MVP too large and terrain too steep for WV & VA

From an Article by Laurence Hammack, Roanoke Times, May 3, 2020

Land movement in a construction area shifted a section of the Mountain Valley Pipeline after it was buried along a West Virginia slope, according to a report filed by environmental regulators.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission report stated that “crews verified that the installed pipe shifted … in at least three locations south of Brush Run Road” in Lewis County, about 50 miles from where the natural gas pipeline begins a 303-mile route that takes it through Southwest Virginia.

Inspectors blamed the problem on what’s called a slip, or the gradual movement of land on its own in an area cleared for the pipeline. Although it was not clear how far the pipe had moved, the report alarmed those who have warned against building such a large pipeline in mountainous terrain.

“That’s a big-time concern,” said Angie Rosser, executive director of the West Virginia Rivers Association. Had pressurized gas been flowing through the finished pipeline, which has been under construction for the past two years, any underground movement could possibly cause a rupture and explosion, Rosser said.

A Mountain Valley spokeswoman, however, said the FERC report focused on environmental concerns and did not delve into technical issues of pipeline construction.

“At this time, there is no direct information to indicate that the pipe has shifted along this portion of the route and this information will not be known until a full investigation is complete,” Natalie Cox wrote in an email. After the issue was discovered April 8, an investigation was launched as “an additional precautionary matter,” the email stated.

Crews will dig up the pipe, which generally is buried eight to 10 feet deep, to ensure its integrity and placement. “Additional mitigation controls will be installed if necessary,” Cox wrote.

There have been no other issues of this type in completed areas of the project, she said. Construction began two years ago, and Mountain Valley said the $5.5 billion project is 90% done and slated for completion by the end of the year.

Opponents of the project worry that similar problems with the pipe shifting after it’s buried could occur in parts of Southwest Virginia, where construction is not as far along.

“They have landslides and slips and failures all the time,” said Diana Christopulos, a Roanoke-area environmental advocate who has been monitoring the pipeline since it was first proposed five years ago. “Putting the pipe in the ground does not solve the problem.”

The region’s steep slopes and karst topography make it “pretty challenging terrain,” pipeline safety consultant Richard Kuprewicz said.

Regulators in both Virginia and West Virginia have cited Mountain Valley for failing to comply with erosion and sediment control measures hundreds of times. But the shifting of pipe described in the FERC report was the first of its kind.

Using line locators to monitor installed pipelines

The first sign that something was amiss came about a month ago. According to a weekly summary report of environmental compliance, recently filed on the FERC online docket, the commission’s compliance monitor was notified by Mountain Valley officials of a problem April 8 at the West Virginia construction site. “Movements of the slips” in at least three locations had caused the 42-inch diameter pipe to shift, the report stated.

A slip, also known as land creep, is the gradual movement of soil and rock down a slope and is not as serious as a landslide, said Kuprewicz, a chemical engineer who worked for years in the gas industry and now consults on pipeline safety issues as president of Accufacts Inc. in Redmond, Washington.

The FERC report does not indicate how far the pipe shifted. Survey crews marked where the pipe had originally been laid, and workers dug potholes and used line locators to determine its current location, the report states. Asked about the incident last Wednesday, a FERC spokeswoman said the agency would answer emailed questions “as soon as we can.” No response had been received by 5 p.m. Friday.

FERC listed the incident as a “communication report,” meaning that it could be resolved by discussion between its compliance monitor and Mountain Valley representatives. A communication report is the least serious type of non-compliance listed in FERC’s weekly summary of environmental monitoring. Other write-ups can be for problem areas, non-compliance and serious violations.

Kuprewicz, who reviewed the report on the shifting pipe for The Roanoke Times, said it didn’t contain enough details for him to make an informed opinion about how serious the problem was. “Land slip on its own is not a big deal, depending on the details,” he wrote in an email. However, “the fact that the document mentions three sites calls for further investigation to see if there is a possible systemic issue for the pipeline and its right-of-way.”

According to Cox, Mountain Valley is designed, like all interstate pipelines, to withstand minor ground shifting as the pipe begins to settle in the final stages of construction. That may be true, Kuprewicz said, but it’s important to monitor a land slip closely to make sure it doesn’t get out of hand. “Land creep could eventually result in rupture if it moves the pipe too much too quickly,” he wrote.

An earlier inspection by FERC officials in March — before the shift in the pipeline was discovered — found that two of the three slips at the Lewis County construction site had increased in their size and movement. The leading cause of slips is poor water management on sloped land, Kuprewicz said. Rainfall “starts to liquify the soil and gravity never shuts off,” his email stated.

Cox said the environmental inspector was correct in assessing ground movement so that construction crews could quickly stabilize any areas of concern. “However, it’s important to note that environmental assessments do not necessarily indicate issues with movement or the technical construction of the pipe,” she wrote.

