Gaslighting: First in a series published in partnership with The Assembly about opposition to a wave of new natural gas pipelines, power plants and storage facilities on the drawing board in North Carolina.
Listen to an audio version of this story below.
ROUGEMONT, N.C.—Andrea Childers ambled down a moss-covered path with Hubert, the family Corgi, leading the way. She veered onto an old logging road and arrived at the creek, which lies a mile downstream of the Moriah Energy Center site in southeastern Person County.
This creek was a huge reason why the Childers family bought the property more than 30 years ago. It’s where the Childers sent their young daughters, now 29 and 26, to play and catch crayfish near their rustic home. It’s where she found solace after she miscarried.
Childers brought up photos on her phone taken last January showing a stream so clear it looks like glass. Now the water is brown.
In mid-August, Childers, a retired social studies teacher, her husband, Paul, and Samantha Krop, the Neuse Riverkeeper, led three people from the state Division of Water Resources’ inspection team on a walking tour of the local creeks. Krop had found turbidity levels in those leaving the Moriah Energy Center at 20 times the state standards.
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“After a lot of back and forth, the state acknowledged that the sediment was coming from Dominion’s site,” Krop said, referring to the energy center’s owner. “But they said their hands are tied. You can see how we go around and around in circles here.”
“There is no arguing that this is Dominion’s pollution,” Childers said. “This is another lesson in futility.”
A half-mile away, Dominion Energy was toppling trees and blasting bedrock to build the $400 million Moriah Energy Center, where it will store liquified natural gas on 485 acres of forestland.
When finished, the MEC, as it’s known locally, would hold 50 million gallons of LNG in two pressurized tanks at temperatures of 260 degrees below zero. Each tank would be 160 feet tall and 600 feet around, roughly the circumference of a ferris wheel.
One thousand feet above the Earth a few days later, Krop sits in the passenger seat as a retired lieutenant colonel and volunteer pilot for SouthWings, a conservation group, flies his Cessna over southern Person County.
A view of the Moriah Energy Center construction site on July 28 in southeastern Person County.
It’s at the peak of summer, and lush forests cover the landscape in green brocade. Helena Moriah Road, sinuous and narrow, hems in the fields whose ripening rows of corn are ribbed like corduroy.
Suddenly there it is: the future factory for freezing and liquifying natural gas, now a brown scour of rubble and dirt.
Ascend another 5,000 feet, and the rest of the fossil fuel industry’s expansive buildout would
Biologist, Landscaper, Plant Geek
2moI appreciate this innovative and mutually beneficial approach to vegetation management. We need to see more of this creative rethinking of practices!