John Laury

Pipeline voices: Activists look back on a historic victory

On July 5, Dominion Energy abruptly canceled the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, an $8 billion project that would have carried natural gas 600 miles from West Virginia to North Carolina. Environmental activists of all persuasions spent six years fighting the project before finally prevailing over the gigantic power corporation. As the victory set in, C-VILLE caught up with some of central Virginia’s anti-pipeline activists, giving them a chance to reflect—and look ahead. The following interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

John Laury is the secretary of Friends of Buckingham. He lives in Union Hill, a historically Black community in rural Buckingham County that would have been disrupted by the pipeline.

C-VILLE: Where were you when you heard the news? What was that moment like?

JL: It was amazing to me. I have been praying about this. We have been in the struggle for—working on our sixth year. Really, I was elated. I felt the load was lifted off of me. But at the same time I wasn’t sure that what I heard was true.

Then my mind began to reflect back, to one of the Board of Supervisors meetings two years back, when our pastor Paul Wilson spoke. Dominion was in control at the time.

He gave the example of David and Goliath. David, a little shepherd boy, with smooth stones and a slingshot, going against Goliath and all of his weaponry. But David was going in the name of God, and Goliath was going on his strength.

We were always talked to as if this was a done deal. We were even told, “you’re wasting your time. You can’t go against Dominion.” This is what we were against.

Can you describe your home in Union Hill a little bit? What role do you think Union Hill played in the victory against the pipeline?

From where I live now, I was raised across the road. I would be the third generation raised on that 52 acres. We grew greens, and always a garden every year. Fruit trees. That generation believed in raising their food, preparing in summer for the winter.

I enjoyed the four seasons. I enjoyed the people and the natural earth. Spent a long time in the woods. Ate a lot of fruit off the trees the other generation had planted.

We depend on an underground water source, we have wells, that’s the source of water for our home.

As we spoke on panels in different areas of the state—some out of state—we realized that there were other states dealing with similar issues that were detrimental to them as well. The pattern was in the areas of people of color, and the poor, lower income areas…When we raised awareness as to what was happening here in Union Hill, that made a difference.

It’s not just a Union Hill issue. It’s a people issue. And as one of the quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King tells us, if people are hurting anywhere in this world, it should be the concern of all of us.

Alice Clair

Alice Clair is a local musician who grew up in Nelson County. Her childhood home is less than a mile from where the pipeline would have run.

C-VILLE: What was your reaction to the news?

AC: I was screaming and crying. No exaggeration, I was screaming and crying. Just, ultimate elation—and also relief. I always said it wasn’t going to happen. But for that to come true is a relief.

You’re a musician. You wrote some songs about the pipeline. What role do you think music played in the effort over the last six years?

Robin and Linda [Williams] are songwriters in Augusta County, and they wrote “We Don’t Want Your Pipeline.” And that has become a classic for us in Virginia, and maybe across the U.S., fighting pipelines.

When I was in high school, Dominion would set up information sessions for the public in our gym. We would go in and be protesting in my high school, people would bring their guitars and play that song.

I think music, it motivates in every kind of way. If you can get a bunch of people together singing a song, that’s a great way to energize people towards a common good.

Can music help translate this victory into something even bigger?

I had friends travel out to fight against the Keystone and the DAPL pipelines. There’s been so much music that’s come out of that. Not only using old folk songs of protest, but making new ones.

The fight is not over even though I won at home—I’m so lucky that I was one of the few that could win at home. My land out in Nelson is not going to be affected anymore. Time to turn our eyes to the next one. We’re looking at the Mountain Valley Pipeline now. It is not over, but we’re feeling darn good.

This is how it should work. If our country may turn to a true democracy one day, that’s what it’s all about. The people using their voice. If the majority don’t want it, it shouldn’t be there.

Ben Cunningham

Ben Cunningham is the field director of the Pipeline Compliance Surveillance Initiative, a group that used technology and community volunteers to document the construction violations Dominion committed as they started building the pipeline.

C-VILLE: Where were you when you heard the news?

