On this West Virginia Morning, energy and environment reporter Curtis Tate speaks with Sierra Club Senior Campaign Representative Karan May about the West Virginia Public Service Commission’s recent agreement to allow a plan to keep the Pleasants Power Station from shutting down at the end of May. Consumer and environmental groups, large industrial users and even the PSC’s Consumer Advocate testified against it.
On this West Virginia Morning,energy and environment reporter Curtis Tate speaks with Sierra Club Senior Campaign Representative Karan May about the West Virginia Public Service Commission’s recent agreement to allow a plan to keep the Pleasants Power Station from shutting down at the end of May. Consumer and environmental groups, large industrial users and even the PSC’s Consumer Advocate testified against it.
We also hear from The Allegheny Front, a public radio program based in Pittsburgh, about a recent public meeting with the EPA. After the train derailment in East Palestine in early February, the agency tested the soil for chemicals, but some people came with their own results – saying they’re still being exposed to toxins.
Also, millions of federal dollars will help early childhood education and development in the Mountain State, and West Virginia experts say efforts to improve child mental health are showing positive results.
West Virginia Morning is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, which is solely responsible for its content.
Support for our news bureaus comes from Concord University, and Shepherd University. Listen to West Virginia Morning weekdays at 7:43 a.m. on WVPB Radio or subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. #WVMorning
On this West Virginia Morning, state agencies work with hundreds of independent vendors and contractors. Recently state lawmakers learned that some agencies pay more quickly than others, and the adverse effects caused.
On this West Virginia Morning, state agencies work with hundreds of independent vendors and contractors. Recently state lawmakers learned that some agencies pay more quickly than others, and the adverse effects that causes.
We also hear from The Allegheny Front, a public radio program based in Pittsburgh that reports on environmental issues in the region, with a story about wild grouse and how to protect them.
West Virginia Morning is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, which is solely responsible for its content.
Support for our news bureaus comes from West Virginia University, Concord University, and Shepherd University. Listen to West Virginia Morning weekdays at 7:43 a.m. on WVPB Radio or subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. #WVMorning
A land donation will more than double the size of the Bear Rocks Preserve in West Virginia.
The Charleston Gazette-Mail reports that near 2 square miles of land along the Allegheny Front, the eastern rim of the Dolly Sods plateau, has been donated to the Nature Conservancy of West Virginia. The gift was made possible through donations from the Ann C. and Robert O. Orders Jr. Family Foundation and Maryland resident Dan Montgomery.
The 1,143-acre tract will be added to the existing 477-acre Bear Rocks Preserve.
The conservancy’s state director, Thomas Minney, called the Allegheny Front property “a biologically important gem” that’s crucial to the state’s “ability to support and promote tourism, provide drinking water and clean air to the eastern United States.”
Dave Hathaway is a coal miner in Greene County, in the very southwestern corner of Pennsylvania. Apart from a brief stint living in Colorado as a child, he’s lived his whole life there, and he’s never really thought much about leaving.
So, when he was laid off in late 2015, he figured he had to find a way to stay there.
The question of what will happen with coal miners and the communities that depend on them has become pointed in recent years, as thousands of mining jobs have been lost in Appalachia and around the country.
The case of Dave Hathaway shows how difficult it can be for miners to find work that can approximate the kind of earning power and stability coal brought them, while fulfilling one important requirement: being able to stay in the place you call home.
Hathaway spent a year looking for work. He put in hundreds of online applications, and tried unsuccessfully to join a union.
He only had one iron-clad rule in his job hunt: he wouldn’t leave Greene County. His family and his wife Ashley’s family are in the area; his son Grant, 11, lives there, too.
Grant lives with his mother nearby, but he has a room at his dad’s house in Waynesburg. It’s crowded with toys, video game paraphernalia, and Grant’s collection of 2,000 football cards, including the boy’s most prized possession–a Marcus Mariota rookie card.
Living in Greene County means Hathaway can take Grant turkey hunting, play cards with Grant, and go to his son’s wrestling meets, where Hathaway, a former wrestler, could call out holds and maneuvers from the side of the mat.
Credit Reid Frazier
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Dave Hathaway with his sons, Deacon and Grant. Hathaway had one iron-clad rule in his job hunt: he wouldn’t leave Greene County.
