ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, December 26, 1995 TAG: 9512260060
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH
SOURCE: Associated Press
Workers next month will begin digging for the long-awaited Lake Gaston pipeline despite ongoing challenges that could halt the project.
The $200 million pipeline first was proposed in the early 1980s to alleviate Virginia Beach's water shortage. Project opponents argue that the city should not be allowed to siphon water from rural areas in Southside Virginia and North Carolina and say Virginia Beach needs nowhere near the 60 million gallons of water per day that the pipeline can carry.
Virginia Beach officials say going ahead with the project is a calculated risk.
``We will probably be litigating the pipeline for years after it's up and running,'' Thomas Leahy, pipeline project manager for Virginia Beach, told the Richmond Times-Dispatch. ``If we waited to build until after all the challenges and lawsuits were over, we'd never do anything.''
The city is free to build the 76-mile pipeline because it received the last regulatory permit it needed in November. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said the pipeline was an environmentally sound way to bring badly needed drinking water to Virginia Beach. A federal court upheld the permit last month.
But the city's decision to proceed is still a gamble.
Project opponents include North Carolina and the Roanoke River Basin Association, a group of Virginia interests. Opponents already have asked a federal appeals court in Washington to void the last permit. They also have filed a lawsuit in Mecklenburg County to stop the pipeline and introduced a bill in Congress to halt it.
Any one of those challenges could cease construction of the pipeline before spring, they say.
Even if the pipeline is finished and the water starts flowing, opponents say, the flow could be shut off or cut back drastically in 2001, when the entire Lake Gaston hydropower project comes up for relicensing by the energy regulatory commission. The relicensing process gives North Carolina a new opportunity to challenge the taking of water from the lake.
``No business or person spending their own money would ever go forward with this project at this point,'' said Alan Hirsch, a deputy North Carolina attorney general. ``The only reason Virginia Beach is going ahead is that it's the taxpayers' money. But it's foolish policy, and somebody's going to pay dearly for it.''
Over the past few weeks, contractors in Alabama and Maryland have produced hundreds of feet of steel and concrete pipe, 5 feet in diameter, for transport by rail and truck to Southside Virginia.
Sometime in January, Virginia Beach officials say, work crews along the pipeline route will start digging a trench, burying the lengths of pipe and fastening them together.
City officials say it will take about two years to finish the pipeline.
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