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appalachian voices
Will the MVP Ever Open? Not If the Local Community Has Anything to Say About It!
What is sure is that the resilient community fight that has delayed the pipeline for so long, highlighting the climatic, ecological, and safety flaws of the MVP, will continue.
Jun 11, 2024
June 1, 2024, the grand opening day, came and went—but nothing actually happened. It was the latest of many proposed start dates that have come and gone over the years.
The highly controversial Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) was meant to start a year ago, then last month, and finally, on June 1. Again, that deadline was missed.
The company behind the fracked gas pipeline, Equitrans Midstream Partners (EQM), is still burying sections of it, while testing other sections. Problems persist, as they have done for years. Last week, local news reported that more pipeline “anomalies” have been discovered, with tests of MVP pointing to over 130 “potential problems” that “required additional analysis.”
The fight against the MVP is a classic environmental justice fight, with the pipeline route running directly through forests and people’s property, including low-income communities in West Virginia and Virginia.
Meanwhile, MVP continues to face significant and fierce opposition from local residents who vehemently oppose the $7.85 billion pipeline. Stretching 303 miles from West Virginia to southern Virginia, the project has been met with mounting resistance, further contributing to its delays.
And so, yet again, the grand opening of this explosive and destructive pipeline will have to wait.
The delays mean that not only has the pipeline not been formally opened yet, but its start date—known as the “in-service date”—is still unknown. It may be days, weeks, or even months. It may be never finished, billions of stranded assets poured into a failed pipeline.
Regardless, the dogged, determined, and courageous community fight against the pipeline continues to this day, a testament to the resilience and unwavering spirit of Appalachian communities opposing this fracked gas disaster.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, also known as FERC, gave the MVP a green light in October 2017. Since then, frontline communities and civil society have led years of spirited resistance and bitter legal fights that have long delayed the project.
Of course, the fossil fuel company behind this disaster wants to rush the job as soon as possible and ram it through, failed tests and pending legal issues be damned. While Equitrans has pushed for a series of unachievable in-service dates to please its shareholders, the community and many others think otherwise.
“I’m asking you to please deny their rush for [an in-] service date,” one local Virginia resident and community organizer with Protect Our Water Heritage and Rights (POWHR), Crystal Mello, wrote to federal regulators just over a week ago. Mello and others are demanding that the regulator “go slow” with a final decision to allow the MVP to start operating.
In April, several conservation groups filed a petition in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit challenging FERC’s decision to extend a Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity for MVP. At the time, Caroline Hansley, Sierra Club’s Senior Field Organizer, said,“The time to build more dirty and dangerous pipelines is over.”
The company had already tried to get the in-service agreement for late May but had failed. At the time, Jessica Sims, the Virginia field coordinator for Appalachian Voices, said, “MVP brazenly asks for this authorization while simultaneously notifying FERC that the company has completed less than two-thirds of the project to final restoration and with the mere promise that it will notify the commission when it fully complies with the requirements of a consent decree it entered into with the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration last fall.”
Meanwhile, the spirited resistance continues, including direct action. Late last month, a protester was arrested for blocking construction access to the pipeline. This follows many other such protests in recent weeks and months.
Back in March, in a week-long series of actions, one young activist spent nearly 36 hours inside the pipeline. Two other pipeline resistors—aged 81 and 63—locked themselves to a broken-down vehicle for over nine hours. Their banners read “Doom to the Mountain Valley Pipeline,” “Water is Life,” and “From the River to the Sea, Gaza to Wounded Knee.” On the same day, seven others were arrested. Other activists locked themselves to a drill for more than eight hours.
The company’s response has been to launch multiple draconian lawsuits, leading to the accusation that these are SLAPPS—Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation—designed to silence people into not protesting.
Meanwhile, according to Inside Climate News, some demonstrators have been threatened with domestic terrorism charges and others with felonies, including felony kidnapping, allegedly for holding up a work vehicle while a worker was inside. On March 4, several protesters said that police drew guns while chasing them.
The fight against the MVP is a classic environmental justice fight, with the pipeline route running directly through forests and people’s property, including low-income communities in West Virginia and Virginia. It will carve a permanent 50-foot-wide strip of land around the pipeline, permanently scarring the landscape.
In this rural area of the United States, MVP has also invoked the legal doctrine of “eminent domain”—traditionally used by the government to seize property for public projects—to take property from about 300 landowners in Southwest Virginia for a private venture. Local lands are at risk of a large catastrophic accident which could lead to damages up to $1 billion.
The battle to #StopMVP is also a climate fight. As Oil Change International and Bold Alliance pointed out in 2017, the greenhouse gas pollution from the MVP would be “very substantial,” responsible for an estimated 90 million metric tons of annual emissions, or the equivalent of 26 average U.S. coal plants.