Steady Drain Out of Appalachia
Greene County has been the biggest coal-producing county east of the Mississippi for years. And Hathaway grew up in a coal mining family. His father, and his father’s father were coal miners.
“Pretty much everyone you knew was a coal miner. Everyone’s dad was a coal miner,” Hathaway says.
He eventually became a coal miner himself, taking a job at the Emerald Mine in Waynesburg, Pa. in 2007.
He at first was skeptical that he’d ever like it. But eventually, he thought of the job as the greatest in the world. He loved the camaraderie of working with his union “brothers”. The mine was a place to get paid well for doing hard work.
But then bad times came. Coal began to lose market share to natural gas. Coal production reached a 30-year low in 2015, and the number of U.S. coal miners fell from 90,000 in 2012 to 50,000 in 2016, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
And at the end of 2015, Hathaway lost his job, too. The Emerald mine closed.
Over the years, many have left Appalachia in search of work. The population in Greene County, like much of the Appalachian coal region, peaked in 1950, at 45,000, and since then it has slowly declined. Greene County is now home to just 37,000 people, and every year, that number gets lower and lower.
Ashley Hathaway gave birth to their son, Deacon, in August, 2016. After a few months, she went back to work, at the coal company’s purchasing department (the couple met at the mine), and Dave watched Deacon at home. He called himself the ‘manny’, and joked that he was a pro at changing diapers and feeding Deacon with a baby bottle.
Next week on The Struggle to Stay, we’ll see how Dave copes with being unemployed, and what he does to stay in Greene County.
Music in the audio version of this story was provided by Marisa Anderson.
Interstate cooperation has been crucial to restoring waters in the Great Lakes and Chesapeake Bay. But so far, there hasn’t been much interest in marshaling a regional effort to improve the heavily polluted Ohio River. Those living along its banks from Pittsburgh to Louisville are beginning to realize the increasing value of this water, and how reimagining their relationship to it could prove critical to the region’s future. This week, we kick off a new series called Headwaters to explore what this new chapter in the river’s history could look like—and how we can get there.
Standing in downtown Pittsburgh, you can see where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers meet to form the headwaters of the Ohio River. It’s here where the Ohio starts its near-thousand-mile journey from Pennsylvania through five other states to the Mississippi River.
Along its banks, you’ll see green spaces and fishing spots. But the Ohio is best known as one of America’s “working rivers.” It’s lined with factories and power plants, and its waters are filled with barge traffic carrying coal from Appalachia. In fact, the Environmental Protection Agency says the Ohio is the most polluted river in the country. Some years as much as 24 million pounds of pollution have been dumped into its waters.
But there is increasing awareness among those who live along the headwaters of the Ohio that cleaning up the river could become critical to region’s health and economic future.
At a restaurant in the heart of a busy urban riverfront park, you can get a sense of the kind of planning it would take to write this new chapter in the Ohio’s history. The room is filled with researchers, technology geeks, water treatment experts, political and business leaders—and everyone’s talking about how water fits into the region’s economic development plans. But we’re not in Pittsburgh. This is the first annual meeting of the Cleveland Water Alliance.
Cleveland, of course, knows a thing or two about polluted waterways. It sits alongside both the Cuyahoga River—which has caught fire numerous times—and Lake Erie, which has been plagued recently with toxic algae blooms. But Cleveland is ahead of other cities when it comes to putting a value on its water—and how to leverage it to benefit the region.
“We’re starting to see the investment community pay attention,” says Alliance Executive Director Bryan Stubbs. “And so what we’re trying to do is get private capital engaged in this space. No longer is it just the state or just the city or just a watershed group. We’re now trying to have conversations with big money.”
Stubbs told Water Alliance members that the region added more than 200 water technology jobs in the last year. The organization is also working on patents related to water clean-up, and it’s launching a large-scale competition in cities around the Great Lakes to spur innovation in water technology.
Credit Uprooted Photographer via Flickr
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High atop Pittsburgh’s southern hills, you can actually watch the Ohio River take form, as the waters of the Allegheny River collide with the Monongahela.
So if Cleveland’s starting to bring in big money around its water, some wonder why the same thing hasn’t happened yet in the Ohio River headwaters region.
“I don’t think it’s top of mind,” says Jerry Paytas, whose Pittsburgh-based consulting firm, Fourth Economy, recently looked into water’s role in the regional economy. “It’s not something people are thinking about. So in that regard, we’re not really valuing what the water can mean to us long term.”
