The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality has fined Mountain Valley Pipeline $30,500 for erosion control and water pollution violations.
The Mountain Valley Pipeline has received another round of fines in Virginia.
The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality has fined Mountain Valley Pipeline $30,500 for erosion control and water pollution violations.
The fines account for separate incidents that occurred as the pipeline was in pressure testing.
On May 1, a portion of the pipe ruptured, releasing an unknown volume of water and sediment and on June 4, a connecting hose broke, releasing more water as a round of pressure testing concluded.
Irina Calos, a spokeswoman for the agency, said the fines – totaling $13,000 – are related to the May and June incidents.
According to a letter from DEQ to MVP dated July 23, three levels of penalties applied, from $500, to $2,500, up to $6,500.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission gave authorization in late June for the 303-mile gas pipeline to begin operating.
Shawn Day, a spokesman for Mountain Valley Pipeline, said the letter was received as part of DEQ’s quarterly review of the project.
“The recent letter from VADEQ includes stipulated penalties for the second quarter of 2024, which were primarily related to issues involving the installation of erosion control devices,” he said. “These noted items were quickly resolved, and full payment will be made without dispute.”
After a decade of planning and construction, residents of Bent Mountain, Virginia, said they still worry the Mountain Valley Pipeline could affect their safety, their water quality and their property values.
It isn’t easy to get a clear view of where the Mountain Valley Pipeline burst during a water pressure test in early May.
So Robin Austin, who lives nearby, guides a reporter through the woods where the Blue Ridge Parkway connects to U.S. highway 221.
At the edge of the fence, a giant trench comes into view. It is filled with workers and heavy construction equipment. They’re replacing the damaged section of pipe that burst on May 1.
“This is a site where we’ve had water problems in the past,” she said. “Just the topography of the land and the way this watershed is. It runs off. It’s a wetland right against 221. And it enters the culverts and goes to the streams.”
“Once the gas is in the line, we don’t have any control now,” Austin said, “but at least we have action we can take.”
Chandler, Austin and other Bent Mountain residents have been fighting the project for a decade.
Last month at the Bent Mountain Center, a converted school building, they said they still worry the pipeline could affect their safety, their water quality and their property values.
“I don’t want to be known as the girl with the muddy creek,” Chandler said. “That is an issue for us up here. Horrible, repeat events to our water, our surface waters. But the real life-threatening event for our neighborhood is that a pipe split open under pressure.”
Equitrans Midstream, the builder of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, has repeatedly insisted that the failed pressure test poses no safety risks. On May 10, Todd Normane, an Equitrans senior vice president and general counsel for the pipeline, wrote to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that the incident demonstrated that the testing worked. He criticized pipeline opponents for asking the commission to delay or deny its approval to begin service.
John Coles Terry III and his wife, Red Terry, in Bent Mountain, Virginia, on Friday, May 10, 2024.
Photo by Curtis Tate/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Uphill Battle
Bent Mountain sits on a plateau just inside Roanoke County. It is about 17 miles, and 30 minutes down a twisting road to Roanoke, the most populated city in southwest Virginia.
Coles Terry, who lives in Bent Mountain with his wife, Theresa, or “Red,” said he’s not convinced local emergency response agencies have the materials or a plan for a fire should the pipeline fail again. Bent Mountain residents are miles away from a municipal water connection. Most rely on wells and springs.
“If it does catch fire,” Coles Terry said, “the county has got $50,000 worth of foam, somewhere.”
“They won’t tell us where,” Red Terry said.
“They won’t tell us where,” Coles Terry said. “They won’t tell us how they plan to get it up here. They won’t tell us how they plan to get it where the fire is raging.”
The Terrys were among hundreds of residents the pipeline builder sued to gain access to their land via eminent domain. Many tried to challenge the decision by FERC to grant the pipeline the authority to use eminent domain, but were ultimately not successful.
Pipeline opponents had been successful in challenging the project’s permits, bringing construction to a halt for prolonged periods.
That all changed a year ago, when Congress enacted the Fiscal Responsibility Act, a spending deal that required the completion of the pipeline.
