Mountain Valley Pipeline delay request fails - Roanoke Times

Mountain Valley Pipeline delay request fails

A federal appeals court has denied a request from six landowners to stop construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline on their property while their lawsuit is pending.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia turned down a petition for an emergency injunction in a brief order Tuesday.

In what is believed to be the last pending legal action involving pipeline construction in Virginia, the landowners are challenging Mountain Valley’s use of eminent domain, which it employed in 2018 to take their land for the natural gas pipeline.

Concerned that the 2020 lawsuit is taking so long to be heard, the landowners sought to stop work on their land — three parcels in Franklin, Montgomery and Roanoke counties — until there is a decision in the case.

The delays “are nothing but shameless stall tactics” by Mountain Valley and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, “who are trying to run out the clock by manipulating the judicial process,” the landowners’ attorney, Mia Yugo of Roanoke, wrote in court documents.

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Mountain Valley urged the court to reject the “thirteenth hour” request for an injunction, citing a law passed by Congress in May that declared the 303-mile pipeline to be in the national interest and fast-tracked its completion.

“Additional delays — on top of years of delays and billions of dollars of losses already incurred as a result of the barrage of prior litigation seeking to prevent the pipeline from being built — will undermine the public interest benefits Congress has identified,” attorneys for the company argued.

Last week, Mountain Valley abandoned its earlier goal of completing the $7.2 billion project by year’s end, telling the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it now hopes to have the pipeline in service sometime in the first quarter of 2024.

The plan now is to have all major construction done by mid-December, before winter sets in. Final stages of construction and various testing and commissioning activities would then happen early next year, Mountain Valley said in a filing with the landowners’ case.

Yugo said the three couples she represents — Cletus and Beverly Bohon of Montgomery County, Robert and Aimee Hamm of Roanoke County and Wendell and Mary Flora of Franklin County — are considering an appeal of the denial of their emergency injunction request.

Without an injunction, Yugo says that construction may have already been completed by the time the case is decided.

The court, which gave no reason for its denial of the emergency request, is still receiving briefs on the underlying case, with the latest round due in mid-November. A decision will likely come next year.

The lawsuit asserts that Congress improperly delegated eminent domain authority to FERC, which in turn gave Mountain Valley the power to take private land for its pipeline after finding there was a public need for it.

In more recent filings, Yugo has also challenged the constitutionality of the law that green-lighted Mountain Valley. Critics say Congress violated the separation of powers doctrine when it substituted its judgement for that of the courts, which had repeatedly struck down government permits granted to Mountain Valley before the law prohibited such challenges.

Also this week, Mountain Valley moved forward with its plans to bore a tunnel under the Roanoke River for its 42-inch diameter pipe.

Heavy equipment was stationed Thursday afternoon on each side of a stretch of the river that forms the Montgomery-Roanoke county line near Lafayette. Plans call for two pits to be dug across the river from one another.

A crew will then bore horizontally from one pit to the other, allowing the pipe to pass directly behind the boring machine. The crossing will be 316 feet long and at least 6 feet beneath the river bottom, according to plans filed in 2020 with FERC.

The crossing will take about 90 days, the report said.

Along its route from northern West Virginia through Southwest Virginia, the buried pipe will pass under nearly 1,000 rivers, streams and wetlands. A Mountain Valley spokesperson declined to comment in detail on any specific crossing, citing safety and security reasons.

The Western Virginia Water Authority, which operates Spring Hollow reservoir about 1.2 miles downstream from the crossing, was recently notified that boring would start Tuesday, according to spokeswoman Sarah Baumgardner.

Pipeline opponents say the crossings — either by boring or digging a trench along the bottom of a water body while the current is temporarily diverted — will release harmful sediment into streams and wetlands.

There have been no documented problems with sediment in the river water that is pumped to fill Spring Hollow since pipeline construction began in 2018, Baumgardner said.

Pumping is currently suspended because of the low level of the river.

Laurence Hammack (540) 981-3239

laurence.hammack@roanoke.com