'Getting in the way:' Inside the standoff over the Mountain Valley Pipeline
ELLISTON — The roar of construction echoed through the hollow, as a bulldozer pushed dirt on an impossibly steep slope hundreds of feet up the ridge. At the bottom of the slope, a makeshift fence and stack of pallets marked a boundary — the edge of a support camp for tree-sitters who for 10 months have blocked the path up the other side of the hollow.
These are the battle lines on the ground in the fight over the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a 303-mile natural gas transmission line intended to transport gas from the fracking fields of northern West Virginia through the rugged terrain of eastern Appalachia to a compressor station in southern Virginia’s Pittsylvania County.
The encampment on Yellow Finch Lane has become a hotspot over the summer. In July, three protesters were arrested at the camp after others walked onto an MVP work site on a nearby road. An Austin man who had sat in a tree on the site for several months was also arrested after locking himself to a concrete structure and halting pipeline construction for several hours.
Several people occupied the support camp on a day last month, doing chores and talking with one another. They ask reporters not to take photos showing anyone’s faces. More than one individual mentioned the protest against the Dakota Access pipeline at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation as a motivating incident. The protesters, mostly young people, had traveled to Elliston not just from other parts of Virginia, but from West Virginia, Louisiana and beyond.
Read more: https://www.virginiamercury.com/2019/08/04/getting-in-the-way-inside-the-standoff-over-the-mountain-valley-pipeline-in-southwest-virginia/