Dear Editor,
After a Richmond Federal Court disqualified Mountain Valley Pipeline’s (MVP) Army Corps (ACE) boilerplate Nationwide12 water crossing permit, MVP resorted to its last permit option to dump tons of dredge and boring de-watering sediment into our upland watershed and throughout MVP’s planned 130 Roanoke River tributary stream crossings that comprise the Roanoke River. MVP is requesting permitting under America’s 1972 Clean Water Act (CWA) that cleaned up America’s rivers and should not be used to systematically pollute and downgrade every Appalachian stream it crosses. Only Biden’s new EPA has our backs for clean water, and they spelled out MVP’s unsurmountable impediments. I requested that Council endorse that letter. They did not. Dirty MVP also violates Virginia’s Stream Antidegradation Act.
Our CWA’s high standards will likely defeat MVP either in Virginia (decision Dec. 14), by the ACE, or in the many Federal court legal challenges ahead. I wanted to give Salem Council the opportunity to weigh in endorsing EPA’s letter to ACE recommending non-approval. I only had a week to educate and convince council that MVP is very bad for Salem’s economic development, environment and other investments like our Greenway and Water Treatment Plant. Despite me sending them regular notices and documents over the last five years, Council has not paid much attention to MVP harms for Salem.
The CWA puts MVP under EPA scrutiny – literally the only state or federal agency that did not rubber stamp this destructive MVP that has trenched its way across our beautiful mountains leaving a trail of inextricable 4,000-pound pipes unnecessarily implanted all over our Blue Ridge despite MVP’s longstanding, uncertain water crossing permitting prospects. Let’s hope those pipes remain unsupplied with dangerously-explosive high-compression gas with MVP’s one-mile wide “incineration zone.”
Our Southwest Virginia region was targeted to host the only east coast super-sized pipeline. Due to missing permits, the USFS halted MVP across the three-miles of the Jeff National Forest. But our VADEQ is allowing construction and blasting across Bent Mountain–the very source of Salem’s headwaters where landowners have alerted DEQ of MVP working illegally in an aquifer and wetlands without a permit to be there. But VADEQ is MIA and has substituted an unstated mission to advance MVP over protecting Virginia’s water resources.
I highly praise the new council majority for granting this new five-minute citizen speaking opportunity at each meeting. This process opens the vast resource of free citizen expertise. The next level is follow-through collaboration with concerned citizens who could have offered Salem options to quickly and clearly register environmental concerns over new MVP permitting. That would put Salem – already a Cool Cities member – up for clean municipal and river water.
This could have met VADEQ’s October 27 and ACE’s November 19 deadlines for public comment – so crucial to using Salem’s downstream standing to help hold MVP’s “pipes to the fire.”
Of course, we need curious, informed, open, collaborative and environmental councilmembers so Salem can fulfill its highest potential.
- Submitted by Cynthia Munley