In the shadow of the coal industry, the Mountain Valley Pipeline runs into resistance in Appalachia

The Daily Yonder graphic

The long relationship between Appalachian people and energy industry representatives was barely forged before it started to fracture due to misrepresentation and unscrupulous contracts pushed by coal representatives, reports Hannah Wilson-Black of The Daily Yonder. More recently, Mountain Valley Pipeline representatives have come calling, and wiser Appalachians are not all-in for their contracts or pipeline.

"When speculators and early corporations first came to the hollers of Central Appalachia's coal country in the late 1800s, they wanted to buy landowners' mineral rights — not the rights to their farmland, but to the coal underneath," Wilson-Black writes. "Knowing that these landowners were subsistence farmers who had little money and were not fluent in legal language or the going price of coal, the land agents offered to buy mineral rights for as little as fifty cents an acre. Or, as West Virginian community organizer Maury Johnson put it, for 'a little bit of nothing and a Christmas turkey.'"

MVP representatives first approached West Virginia and southwest Virginia landowners in 2014, "seeking 'right-of-way' easement agreements that would allow the pipeline to go through private property without requiring purchase of the land itself. Johnson, a resident of Monroe County, was one such landowner," Wilson-Black reports. "An analyst sent by the company asked to survey his farm, and Johnson agreed — with the stipulation that he accompany the surveyors. . . . Johnson claimed that when he followed the surveyors around, he watched them omit the existence of springs or dangerous karst formations on his property in their reports, and said the surveyors would only note the geographic obstacles when he drew attention to them."

Sunset in Monroe County, W.Va., one of the counties the MVP
pipeline passes through. (Photo by Hannah Wilson-Black)

Johnson and Arietta DuPre, who also lives in Monroe County, told Wilson-Black that MVP representatives employed some of the same undervalue-offer tactics coal companies used years ago. Johnson told her: "A lot of people, they've never dealt with this. They don't know what they're doing. I didn't know what I was doing. They [MVP representatives] say, 'We'll give you X amount of dollars, this is the best you're going to get."

Johnson found a way to protect his property. Wilson-Black reports, "He retained an eminent domain attorney who negotiated a higher price for his easement based on 'real impacts to the property,' as he put it. This allowed him to avoid a protracted — and expensive — court battle with MVP. He was also able to stipulate, through his final contract, which crops or chemicals MVP must use to restore the land."

As the pipeline build continues, landslides and explosions remain a top concern to residents who fear a repeat of the Leach XPress Pipeline explosion in Marshall County, West Virginia, where "a fireball burned for several hours after an 83-foot section of the pipeline burst into flames, releasing more than $430,000 worth of natural gas," Brittany Patterson reported for West Virginia Public Broadcasting. Land shift was blamed for the explosion, which left a crater in the ground and a stark reality burned into Appalachian communities.