BC: I was about to bite into a really killer sandwich at 3:12pm on Sunday when my intern with my Pipeline CSI program, Virginia Paschal, texted me, all capital letters, CONGRATULATIONS!…Then she sent me a link to an article about it. Then I spent the next half hour just crying in joy and disbelief.

What was the final straw for Dominion?

We would never claim that this was all one group or all one strategy’s effort. Death by a thousand cuts—we all believe that’s what it took. It’s gone from Supreme Court hearings and all sorts of different legal battles, to people [protesting] in the trees trying to stop this and other pipelines, to science-and-technology-monitoring programs like ours, as well as strategies like political pressure. Really, community organizing is the bottom line.

…The story of environmental work in this country is the project never dies, people get burnt out, and so on. So I’ve just been plugging away at it, as have hundreds and maybe a thousand other people in various different ways.

Can the win against the ACP set an example for activists fighting other projects?

We’ve got, now, an example that we can win, against the largest political contributor to both parties in our state, arguably the most powerful corporation in our state, and one of the most powerful utilities in the country.

There are countless injustices around the world. I believe in starting where we live—it’s what we’re most familiar with, where we can be most powerful, and where we can effect the most change.

Compressor anxiety: Historic African American community alleges environmental racism

About 50 miles south of Charlottesville, in the small, quiet community of Union Hill, there are far more “No Pipeline” signs than traffic lights.

The historic town of weather-faded homes and churches in bucolic Buckingham County could soon be sliced by the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, and in what residents say would add insult to injury, it could become home to one of the 600-mile natural gas pipeline’s three proposed compressor stations.

Residents are calling it “blatant environmental racism,” and allege Dominion intentionally erased a large percentage of their population in its application to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to build the pipeline.

In the final environmental impact statement on the ACP, FERC stated that, on average, there are 29.6 people per square mile in the area surrounding the pipeline’s path in Buckingham—that number was provided by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Residents say that number was off by about 500 percent.

Members of the anti-pipeline group Friends of Buckingham went door-to-door to survey the Union Hill area. They spoke with 64 percent of the people living in the 99 households within that square mile, and of those 158 residents, 85 percent are African American.

The FERC report didn’t mention Union Hill, where a third of the residents are descendants of the freedmen community that was once enslaved there, and where there are freedmen cemeteries and unmarked slave burials on the site where Dominion wants to build its compressor station, according to Yogaville resident and cultural anthropologist Lakshmi Fjord.

She also noted that Charlottesville’s 29 bypass project was halted by just one slave burial site.

On May 31, the governor’s Advisory Council on Environmental Justice met in Buckingham to report some of its findings, make recommendations and host a public comment session, but beforehand, members stopped by the Union Hill Baptist Church for a quick presentation and tour of the proposed compressor station site.

“Now we are in our golden years, and we’d like to keep it that way,” said John Laury as he stood at the front of the pews. He listed his grievances, including the poisonous air that he says the station, if approved, would emit, and its potential effect on water quality in the town where most people rely on wells. “That’s the only water we have,” he said.

Laury, who lives with his wife, Ruby, on the cattle farm down the hill and to the left of the Baptist church, was born and raised in Buckingham. He says he likes the clean air that his county is known for, the nearby wooded areas brimming with wildlife and the constant hum of birds chirping.

“We want to remain here without interruption from big corporations,” he told the governor’s council before its members filed into a big white church van. Laury drove them less than half a mile to the proposed compressor station site.

There, a large swath of land has been cleared because four Transco pipelines, which carry gas from Texas to New York City, already exist under the soil. The ACP would connect to one of the existing pipelines at the 55,000-horsepower compressor station, and transfer the fracked gas up the east coast.

To the left of the existing clear cut, just into the trees, is where Dominion would like to connect the ACP to the Transco line and build its aboveground compressor station.

Nothing can be built and no trees can be planted on the Transco pipeline corridor, according to Fjord, “which is why it is so galling to landowners to have their farmland seized on working farms, where it bisects the fields they grow, where their cattle graze.”