One of the pipeline’s chief supporters, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat turned Independent, attached the provision to the bill.
“This is a great day for American energy security and an even greater day for the state of West Virginia,” Manchin said at the end of July last year after construction resumed on the pipeline.
According to Chandler, Austin and Terry, it resumed at a pace they had not seen before.
“If this is a matter of national security, then it should be the safest pipeline in the country,” Chandler said. “It should absolutely be the tip-top safest. And with this recent event, that cannot be assured.”
Kathy Chandler, a resident of Bent Mountain, Virginia, looks at the site of a failed pressure test on the Mountain Valley Pipeline near her property.
Photo by Curtis Tate/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
‘We’re just the landowners’
Austin and Chandler showed some other places in the area where the pipeline crosses farms and wetlands and also where it begins to ascend steep slopes.
Chandler says the topography and geology of Bent Mountain makes it a risky place to build a pipeline.
“Bent Mountain plateau, our neighborhood, has every geohazard known to pipeline construction,” Chandler said. We have the steepest slopes, we have rocky soil, we have highly erodible soils, we have water crossings, we have shallow water, we have a seismically active zone.
Coles Terry says the pipeline’s builder and its regulators haven’t listened to residents’ concerns.
“We’re just the landowners,” he said. “Everything we said would happen has happened. Everything we told them was bad and wrong has come true. We’ve had people way smarter than me come in and tell them the same thing. But the pipeline, the MVP, the companies, they have one job, one job, that’s to put the pipe in the ground. That’s all they care about, putting this pipe in the ground.”
They wrote letters, they made phone calls, they attended public meetings. They visited lawmakers in Richmond and Washington. In Red Terry’s case, she camped out in a tree in 2018 until a judge threatened to fine her $1,000 a day.
The residents have taken time away from their families to campaign against the pipeline and have lost loved ones along the way. They say it has also affected their health.
“My blood pressure will never be normal again,” Coles Terry said.
In some places, the break in the landscape is so subtle, you wouldn’t even know a major piece of fossil fuel infrastructure was just below the surface. The Mountain Valley Pipeline might not be visible, but it is on the minds of the people of Bent Mountain.
The Mountain Valley Pipeline got federal approval earlier this week to begin service. That same day, a federal court upheld a jury verdict the company had appealed.
The Mountain Valley Pipeline got federal approval earlier this week to begin service. That same day, a federal court upheld a jury verdict the company had appealed.
Mountain Valley Pipeline had sued Frank, Coles and Elizabeth Terry, of Bent Mountain, Virginia, for a 50-foot easement on their property for the project.
A jury awarded the Terrys $523,000, but then U.S. District Judge Elizabeth Dillon cut it in half.
On Tuesday, the court denied both requests, preserving the original award for the Terry siblings.
In an email, Natalie Cox, a spokeswoman for Equitrans Midstream, the pipeline’s builder, said she wouldn’t comment on whether the company would appeal again.
FERC had earlier allowed the pipeline’s builder to use eminent domain to acquire the easements it needed. Landowners challenged the agency’s decision in court but did not prevail.
In a letter to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Monday, Equitrans Midstream declared the project “mechanically complete” and in compliance with environmental and safety requirements.
The builder of the Mountain Valley Pipeline has asked federal regulators to give authorization for the natural gas pipeline to begin service on Tuesday.
In a letter to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Monday, Equitrans Midstream declared the project “mechanically complete” and in compliance with environmental and safety requirements.
The nearly $8 billion, 303-mile pipeline has been under construction since 2018.
Equitrans also told FERC it had completed water pressure testing on “all project facilities.”
It remains unclear whether FERC took the test failure into account. A pipeline safety watchdog asked FERC to give the project more scrutiny because of it.
The company has maintained that the incident warrants no safety concerns and demonstrates how the testing reveals problems that need to be corrected.
Residents, community groups, state lawmakers and county commissioners have asked FERC to deny the pipeline’s application for service.
