Dear Editor: Many in West Virginia are perplexed and outraged by the Mountain Valley Pipeline. This will take fracking gas from Clarksburg area down through WV and through Greenbrier, Summers and Monroe counties, where we live in WV, taking along its route ancestral lands. Some of our most beautiful mountains and landscape can be found there. Most of this land has been in the families for generations in WV! It will do the families and economies of our counties NO BENEFIT! While lowering or making their lands greatly devalued or unsellable! The gas, destined for other countries will be sold by the gas company and will not profit any of the landowners it would past through! Taking land for corporate profit is plain unjust! No long-term WV jobs will be created. It will endanger anyone that lives within a half a mile of the 42 inch bomb in any direction under 1440 PSI (as seen last year in Sissonville, WV) but this pipeline is more than twice the size! How can FERC justify the position of even considering this with so much opposition to this 330 mile monster, that will affect our water supplies and our safety while creating a 4-wheelers adventure park on private land, making our quiet and peaceful lands available to access by this 150 wide right of way through its entire length! Oh, and the building of it will play havoc with our road systems and we will see nothing that will benefit any community (tapped gas) along the way. Our fire departments don’t have the equipment to fight such a fire or chemicals. Our emergency systems don’t have the man power or equipment to handle an explosion or fire of the magnitude that such a pipeline might have! It will cause great environmental damage the entire length of it. How many trees will have to be cut down and how much animal habitat destroyed? How much erosion will this cause and how many water courses will be effected. No, the WV DEP does not have the answers to these questions. Nor does the pipeline company, they have NEVER built one this big before and their environmental track record is horrid! Fines in Pennsylvania, many millions for environmental damage! I would urge all that have concerns to call and or write your representatives and comment to https://ferconline.ferc.gov/QuickComment.aspx. Sincerely, Mark Blumenstein Past President of and Co-Founder of Friends of the Lower Greenbrier River and Greenbrier River Watershed Association
