there is currently no way to determine if pipeline construction has increased the sediment load in the Roanoke section of the river.
DEQ has installed 12 gauges immediately upstream and downstream of where the pipe crosses the river or its tributaries. But the agency’s pipeline monitoring plan does not extend as far downstream as Roanoke, according to spokeswoman Ann Regn.
There have been no recent discussions between the city and DEQ, she said.
The best measuring stick for Roanoke appears to be a United States Geological Survey gauge beneath the Peters Creek Road bridge that spans the river. Suspended by cables from the bridge, the instrument records a number of variables every 15 minutes, including the water temperature, dissolved oxygen concentrations and the level of turbidity in the river.
Samples are sent to a lab to determine the suspended sediment concentration, according to USGS hydrologist James Webber. A detailed analysis will then be conducted, followed by a report or article in a peer-reviewed journal.
It will likely be late 2022 or early 2023 before a final conclusion — which would show the tons per year of sediment load and a comparison to previous years — is reached.
The data collected will not be able to determine a specific source of sediment, Webber said.
But city councilman Bill Bestpitch said that shouldn’t be a mystery. “Where else could it be coming from?” he said. “There aren’t any other major construction projects that are going to put that much sediment into the river.”
Asked if Mountain Valley would be willing to compensate the city, spokeswoman Natalie Cox wrote in an email that a number of stream crossings have already been completed with no adverse affects.
The company has changed its plans to cross the Roanoke River, now saying that it will bore under the water body rather than dig a trench along its bottom.
“Trenchless crossing methods have historically reduced the risk of surface water impacts, which we expect would be the case at this crossing,” Cox wrote.
The city’s concerns expressed in 2017 “remain today and are heightened in many ways by the performance of MVP in inadequately addressing these concerns during construction of the pipeline thus far,” City Manager Bob Cowell wrote in a letter submitted in October to DEQ as part of its public comment period.
There has been no evidence to date of contamination of public water drawn from the river by the city of Salem or the Western Virginia Water Authority, spokespersons for the two entities said last week.
Federal and state authorities require the city of Roanoke to reduce sediment loads from all sources. Also known as nonpoint source pollution, sedimentation is the nation’s largest water quality problem, according to the EPA.
Bestpitch said he’s frustrated by the possibility that there may be no way to hold Mountain Valley accountable for what it contributes to the problem.
“What we’ve done so far appears to have had a negligible effect,” he said when asked if additional action may be taken by the city. “And I don’t think there’s any strong reason to believe that another statement made by the Roanoke City Council will make any difference.”
“Pipeline prisoners”
The view from the top of Poor Mountain was much different on a recent December day.
Construction workers were nowhere to be seen. The 42-inch diameter steel pipe had been buried on the steep slopes on both sides of Honeysuckle Road, which follows the ridgeline not far from a row of television and radio towers visible from the valley below.
From a distance, the completed right-of-way resembled a ski slope waiting for its first blanket of snow.
Two plastic tubes protruding from the ground offered the only hint of what was below: “Warning. Gas Pipeline. MVP.”
The yellow and black lettering is a standard warning for all pipelines, meant to prevent any digging that might disturb the highly pressurized natural gas that will be shipped through the region.
But to Roberta Bondurant, a longtime pipeline opponent who lives nearby, the signs stand for much more.
The route of a “mega-pipeline” across steep slopes raises the risk of water pollution, landslides, explosions, marring of the landscape and other dangers for residents in its path, who Bondurant called “pipeline prisoners.”
On Tuesday, she said, “the water board has the opportunity to do real environmental justice.”