Equitrans told FERC it had satisfied all aspects of a safety agreement it reached in October with the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.
The company cited the demand for the product in requesting quick regulatory approval.
“Multiple shippers have executed agreements to commence transporting volumes using the project facilities beginning the day after the project declares in-service, which further heightens the need for prompt authorization to meet market demands,” its letter said.
Construction of the pipeline was slowed by court challenges until a congressional spending deal last summer removed the regulatory and legal barriers to its completion.
Jessica Sims, Virginia field coordinator for Appalachian Voices, one of the groups that opposes the pipeline, said the people who live near it have unanswered questions about the pipeline’s readiness to begin operating.
“The community is in the dark about important safety and environmental considerations from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration and FERC, while Mountain Valley Pipeline pressures FERC to prioritize the company’s sales schedule,” she said in an email.
On this West Virginia Week, we’ll look at Black LGBTQ Pride in West Virginia. We’ll also hear how a federal agency regulates the nation’s pipelines, we’ll talk to a national park ranger about summer activities at the New River Gorge and more.
On this West Virginia Week, we’ll look at Black LGBTQ Pride in West Virginia. We’ll also hear how a federal agency regulates the nation’s pipelines and we’ll talk to a national park ranger about summer activities at the New River Gorge.
We’ll also discuss new rules to prevent black lung disease, a new role for the state’s solicitor general and how the state’s opioid settlement money will be spent.
Curtis Tate is our host this week. Our theme music is by Matt Jackfert.
West Virginia Week is a web-only podcast that explores the week’s biggest news in the Mountain State. It’s produced with help from Bill Lynch, Briana Heaney, Chris Schulz, Curtis Tate, Emily Rice, Eric Douglas, Jack Walker, Liz McCormick and Maria Young.
A Freedom of Information Act request to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission revealed no correspondence between the pipeline builder and FERC in the 10 days after the May 1 incident.
The builder of the Mountain Valley Pipeline has said it notified federal regulators when a section of the pipe ruptured last month during a pressure test.
However, a Freedom of Information Act request by West Virginia Public Broadcasting to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission revealed no correspondence between the pipeline builder, Equitrans Midstream, and the FERC Office of Energy Projects in the 10 days after the May 1 incident.
The Office of Energy Projects is tasked with approval of the pipeline to begin moving as much as 2 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day from north central West Virginia to southern Virginia. Among its other responsibilities: “safeguarding the public.”
It remains unclear when and how FERC was notified of the ruptured pipe.
“We are aware of the situation,” wrote Celeste Miller, a FERC spokeswoman, in an email.
Natalie Cox, a spokeswoman for the pipeline’s builder, pointed to two documents in the FERC public docket: a construction status report posted on May 13 and an environmental compliance report posted on May 17.
Neither document conveys a sense of urgency about the incident.
The construction status report says on page 12 that an “inadvertent hydrotest discharge caused turbid water to enter several resources.”
On page 5 of the environmental compliance report, the entry says “the Compliance Monitor was notified that an applicant problem area report was written for sediment deposits beyond the limits of disturbance and into a sensitive resource at MP 246.1 due to a release of hydrostatic test water.”
Another landowner in Bent Mountain tracked down and photographed the damaged section of pipe, which was transported away from the site on a flatbed truck.
In a letter to FERC dated May 10, Todd Normane, Equitrans Midstream senior vice president, and legal counsel for the Mountain Valley Pipeline, wrote that the pressure test failure warranted no safety concerns and demonstrated that the testing was working as intended.
“To reiterate, hydrostatic testing is a proof test to ensure all pipeline components will safely operate at the (maximum allowable operating pressure) prior to introducing gas into the pipeline,” he wrote.
The pipeline got fast-tracked to completion last summer with the passage of the Fiscal Responsibility Act, a spending deal that required the approval of all remaining permits for construction. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a Democrat turned independent, inserted the language into the bill over the objection of Virginia’s senators.
Landowners, environmental organizations, a group of Virginia state lawmakers and three county commissions have written to FERC urging it to deny the pipeline approval to enter service.