Project delayed for multiple reasons

By now, Mountain Valley officials had hoped to resume construction of a pipeline that will transport 2 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day to markets along the East Coast. But except for stabilization and erosion control work, the project remains in a state of limbo.

A series of legal challenges by environmental groups have led to the suspension of three sets of permits — one for the pipeline to pass through the Jefferson National Forest, a second for it to cross more than 1,000 streams and wetlands and a third for it to be built in a way that does not jeopardize endangered or threatened species.

After the most recent lawsuit claimed that protected fish and bats were not properly taken into account by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, FERC last October ordered a stop to all active construction until the issues could be resolved.

The Fish and Wildlife Service began work on a new biological opinion, the document that allows pipeline construction if there is no substantial harm to plants or wildlife. Originally due in December, work on the opinion was extended three times, with the most recent deadline of April 27.

The ruling “has a nationwide effect, is extremely disruptive, and contrary to the public interest,” lawyers for the U.S. Justice Department wrote in a motion seeking a stay of Judge Brian Morris’s ruling. The attorneys also asked Morris to limit the scope of his decision to the Keystone pipeline.

About 5,500 projects, including Mountain Valley, were awaiting approval from the Corps when the permit was struck down, according to the motion. “Many likely have nothing to do with oil and gas pipelines at all,” such as power lines, water mains and broadband cable, the government said.

If the projects were forced to seek individual permits from the Corps, which require more analysis than the Nationwide Permit 12, it would take the agency an average of 264 days to process each case, the motion states.

The Justice Department asked Morris to rule on its request for a stay by May 11. If that fails, it will appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Height Capital Markets, an investment banking firm that issues weekly reports on Mountain Valley and other pipelines, wrote in an April 27 update that it was growing “increasingly concerned” about the case’s impact.

“At this point, we believe it’s too early to shift our late 2020 in-service target for MVP and need to see what actions the Trump administration takes,” the report stated, “though the odds of a 2020 completion are certainly trending down.”

Leaks, spills, fires, explosions happen every day, OMG!

Essay by Tom Bond, Retired Chemistry Professor and Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV

Fracking is surely the most widely contentious industrial process today. It beats out use of pesticides, and brings much the same complaints as mountaintop removal to a much wider area. It involves natural capital, the God given things we humans have to use for our support and betterment, our common property.

Natural capital was here before we humans came along, and will be needed after you and I are gone, indeed as long as there are humans on earth, indeed as long as there is life of any kind. Failure to recognize it as an asset is a serious mistake, because this can be squandered.

The natural world is a wonderfully complex system. Whether you see it as worked out over 4.54 billion years, or the gift of an all-powerful God, examination shows wonderful properties. Dead life is recycled so that there are no piles of trash, a perfect recycling system, even the rocks are recycled in time. Humans are recent and have become in our day unaware of our increasingly urban way of connections to this marvelous system, and how tenuous our life is and how brief our time here actually is. (Old age forces you think about this, though.) Humanity survives by a succession of generations. Each must learn from the last.

We humans are increasingly out-of-whack because our technology alters our immediate environment for our survival and comfort. Our needs are immediate and our thinking first arrives at solutions suited for immediate use, rather than fitting well into the natural system. Thus we have garbage, resource shortages, and, largely unrecognized destruction of the vast system in which we survive. It has recently become known to science, our best system for knowing, that, “60% of all mammals on Earth are livestock, mostly cattle and pigs, 36% are human and just 4% are wild animals.” And we have caused the loss of 50% of the plant life.

So where does fracking come in?

Fracking will denude much of the area where it is practiced. Viewed from high altitude we will be able to see the pockmarks of fracking pads, and the veins of connecting roads and pipelines. Restoration of grass to pads and roadways will never be as productive as before within the lifetime even of the youngest now alive. Forests requires 70 years to grow to harvest if replanted on the pipelines, and it won’t be. Poisoned waters may clear up in centuries, and it may not. Sick people in the form of lost labor and lost mental work are human capital lost by fracking.

All this is natural capital and there is negligible price for altering it, no consideration for its loss. Owners of this capital and the public must bare a loss, so it is no inhibition on the fracker or factor in the price of natural gas to restrain it’s use!

It is widely understood that the decrease in the value of property, making people sick, adding to the burden of the taxpayer and poisoning water that could be used later or down stream is immoral. How does that enter the decision to frack? Not at all! It is ignored by the companies, by the financiers, and by government.

Legislators have the motivation for moral withdrawal provided by the companies. It is known that there are more than 20 registered lobbyists for every member of Congress. Most are deployed to block anything that would tax, regulate or otherwise threaten a deep-pocketed client. There is a similar situation in state legislatures, no doubt.