Safety concerns, including pollution and explosions, are also a major issue with MVP. In early May, a section of the pipeline ruptured while being tested, drastically increasing community concerns. According to Protect Our Water, Heritage, Rights (POWHR), a locally rooted group opposing the pipeline, the breach heightened concerns about public safety and discharged significant pollution to local water sources.
“The earth-shattering disasters MVP continues to cause on the methane gas pipeline route are a terrifying forecast for the future of people and planet if FERC allows it to go into service,” said Russell Chisholm, POWHR co-director. “We have warned regulatory officials that MVP is a reckless company tossing corroding pipes into landslide-prone mountain slopes in a rush to meet its contract obligations. It is past time for our safety to come first.” Chisholm calls the completion of the pipeline his worst nightmare.
In response to the egregiously failed test, the local Montgomery County Board of Supervisors urged FERC to “deny Mountain Valley Pipeline’s in-service request until all safety requirements of Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration consent decree have been complied with.” The Board added, “The safety of all our residents is of the utmost importance to us.”
Another local body, the Roanoke County Board of Supervisors, spoke out publicly. Speaking for the Board, County Administrator Richard Caywood said, “This rather dramatic pipe failure has caused a great deal of concern among our residents who live in the area and who appropriately ask: What if the pipe failed with gas rather than water?”
More recently, a large sinkhole has re-appeared in the ground near the pipeline, raising concerns that a slow leak could be leading to soil destabilization. “You would think that they would want to come out and examine it and see what’s going on rather than just covering it up,” said pipeline opponent and concerned resident Bob Peckman.
As local residents warned years ago when the project was initially proposed, the pipeline’s topography is a massive obstacle to safe construction and operation. The clue is in the name: mountain. It passes steep mountainous terrain, traversing ecologically sensitive land, including national forest, and routes under the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Appalachian Trail.
Over two-thirds of the terrain along the project’s route through West Virginia and Southwest Virginia is susceptible to landslides. Pipeline opponents say the rugged terrain poses multiple dangers, both during construction and when the pipeline carries gas along steep slopes susceptible to landslides.
The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality has cited MVP for causing over 300 violations of erosion and sedimentation control regulations. In 2019, the department fined MVP $2.15 million, resolving a lawsuit both the agency and former Virginia attorney general had filed alleging the company violated a previously issued water quality certification by not controlling sediment and stormwater runoff.
The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection has also fined MVP a combined $569,000 in 2019 and 2021 for erosion and sedimentation issues. There is also an ongoing legal dispute over a safety incident that led to one worker being hospitalized and one of MVP’s contractors being fined.
The MVP may finally open one day, posing a lethal safety risk every day it operates, pumping fracked gas to exacerbate our climate crisis. It may yet stand idle: a stranded relic to the greed and ignorance of the fossil fuel industry and its allies.
What is sure, though, is that the resilient community fight that has delayed the pipeline for so long, highlighting the climatic, ecological, and safety flaws of the MVP, will continue. There are new chapters of the MVP fight to be written. There will be new stories of heroic community resistance to be told.
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Critics Blast 'Reckless and Impossible' Bid to Start Operating Mountain Valley Pipeline
"The time to build more dirty and dangerous pipelines is over," said one environmental campaigner.
Apr 23, 2024
Environmental defenders on Tuesday ripped the company behind the Mountain Valley Pipeline for asking the federal government—on Earth Day—for permission to start sending methane gas through the 303-mile conduit despite a worsening climate emergency caused largely by burning fossil fuels.
Mountain Valley Pipeline LLC sent a letter Monday to Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Acting Secretary Debbie-Anne Reese seeking final permission to begin operation on the MVP next month, even while acknowledging that much of the Virginia portion of the pipeline route remains unfinished and developers have yet to fully comply with safety requirements.
"In a manner typical of its ongoing disrespect for the environment, Mountain Valley Pipeline marked Earth Day by asking FERC for authorization to place its dangerous, unnecessary pipeline into service in late May," said Jessica Sims, the Virginia field coordinator for Appalachian Voices.
"MVP brazenly asks for this authorization while simultaneously notifying FERC that the company has completed less than two-thirds of the project to final restoration and with the mere promise that it will notify the commission when it fully complies with the requirements of a consent decree it entered into with the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration last fall," she continued.
"Requesting an in-service decision by May 23 leaves the company very little time to implement the safety measures required by its agreement with PHMSA," Sims added. "There is no rush, other than to satisfy MVP's capacity customers' contracts—a situation of the company's own making. We remain deeply concerned about the construction methods and the safety of communities along the route of MVP."
Russell Chisholm, co-director of the Protect Our Water, Heritage, Rights (POWHR) Coalition—which called MVP's request "reckless and impossible"—said in a statement that "we are watching our worst nightmare unfold in real-time: The reckless MVP is barreling towards completion."
