Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, September 13, 1993 TAG: 9309130019
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CATHRYN McCUE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The towers that hold 765,000-volt power lines average 136 feet tall.
It takes about 60 steps to walk around the base of a tower, which spreads over half an acre. To stand in the middle and look up is to gaze into an engineering marvel, an intricate criss-cross of steel beams.
Each tower contains from 23 to 107 tons of steel, depending on topography, height and placement along the line.
Sometimes helicopters are used to haul the pieces into rugged areas, like Southwest Virginia. The towers are put together in a matter of days, anchored by large metal grills buried a dozen feet in the ground.
The 765-kv line is actually three bundles of four lines, each one the thickness of a broom handle. "Micro-arcing" between these lines causes the noise, says Charles Simmons, vice president of construction and maintenance for Appalachian Power Co. The lines are louder when the weather is damp because the electric fields concentrate in the droplets of water that hang off the lines.
The new line that Apco wants to build from West Virginia to Cloverdale will be the first of its kind, Simmons says. It will have three bundles of six lines each, and should be virtually silent.
At peak, Apco's Jackson Ferry-Axton line that runs through Floyd County carries enough to electrify a city three times the size of Danville.
The route is part of larger 765-kv transmission web built by American Electric Power, Apco's parent company. The 2,022-mile network took 20 years to build and reaches into six states - about one-tenth of those miles in Virginia. The utility says the 765-kv lines are the most efficient way of transmitting power over great distances.
The entire network is linked by 7,500 four-legged towers. About 1,200 are in Virginia. One hundred towers pass through Floyd County.
One of them stands next to Rita Smith's house.
Sometimes Smith can hear the line when it rains, but otherwise it doesn't bother her. Smith says she didn't care when the line came through her 160-acre farm.
Half her years she's lived in an Indian Valley hollow without electricity, and she remembers how much it changed her life.
"If that line didn't do me no good, it might do someone else," she says.
A few miles away, Michael Branscome built his log cabin home about 100 yards from the power line. It may not be attractive, and it may give him a shock when he parks his truck near it. But, Branscome says, "This is where I had my land. I don't even pay attention to it."
Even those who helped fight the line, maybe bought a raffle ticket and signed a petition, are resigned to living with it these days.
"You get used to it," says Lane Via, who lives outside the town of Floyd. A tower stands about 100 feet from his bedroom window. "It's here, and it's going to stay here, so might as well not pay any attention to it."
Via says he hardly hears the noise anymore. But there was that one morning, shortly after the line was energized. He woke up to the sound of a rain pounding on the world outside. "I thought, man, I never heard such a rain."
He put on his rain coat and opened the door . . . on a clear day. It was the power line, kicking up a racket.
Up the street from Via lives Susan Nunn. She can see a couple of towers and hear the line from her yard. When she moved in five years ago, she didn't think the line was a big deal, she says.
She still doesn't, not much anyhow. Except when it storms, lightning seems to hit close to her house. One time, sparks shot from an outlet, petrifying her son. "We had the house grounded. We don't know what's going on," she says.
Although several towers march through her community, dominating the view, Nunn says not once in her five years there has she talked about it with neighbors.
Richard and Betty Martin inherited their farm from an elderly man they took care of for years. The towers came with the property.
Betty Martin feels uneasy around the power line. "It's weird," she says, but the berries that grow under it have no taste at all.
But, there it is, a big tower right out back - so why not take advantage of it? Richard Martin now runs the "Powerline Motorcross Playground," and has printed colorful T-shirts and jackets picturing motorbikes zooming around the feet of a gigantic tower.
Others have not gotten used to it.
"We try to stay away from it as much as we can when the weather's bad," Lois Slusher says. "We don't let the grandchildren play under it."
Although only one tower sits on her property, she can see seven from her front door.
She and her husband were active in the 11-year fight against the line, and they keep up with the latest twists in the debate over health effects from electromagnetic fields.
"I still think it's dangerous, I don't care what they say," J. Edward Slusher said. "It's never been proved that it couldn't be."
They thought about selling one time, but a real estate agent said they wouldn't get fair market value because of the line.
The Slushers were the first landowners in Floyd County to go to court with Apco, refusing to take the company's offer of about $20,000 for a right-of-way easement on 6 acres.
J. Edward Slusher offered to sell the land to the utility at market value - $100,000. Apco declined. They went to court, and the Slushers ended up with $50,000.
Lou Ona Bond was another who held out and got a court settlement, eventually getting $20,000 rather than the $5,000 Apco offered to put a tower on her farm.
"No, it wasn't worth it. They could take their $20,000 and not build the line," Bond says. She and her husband moved to the other side of their property to get away from the line, which Bond thinks may be harmful for her grandchildren.
Floyd County records show that property assessments on land beneath the tower and lines dropped in 1986, one year after the line was built, to one-half or one-third its previous value. However, few landowners saw a decrease in their taxes because, overall, the county's land has risen in value.
Apco paid out a total of $3.8 million for the Jackson Ferry-Axton line, which runs 73 miles and covers 1,781 acres in five counties.
In addition, Apco has paid about $3.4 million in equipment taxes to Virginia since the line was built.
While economic development is an important consideration in Apco's proposed Oceana-Cloverdale line, that was not a big deal in the 1970s, Don Johnson, Apco's spokesman, says.
"The economy was going great guns. People weren't asking about jobs," so Apco did not make projections of the project's economic impact. Going back through the files, Johnson finds that a minimum of 300 mostly local workers were employed during the 1 1/2 years of construction.
Recently, various officials asked Apco to look at the economic impact of the current proposal, coming as it does in the midst of uncertain times. The line is estimated to cost about $250 million, although Apco says that delays will add to the cost.
About 1,260 four-year construction jobs and between 1,500 and 3,600 permanent jobs will be created. The total economic benefit in Virginia and West Virginia will run between $140 million and $340 million a year.
But, as Johnson and others in Apco continue to point out, the line is being built to meet the utility's mandate of providing reliable power at the lowest possible cost - not as an economic boost.
Apco maintains that without the 765,000-volt line in full operation by 1998, its customers will be prone to brownouts and blackouts.
The bottom line, according to Apco: more people are using more electricity, and they're showing no signs of letting up. Apco's customers used 5.2 percent more electricity during the first eight months of this year than last year.
Betty Yopp agrees that Apco has its job to do, she just disagrees with how they do it. "They have a tendency to minimize the effect they have on people," says Yopp, who helped lead the fight against the Floyd County line. "They don't listen very well."
Those who have battled the power company say it's like Don Quixote fencing with the windmills. They were full of optimism, but that dwindled as the forces stacked up against them.
Now, they take some satisfaction in how long they were able to delay the company.
Dallas Hubbard bumps along in his pickup truck through his field, which is intersected by the power line. He notes with a laugh that while 765,000 volts of electricity pass overhead, he can't get a service line to his barn.
He nods toward a grassy knoll overlooking a valley, dotted with pine stands and sweeping slowly up to a ridge of mountains.
"That would have made a right nice spot, to look out over and everything," says Hubbard, whose eldest son had wanted to build a home there. "Hell, that's shot, not for this year, but for the hereafter, you might say."
Straddling the top of the knoll is one of the steel giants.
by CNB