Enforcement is not adequate even for existing agencies. They are underfunded, understaffed, and under motivated. For example, the U. S. has one pipeline inspector for every 5000 miles of pipeline, about twice the length of the country.

There are 2.7 million miles of pipeline snaked across the U.S. Some of the pipes carry hazardous chemicals, others carry crude oil, and still others carry highly pressurized natural gas. And when it comes to safety, all of them are under the care of 528 government inspectors.

Moral withdrawal helps make money for a few, and robs many others, and plays havoc with natural capital.

Leach Xpress 30 inch Pipeline explodes in WV

From an Article by Chris Lawrence in WV Metro News, June 07, 2018

Photo: Flames shoot hundreds of feet into the air until gas service was cut off following explosion Thursday morning

MOUNDSVILLE, W.Va. — The cause of a gas line explosion in Marshall County from early Thursday morning remained under investigation hours after the ensuing fire was out. Investigators from the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection and Trans-Canada remained on the scene Thursday.

The blast happened along Trans-Canada’s Midstream Pipeline around 4 a.m. Thursday. The fire cast a glow hundreds of feet into the air which was seen and heard for miles. When the sun rose, the immediate area of the explosion and fire revealed the results of the intense heat from the blaze.

“There were calls going into Ohio County, Wetzel County and across the river in Belmont and Monroe County, Ohio and also into Greene and Washington Counties in Pennsylvania,” said Marshall County Emergency Services Director Tom Hart. “It could be heard and seen for miles and a lot of people could actually feel the roar and said it was like an airplane going over their house.”

Fortunately, the explosion happened in a rural area where there were no homes or other structures. Although there were a few people in the vicinity of the blast, nobody was hurt. According to Hart, the line hadn’t been in service very long.

“There are parts of it that were still under construction,” said Hart. “It was a fairly new line and it was a 36 inch line.”

TransCanada was able to shut down the pressure on the line remotely which allowed the fire to burn out. Firefighters surrounded and secured the area, but since it was in a remote location and posed no threat to property or people, Hart said they simply stood back until the subsequent fire burned off.

“We were very fortunate there were no injuries involved in this incident and it was in a rural location and not in a heavily populated area in Marshall County,” Hart said.

TransCanada released the following statement Thursday afternoon:

At approximately 4:15 a.m. Eastern Time on June 7, 2018 there was a natural gas pipeline rupture on TransCanada’s Columbia Gas Transmission System on Nixon Ridge in Marshall County, West Virginia.

As soon as the issue was identified, emergency response procedures were enacted and the segment of impacted pipeline was isolated shortly after. The fire was fully extinguished by approximately 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time. There were no injuries involved with this incident.

The cause of this issue is not yet known. The site of the incident has been secured and we are beginning the process of working with applicable regulators to investigate, including the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.

Ten acres burned over in northern panhandle

The NIMBY Well Pad -- In Your Back Yard?

PETITION — “No Drilling Under the Ohio River”

Petition by Robin Mahonen, Ohio County, WV

The Wheeling Water Warriors and multiple other concerned groups call on you to stop plans to drill under the Ohio River.

The Ohio River provides drinking water to over 3 million people, and 10% of the population of the United States lives in the Ohio River Valley. The Ohio River is 981 miles long, and runs through six states: Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, and is the largest source of water for the Mississippi River, which flows to the Gulf of Mexico. This intracoastal waterway needs to be kept safe from hydraulic fracturing, which has caused the contamination of numerous water sources in our region, and which is also implicated in increased seismic activity and earthquakes.

West Virginia is already overrun with fossil fuel extractive industries which pollute our air, land and water and negatively disrupt our lives. Our state is unparalleled in its natural resources, and yet we are among the poorest states in the country. We believe that corporate interests have prevailed over the best interests of the citizens of this state. We are told there is an economic crisis which requires us to drill under the river. Clearly, if our communities are polluted, our public health is ravaged, our environment devastated, and we are not reaping the economic benefits which we were promised for this sacrifice, it is not a sacrifice we are willing to make.

In the wake of the recent MCHM water crisis and other contaminations in our state just this year, we must act now to prevent wild, wonderful West Virginia from becoming an industrial wasteland, preserve our river, and our precious water resources.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>

NOTE: Over 3,570 individuals have already signed this Petition, with a target for 5,000 likely to be achieved within a few days.  This is a great risk to the people of the Ohio valley and to the environment if such drilling and fracking takes place.  Already, there has been the incident at Natrium where gas well drilling has interrupted a salt well of Axiall Chemical, formerly PPG Chemicals.  The earthquakes of the Youngstown area in Ohio are another indicator of trouble.  If the WV Governor and WV-DNR persist, then an environmental impact assessment would be an essential first step, but none has been done!  DGN

The Petition is here —  https://www.change.org/p/randy-c-huffman-no-drilling-under-the-ohio-river

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net