The report he co-authored in 2011 nonetheless found that water is already having a big economic impact. Three thousand firms were providing components, products and services for water-related industries. And the region’s water supplies supported more than $24 billion of business in industries like agriculture, food processing, thermoelectric plants and energy.
The report also found that the Ohio River headwaters region has a unique opportunity to use its industrial strengths to grow a variety of water-related industries. But no one is yet coordinating a regional vision for the future of water.
“It’s been referred to as the ‘Wild West,’ because there’s no management of water,” says Deborah Lange, who heads up special environmental projects at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
After Paytas’ report came out, Lange helped facilitate a committee of experts from Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio to get the headwaters region prepared for “the future of water.” But that effort largely stalled. There just wasn’t much interest in a multi-state effort to create a vision for the watershed.
“Probably the biggest hurdle—and probably the reason we’ve been at this for 20 years—is that nobody wants another layer of regulation, approval and fees,” Lange says.
Credit U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
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The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers maintains an extensive network of locks and dams on the Ohio River from Louisville to Pittsburgh. The system is critical to moving the enormous amount of freight that moves by barge and boat over the Ohio’s waters every year.
But Lange notes that many groups and agencies are already working on water issues in the headwaters region. On the state level, environmental agencies oversee permits for water withdrawals and regulate pollution. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers manages locks and dams on the Ohio River. There’s a group called RAIN, which collects real-time water quality monitoring data. And then there’s the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission (ORSANCO)—which works with all eight states in the watershed to meet water quality standards.
“We have all the pieces. We need that little push to begin to coordinate,” Lange says.
Having more regional coordination isn’t a new concept. Other watersheds have been doing it for decades. There’s the Great Lakes Compact, which governs use of water in the Great Lakes states. The Susquehanna River, the Delaware River and the Chesapeake Bay also all have multi-state commissions with planning authority.
But not the Ohio River.
And climate change could make that more important. While some areas of the country are expected to experience more drought, the Ohio headwaters region will likely see bigger rainfalls.
“Since we’re a water-rich area, a water-poor area could, in essence, stick a straw there at the point, and begin extracting water,” Lange says.
There’s no one lining up to suck water from the Ohio River—at least not right now. But Lange says the region should be preparing.
Community planner Jerry Paytas agrees. For him, clean water is essential to economic growth in all sectors. He says when tech companies like Google or Facebook are recruiting new employees to the region, they need quality drinking water—and a river clean enough for recreation.
“If we don’t manage the water withdrawals, if we don’t manage the water quality, it’s going to be very difficult to add people or grow the economy,” Paytas says. “So it may not be an economic driver, but it surely will become an economic break.”
This story is part of our Headwaters series, which explores the environmental and economic importance of the Ohio River. Headwaters is funded by the Benedum Foundation and the Foundation for Pennsylvania Watersheds, and is produced in collaboration with The Allegheny Front.
On the morning of April 29, a natural gas transmission line exploded in a field in Salem Township in western Pennsylvania. The blast was so powerful it ripped a 12-foot crater into the landscape, burned a section of the field with a quarter-mile radius and threw a 25-foot section of the 30-inch steel pipeline 100 feet away. At the time of the explosion, a 26-year-old man was in his house, a few hundred feet away. He was badly burned, and his home destroyed.
When local fire chief Bob Rosatti arrived at the scene, the flames were so hot, he had to stay in his truck.
“They were massive—I would say 300 feet at the least,” Rosatti says. “That was the biggest fireball I’d ever seen in my life. Thank god it was in a rural area. It could have been a lot worse if it had been in a more populous area.”
Investigators think external corrosion on the pipe is to blame for the blast. But they are still poring over a decade’s worth of pipe inspection reports to determine exactly what caused it.
The explosion comes as the federal government is undertaking a new effort to make gas transmission pipelines safer. It has become an even more urgent issue now that the country is building more pipelines, especially in the Northeast. The fracking boom in the Marcellus and Utica shales is a big reason for that. The Department of Energy predicts Pennsylvania and Ohio will nearly double their natural gas production by 2030.
These natural gas transmission lines carry gas at high pressure across long distances. Currently, there are 300,000 miles of these lines in the U.S. And many residents who live in the path of these new pipelines are asking if they should be worried about accidents like the one in Salem Township.
