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Option to bury transmission lines in James River raises environmental concerns

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Pushback on a proposed power line across the James River has focused mostly on the potential damage to a historic riverscape by a string of 300-foot towers that would stretch from Surry to James City County.

Some opponents to the project would rather see Dominion Virginia Power bury its transmission lines in the river bottom, instead, to preserve the scenic view. But an underground crossing raises other concerns, predominantly environmental, including the specter of potentially dredging up a toxic chemical that’s been sleeping deep in the river sediment for decades: a pesticide called Kepone.

Used as a rat poison and related to DDT, Kepone was illegally dumped by the ton in the James River by a chemical company in Hopewell in the 1970s. When the dumping was finally discovered, the state was forced to shut down the lower James to commercial and recreational fishing for years to protect human health. It was completely reopened in 1988.

“During the (public) comment periods, we actually have received comments from citizens expressing concerns about the presence of Kepone in the river,” said Patrick Bloodgood, spokesman at the Norfolk District office of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps has permitting authority over Dominion’s power line project.

“As of this time, we are not aware of it being present in this portion of the river,” Bloodgood said. “However, we and the state regulatory agencies would be considering the implications if Kepone is found.”

That likelihood is slim, one expert says.

Michael Unger at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) in Gloucester Point was part of a finfish monitoring program initiated by the state in 1975 to assess Kepone contamination. The concern was the pesticide would bioaccumulate up the food chain and impact human health.

But he and his colleagues found that Kepone concentrations in fish began to fall as soon as the dumping stopped and in fact fell below the “action level” after 11 years, until today it’s no longer a concern. They published their results in 2005.

Kepone doesn’t dissolve in water, so it isn’t gone from the James, Unger said. But over the decades it has disappeared from the surface of the river bottom, buried under many feet of fresh sediment and redistributed by the river’s natural dynamic forces.

Should an underground crossing be seriously considered, he said, caution would call for taking sediment core samples to check for any Kepone “hot spots.”

“This isn’t based on data, because we don’t have data,” Unger said, “but my gut feeling is it’s such a small area and it’d be for such a short period of time, I doubt it would be a serious problem.”

In fact, the river has been dredged many times over the years, including to excavate silt from the Surry-to-Jamestown ferry channel in the mid-1990s. According to news reports, no evidence of Kepone contamination was ever found.

Dominion needs a new transmission line because it plans to retire two of its three generating units at the Yorktown Power Station following strict new environmental regulations for coal-fired generation. If it can’t get more electricity distributed from its Surry Nuclear Power Station, Dominion says a swath of customers from Northern Virginia to North Carolina can expect to start seeing rolling blackouts by the summer of 2016.

The power company says its best option is to install a 500-kilovolt (kV) transmission line across the James from Surry to a new Skiffes Creek switching station proposed in James City County.

According to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the line would run about 7.4 miles, strung along 17 towers to be built across the James.

An analysis of various overhead and underground alternatives drawn up for Dominion by Stantec Consulting Services Inc. of Williamsburg claims underground crossings would be far costlier and harder to maintain and repair, provide far less electric capacity and cause greater environmental impacts:

*A double-circuit 230 kV line would provide a total capacity of only 2,000 megavolt-amps (MVA), compared to the 5,000 MVA capacity of a single overhead line.

*Installing double-circuit submarine cables would mean plowing a trench as wide as 460 feet and dredging up about 36,000 cubic yards of river bottom. Dominion would also have to build a multistory converter station on both sides of the river, further affecting uplands, wetlands and river bottom.

*Finally, the project price tag would balloon from about $60 million for an overhead line to as much as $1 billion for underground lines plus two converter stations.

Project opponents say Dominion is exaggerating the cost and complexity of underground crossing options.

Dietrich can be reached by phone at 757-247-7892.