“No tractor or car can cross over one,” says Fjord. “Nothing. Yet, farmers in Buckingham will have to pay the same property taxes on the pipeline easements as if they were working farmland.”

Dominion spokesperson Aaron Ruby says once construction on the pipeline is completed, “the only restrictions on the use of the right of way are planting trees and building structures.”

Ann Loomis, Dominion Energy’s vice president of federal affairs, spoke at the governor’s council meeting. She noted that Dominion employs 42 county residents at its Bear Garden Power Station in Buckingham, and said Dominion is a member of the community.

University of Richmond professor of geography and the environment Mary Finley-Brook, who serves on the council’s pipeline subcommittee, gave a report on what her group has learned so far. She also said it does not recommend construction of the ACP.

If it gets built, Finley-Brook said residents can prepare for Dominion to make environmental violations because it already has a record, including several citations from when it started cutting down trees earlier this year. And “blowdowns,” or release of gas (and toxic air pollutants) to relieve pressure in the pipe, happen about 10 times per year at compressor station sites (a figure that Dominion estimates at once every five years). Finley-Brook also noted Dominion’s underreporting of the Union Hill population.

“This was, in my own professional opinion, not an accident,” she said. “This inaccurate information is a tactic that has been used successfully many times.”

The more rural and less densely populated an area is, the thinner the pipe is permitted to be, and fewer shut-off valves are required, she said.

As for the public health impact, she said, “Compressor stations make people sick.”

Pipeline opponent Suzanne Keller, a retired epidemiologist with the Virginia Department of Health, said Buckingham residents can expect around 350 tons of air pollutants to be released each year.

The crowd of about 50 people heard from Michael Dowd, a Department of Environmental Quality representative, who drew jeers when he said, “The community’s health will be protected.” He added, “I can’t guarantee that there won’t be accidents or events at the compressor station.”

But Dowd did make a promise: “The Buckingham compressor will be among the most, if not the most, stringently regulated compression stations in the country.”

There to give a personal testimony was Ray Kemble, a Dimock, Pennsylvania, resident in a Rolling Thunder motorcycle jacket who’s lived near six compressor stations for several years.

The small town of Dimock was featured in the 2010 documentary Gasland, which showed residents lighting their tap water on fire.

Kemble carried a bottle of water that he drew from his neighbor’s well. It was brown and swirled with oil when he shook it. Kemble said he’s been diagnosed with three types of cancer since the compressor stations were built, and he keeps oxygen tanks at his house, so when the air gets too noxious from blowdowns, he has clean oxygen to breathe. He said he often has to leave his home because the air quality is so bad.

The council heard from Marie Gillespie, who lives on Union Hill Road adjacent to where Dominion has already cleared a strip of land for the ACP.

“I think I’m the first person who has been directly impacted by the pipeline and compressor station,” she said, describing hearing an awful noise in her backyard, rushing to get dressed and go outside to see the commotion. By the time she did, the trees were already gone.

“I was stricken,” she said. “I was heartbroken. …The stress has already started. Problems have already begun, and I don’t know where it’s going to end.”

Pastor Paul Wilson, who leads the Union Hill and Union Grove Baptist churches, also spoke.

“We are ground zero,” he said, and echoed a popular argument against the ACP. “This whole pipeline is based on false premises. Politicians were bought off, and this county had no choice but to say yes.”

Added Wilson, “We refuse to be the sacrificial lamb.”

And another commenter, through tears, and while banging her balled fist, said, “Nobody’s protecting us. Not a soul.” Her last remark drew enormous energy from the pipeline opponents in the room: “We are going to fight this fight. This is not a done deal.”

Updated June 6 at 3:50pm to correct the source of the data used in the FERC’s environmental impact statement and to include Dominion’s response to claims by Lakshmi Fjord and Mary Finley-Brook.

Updated June 7 at 3:15 with the correct number of Transco pipelines that already exist in Buckingham County, and with the correct project in Charlottesville that was stopped by one slave burial site.