"During construction, MVP has contaminated our water sources, destroyed our streams, and split the earth beneath our homes. Now they want to run methane gas through their degraded pipes and shoddy work," Chisholm added. "The MVP is a glaring human rights violation that is indicative of the widespread failures of our government to act on the climate crisis in service of the fossil fuel industry."
POWHR and activists representing frontline communities affected by the pipeline are set to take part in a May 8 demonstration outside project financier Bank of America's headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Appalachian Voices noted that MVP's request comes days before pipeline developer Equitrans Midstream is set to release its 2024 first-quarter earnings information on April 30.
MVP is set to traverse much of Virginia and West Virginia, with the Southgate extension running into North Carolina. Outgoing U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and other pipeline proponents fought to include expedited construction of the project in the debt ceiling deal negotiated between President Joe Biden and congressional Republicans last year.
On Monday, climate and environmental defenders also petitioned the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, challenging FERC's approval of the MVP's planned Southgate extension, contending that the project is so different from original plans that the government's previous assent is now irrelevant.
"Federal, state, and local elected officials have spoken out against this unneeded proposal to ship more methane gas into North Carolina," said Sierra Club senior field organizer Caroline Hansley. "The time to build more dirty and dangerous pipelines is over. After MVP Southgate requested a time extension for a project that it no longer plans to construct, it should be sent back to the drawing board for this newly proposed project."
David Sligh, conservation director at Wild Virginia, said: "Approving the Southgate project is irresponsible. This project will pose the same kinds of threats of damage to the environment and the people along its path as we have seen caused by the Mountain Valley Pipeline during the last six years."
"FERC has again failed to protect the public interest, instead favoring a profit-making corporation," Sligh added.
Others renewed warnings about the dangers MVP poses to wildlife.
"The endangered bats, fish, mussels, and plants in this boondoggle's path of destruction deserve to be protected from killing and habitat destruction by a project that never received proper approvals in the first place," Center for Biological Diversity attorney Perrin de Jong said. "Our organization will continue fighting this terrible idea to the bitter end."
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'Hard-Won Movement Victory': MVP Extension in NC Halved
"Mountain Valley Pipeline and its Southgate extension have been poorly conceived from the beginning, but today some of the communities in harm's way can breathe easier," said one campaigner.
Dec 30, 2023
Frontline critics of the Mountain Valley Pipeline celebrated after Equitrans Midstream revealed Friday in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that the distance of the proposed Southgate extension project has been cut in half.
The partially completed MVP project—long delayed by legal battles until congressional Republicans and President Joe Biden included language to fast-track it in a debt limit deal earlier this year—is set to cross 303 miles of Virginia and West Virginia.
The MVP Southgate extension into North Carolina was supposed to be 75 miles, but the filing details plans for a redesigned 31-mile gas project that "would include substantially fewer water crossings and would not require a new compressor station."
Responding to the development Friday evening, Denali Nalamalapu, communications director of the Protect Our Water, Heritage, Rights Coalition, said that "despite receiving a free pass from the federal government, the MVP continues to crumble before our eyes. For nearly 10 years, communities along the route have declared this project impossible and deadly. Now, after meeting with its clients, we see further admission from MVP that they can't follow through with the foolhardy plan they set out with."
"This news is a win for the movement that will be celebrated by emboldened resistance in the new year."
"This news is a hard-won movement victory: Fewer people will be harmed now that the Southgate extension plan has been halved," she stressed. "The MVP has always known it poses a horrific danger to the communities along the route—but their bottom line takes priority."
"With this new plan, the company admits that fewer waterways will be harmed and a compressor station will be avoided, gesturing towards the devastating water pollution, air pollution, and health impacts it will and has caused," she added. "This news is a win for the movement that will be celebrated by emboldened resistance in the new year."
Appalachian Voices Virginia field coordinator Jessica Sims also welcomed the news as a win for communities on the frontlines of the climate-wrecking gas project.
"Mountain Valley Pipeline and its Southgate extension have been poorly conceived from the beginning, but today some of the communities in harm's way can breathe easier," Sims said Saturday. "We know these changes resulted from sustained opposition to this unnecessary methane gas pipeline and its Southgate extension, and our opposition continues."
The new Equitrans Midstream filing follows a pair of Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) orders last week, one that allows MVP to raise gas transportation rates and another that extends the timeline to build the extension.
"The recent decision by FERC to extend Southgate's federal certificate was dependent on the pipeline having a contract with another entity to buy the gas," Appalachian Voices North Carolina program manager Ridge Graham noted Saturday.
"With a wholly new project that requires an 'open season' to find customers," Graham argued, "FERC should cancel the original Southgate Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity and send the developers back to the drawing board."
With MVP opponents "facing increased repression from the state and the companies behind the pipeline," another group that has spent years battling the project, Appalachians Against Pipelines, is calling for solidarity actions across the United States January 29-31 "to bring the fight to every company and bank involved."
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