Dear Editor,
It was predicted that if gas never flows through a pressurized mega-pipeline MVP, that it will be more likely due to a thousand small cuts. The new Biden EPA has recommended that the Army Corps of Engineers not issue a permit to dig and blast through hundreds of water bodies in Virginia and West Virginia concluding in a newly released May 27 letter that the MVP, as proposed, may not comply with Clean Water Act guidelines. It proposed hundreds of monitoring systems and changes that would be necessary to protect streams, rivers and headwaters.
Of special concern to our region is that the EPA letter describes extreme concentrations of impacts in more than 200 sites in the upper Roanoke River watershed that threaten smaller streams, endangered fish and native trout along the pipeline route but can also result in widespread downstream damages, having regional and even national importance. We in Salem and the Roanoke Valley are the affected downstream community.
David Sligh, Wild Virginia’s Conservation Director, stated: “As EPA explains in its letter, many of our most precious waters are at high risk from further degradation by MVP, yet no agency has done the kind of thorough assessment that’s required. What EPA describes is the kind of stream-by-stream review that the public has been demanding for more than five years. It is now time for the Corps and the state regulators in both Virginia and West Virginia to step up and do their jobs. We are confident that proper analyses by these agencies will prove that MVP cannot go forward with this ill-conceived plan in a way that protects our waters and our communities.”
Finally, one agency has the courage to state and outline the obvious: MVP is an existential threat to clean drinking water and endangered species. An immediate “stop-work” is needed while assessment is conducted, to prevent further destruction of these fragile clean headwaters, streams and wetlands that supply our Valley’s drinking water from the Roanoke River.
- Cynthia Munley, Preserve Salem
