Although the Mountain Valley Pipeline began service in mid-June, construction on the route continues as contractors work to permanently restore the route by returning the pipeline to as much of its original condition as possible, removing mud socks, wood mats and other equipment, and installing joint barriers and other permanent sediment control devices.

According to landowners along the pipeline route and state regulators, MVP’s documented history of botched work and water quality violations continues during this final phase of construction.

The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality recently slapped the pipeline with additional $30,000 in fines for water quality violations, while residents along the pipeline route have received numerous complaints about the cleanup work.

“MVP said no”

Washouts occurred on Robert Jones’ property in Montgomery County, Virginia, where MVP had only constructed water barriers – earthen embankments planted with grass – to divert wastewater across the 50-foot-wide permanent right-of-way, leaving the rest of the 125-foot-wide construction right-of-way unprotected.

In early July, heavy rains sent water and sediment rushing down the hill, ripping layers of sediment out of the temporary right-of-way, plugging the rock-cut depressions at the edges of the water barriers, and washing mud and soil into nearby Mill Creek.

Jones’ neighbor Lynda Majors, who helps the retired engineer monitor rights-of-way, discussed the issue with Michael Rolband, director of the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (VVP), and suggested that MVP place the joint barriers across both the temporary and permanent rights-of-way.

“MVP said no,” Majors says. “They said their contract expires at the end of August. I assume they meant the agreement with their remediation company, but MVP is responsible long after that.”

MVP has removed bridges that allowed heavy machinery access to the right-of-way, so cleanup after the July event was not easy.

“It was 12 men with five-gallon buckets working for five days,” Majors says. “Afterward, you could see sediment blooms in Mill Creek where fish were swimming. Mill Creek used to have a gravelly creek bed, but now much of it is covered.”

“You can’t prove it’s us”

Amy Nelson, a history professor who retired from Virginia Tech two years ago, has been monitoring rivers along the pipeline route. Yellow Finch Creek and Sinking Creek are two of the hardest hit rivers she has seen during construction, and the impacts have not improved while the company has worked on final restoration.

“There’s a difference between ‘the pipeline is finished and we’re putting gas through it’ and ‘we’re finished,'” Nelson says. “That’s a huge distinction that gets lost in the public imagination.”

A karst contamination event in February—sediment entering an underground body of water that MVP apparently was unaware of—contaminated a nearby spring, which then discharged sediment into Sinking Creek.

“For seven days, they did nothing about it,” she says. “We were used to having clean or nearly perfect water all along the stretch upstream of Mountain Lake.”

A large landslide near the road to Mountain Lake also caused problems in Sinking Creek.

“They encountered all kinds of problems with that crossing,” Nelson says. “It was a nightmare. It took five months for MVP to get under the creek.”

Repairing the hill was a major project.

“It looks like an amusement park hill – all rebar and concrete,” she says. “There’s nothing natural about it anymore.”

Sinking Creek is not what it once was, and Nelson has little confidence that MVP will do what is necessary to restore it and other affected creeks, such as Yellow Finch.

“Sinking Creek was a trout stream,” she says. “It was a clean stream with no problems. The rocks are now covered with an inch of sediment. It’s normal for a stream to be muddy after rain, but a healthy stream will be back to normal in a day or two. At the spots we’ve monitored along Sinking Creek, the water quality is just not OK anymore. MVP will say, ‘They can’t prove it’s us,’ but it wasn’t like that before. They won’t admit they ruined these streams in the first place, and there’s no effort to restore them.”

According to Nelson, MVP made many promises that it failed to keep.

“People were told, ‘When we’re done, you won’t know we were here,'” she says. “They don’t do that. You can’t just blow the top of a steep slope and put it back on, especially if you’ve buried a 42-inch pipe bomb there. They just take many, many shortcuts and become less and less responsive.”

“That is their responsibility”

Kathy Chandler, who lives on Bent Mountain in Roanoke County, Virginia, has also noticed that MVP has become less and less responsive as she tries to get them to fix the problems their work has left behind – especially on a narrow road that leads to her property and the homes of some neighbors.

MVP used it as an access road – even though it went through a wetland. They dumped tons of gravel on the road and built wooden mat bridges in some places to handle the heavy machinery driving in and out.

After the pipeline was put into service, MVP came and ripped out many of the mud socks and one of the wood mat bridges. Chandler warned them that the road under the other bridge had been destroyed and the culverts beneath it had become severely clogged with all the sediment that came from the pipeline’s route. Tearing down the bridge, she told them, would cut off neighbors from the road and make it impossible for emergency vehicles to get through.

“Everyone told me to talk to someone else,” says Chandler. “I contacted everyone and got no response.”

At some point they suggested that she have a contractor repair the road under the bridge.

“I don’t have anyone to do this work,” she says. “It’s their responsibility.”

When Hurricane Debby, then a tropical depression, passed through the region in early August, bringing heavy rains, Chandler took photos of water rushing under the wooden mats but over the roadway and clogged culverts.

There are other problems on the road. For example, the part of their property behind a gate – which MVP demolished and replaced – is now muddy and impassable. But Chandler hasn’t heard from MVP in weeks.

“Now I think they’re going to pin this on us,” she says. “That’s how it feels, and it’s not right.”