ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, October 9, 1996 TAG: 9610090056
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
Both American Electric Power Co. and the State Corporation Commission's staff have acknowledged in the past week that the U.S. Forest Service's proposed ban of AEP's planned high-voltage power line from federal lands will effectively kill plans for the line if the decision is allowed to stand.
"In the commission staff's view, significant lengthening of the route [for the line] to avoid federal lands ... would render the project both uneconomic and inefficient," the SCC staff wrote to the Forest Service. "Further, lengthening the routing would almost certainly result in adverse environmental impact on a greater number of Virginians and on a significantly larger land area."
The SCC, the power company and others flooded the Forest Service with reactions to a draft environmental study of the line prior to Monday's deadline for public comment. The study looks at the line's potential impact on the Jefferson National Forest, the Appalachian Trail and a section of the New River in West Virginia that is being considered for federal protection.
Ken Landgraf, a planning staff officer for the George Washington and Jefferson National Forests in Roanoke, said the agency received several hundred more comments about its environmental study over the weekend and through Monday's deadline. Responses so far total about 1,000, and others, postmarked no later than Monday, will continue to be accepted, he said.
The comments will be categorized, summarized and put into a document for public review by the end of year, Landgraf said. Many of the respondents made simple statements either for or against the power line, but others, he said, went into lengthy detail in their reaction to the environmental study.
AEP's own response encompasses three volumes and roughly 300 pages.
The environmental study, which took the Forest Service five years to prepare at a cost of more than $5.5 million to AEP, was released in June. It looked at AEP's proposal to build a 115-mile, 765,000-volt line that would run from Wyoming County, W.Va., to a substation at Cloverdale in Botetourt County.
The Forest Service studied AEP's preferred route for the line, which would cross about 15 miles of forest. Forest Supervisor Bill Damon made a preliminary choice to bar the line from federal land.
However, AEP has said the line is needed to prevent overloads to its transmission system in southern West Virginia and Southwest Virginia.
"Such an overload," AEP wrote the Forest Service, "could trigger a series of cascading power outages, creating a blackout affecting millions of people, businesses and industries from West Virginia to the East Coast."
AEP has dubbed the Forest Service's "no-action" alternative a "no-build" alternative. The agency has failed to consider the social and economic consequences of unreliable electric service, including "economic loss, human suffering and even the possibility of human casualties," the company said.
Although AEP suggested the Forest Service had overstated the environmental harm the line could cause, opponents of the line, who support the Forest Service's decision, say the study understates the potential damage.
Opponents from Giles and Montgomery counties said they were surprised the study underestimates the economic damage the line would do. "This line," Pat Bohmer, chairman of the Giles group, said, "would increase Southwest Virginia's reliance on electricity brought in from the Midwest, and cost us many potential jobs."
"We think the line should be killed," said opponent Cliff Shaffer of Newport.
He wasn't surprised, Shaffer said, that the SCC staff criticized the Forest Service study, because the staff was not critical of AEP's application to build the line. "They didn't check it out very well," Shaffer said.
Last December, the SCC issued a preliminary order finding the line is needed to supply the region's power needs and that options, such as building new generating plants in Southwest Virginia, were not the answer.
Both the power company and SCC staff said in their comments that the Forest Service's study shows that building the line on a route that bypasses federal lands would cause much more environmental damage than routing it through the national forest.
The Forest Service and National Park Service, which oversees the Appalachian Trail, are contradicting themselves in the study, the SCC staff said. The federal agencies say they don't intend to stand in the way of the state determining the need for the line and its route, but they also acknowledge their decision blocks construction of the line over a reasonably direct route, the staff said.
The SCC staff added that the study may be flawed in that it doesn't consider the environmental effects of the Forest Service's decision not to allow the line on federal lands.
"There is no discussion of the effects on air, water and other resources from construction of additional generation facilities in Southwest Virginia, which appears to the commission staff to be one alternative that would assure sufficient capacity to serve Virginia consumers," the SCC staff said.
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