“They need to find a safe way to move gas,” says Lisa Segina, a Salem Township resident who leases her land for $20 a year to a company that stores gas under her property. “I understand we need it, we need energy. But there are safe ways to do it.”
Credit Reid Frazier / Allegheny Front
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Allegheny Front
Two men walk the scene of a natural gas transmission line explosion in western Pennsylvania, April 29, 2016. The blast was so powerful it ripped a 12-foot crater into the landscape and burned a section of the field with a quarter-mile radius.
Segina says what upsets her the most is how long it took for the company to shut off the gas in the pipeline after the explosion.
“It was active for almost 55 minutes before they were able to shut it down, because someone had to drive 15 miles to shut this valve off,” she says.
Officials from Spectra Energy, the company operating the pipeline, declined to be interviewed for this story. But in an email, company spokesman Creighton Welch says the industry standard is to shut off pipelines within an hour of any incident. He says the company also performed all federally mandated inspections—including an in-line inspection (ILI) in 2012, which tests the strength of the pipe from the inside. According to Welch, that inspection “revealed no areas requiring repair or remediation before the next inspection.”
Overall, pipelines have steadily gotten safer over the past few decades—though more than 300 serious pipeline incidents have resulted in 132 deaths in the past decade, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Suburban Pittsburgh resident Rob Brown is among those who are uncomfortable with his home’s proximity to a pipeline. Brown lives in Murraysville, where Dominion Transmission wants to put a large natural gas pipeline through his property, about 200 feet from his back door. When Brown first heard about the pipeline, he thought about moving. News of the explosion jolted him—and raised the alarm for people in his suburban neighborhood.
“Something like that happens to a neighbor, the word spreads,” Brown says. “It’s not safe. There’s a definitely a risk.”
But Frank Mack, a spokesperson for Dominion Transmission, says that—by the numbers—moving natural gas via pipeline is the safest form of energy transportation in the U.S.—far safer than transporting other fuels by rail or truck. He says the company uses various methods, including aerial and ground inspections, to keep its pipelines safe.
Earlier this year, the federal agency in charge of pipeline safety proposed new rules that add more protections for areas like Brown’s Murraysville neighborhood. The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) proposed the rules in response to a 2010 explosion in San Bruno, California that killed eight people. A draft of the new rule noted that “the nation’s existing, and in many cases, aging, pipeline system is facing the full brunt of this dramatic increase in natural gas supply and the shifting energy needs of the country.”
As the rules are currently written, pipelines in densely populated areas undergo the most stringent safety inspections. But the agency is proposing to extend some of these protections to suburban and less-populated areas. PHMSA also wants to add more pressure testing for older lines. A separate rule could mandate increased use of automatic shutoff valves, which would have stopped the Salem Township fire sooner.
PHMSA did not respond to interview requests for this story. But Stacey Gerard, the former safety chief at the agency, says the rate at which the regulators can tighten safety rules for pipelines is slow. She says any new rule must pass a cost-benefit analysis. If the projected costs of imposing the rule outweigh the benefits, the government can’t pass it—even if those benefits include avoiding property damage, injuries and deaths.
For example, a rule that saves a human life must yield a benefit of $9.4 million—an amount determined by a federal government metric known as the “value of a statistical life.” Gerard says that hampers the ability of the agency to impose safety regulations.
“The societal benefit of people being able to sleep at night is hard to quantify,” Gerard says. “We’re not going to get all the improvements we’d like. There are actions the agency would like to make that, if they can’t come out with a positive [cost-benefit] analysis, it won’t make it into the rule.”
Further complicating matters is the fact that most pipelines were built in places that once were rural but are now seeing increased development. Today, more than 12,000 schools in the U.S. are within 1,000 feet of a major natural gas transmission line.
Gerard says decisions about where to site pipelines are often made at the local level, which makes the job of federal safety officers even harder.
“You have the challenge of getting the energy to the people who need it. And for the foreseeable future, we’re a fossil fuel-oriented economy,” she says. “For at least the next 20 years, we have to figure out how to do this safely.”
This story is part of The Allegheny Front’s series Follow the Pipeline, which explores the health and environmental impacts of the region’s expanding natural gas infrastructure. Data visualizations by Dave Mistich, West Virginia Public Broadcasting.
