ROCKBRIDGE, Ohio — When Michael Daniels left urban life behind eight years ago to seek solitude and beauty in southeast Ohio's Hocking Hills, he never dreamed Big Oil would follow.

        But now, the country innkeeper is battling a most unwelcome neighbor.

Visitors to Larry Menchhofer's property in the Hocking Hills enter a meadow near where Marathon Ashland is planning to build an oil pipeline. (Tony Jones photos) | ZOOM |

        With Friday's approval of state and federal permits, work is expected to begin soon on the largest petroleum pipeline project the state has ever seen, a $50 million effort through some of Ohio's most unspoiled and scenic land treasured by hundreds of thousands of outdoors lovers each year. If work proceeds as planned, Marathon Ashland Petroleum LLC, based in Findlay, Ohio, will dig a trench four feet deep for a pipeline that will pump up to 80,000 gallons a day of gasoline, kerosene, diesel and jet fuel from Kenova, W.Va., to a tank yard in Columbus.

        The 14-inch pipe will snake under the Ohio River and up through eight Ohio counties, crossing 363 streams and 55 wetlands. It will traverse nature preserves and come in close proximity to Hocking Hills State Park and Hocking State and Wayne National forests.

        It will wind its way to the capital, where, the company says, the fuel will meet the needs of a growing central Ohio market. It's safer than using trucks, no wetlands or endangered species will be harmed, and the route was chosen specifically to avoid population and development centers, Marathon Ashland says.

        Still, despite the approval of the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the company's assertion of minimal environmental impact, some Hocking Hills residents are not so sure.

        They hope to stop the earth moving, tunnel digging and trench building.

        “It will be like a six-lane highway coming through,” says Larry Menchhofer, a Hocking Hills property owner.

        His land, which includes verdant meadows, a creek gorge and massive rock formations, would be intersected by the pipeline and its 75-foot-wide right-of-way.

        Stop the Ohio Pipeline (STOP), a citizens' group based in Columbus and the Hocking Hills, plans to appeal the permits. Rick Sahli, STOP's Columbus lawyer, says he will review the documents from the Ohio EPA and Corps and decide what to do next. “We are not going to quit,” Mr. Sahli says.

        “We may well lose,” Mr. Daniels says. “But we will go down fighting.”

What they fear

        What Mr. Menchhofer, Mr. Daniels and many others in the rural enclave of Hocking County fear is the possibility of a spill like the one in January 2000 in Winchester, Ky., when a 24-inch Marathon Ashland pipeline broke, spilling at least 500,000 gallons of crude oil in the countryside. Kentucky officials called it the worst petroleum spill in the state's history, but the damage was limited to a farm and a golf course.

Rick Sahli is the lawyer for the group Stop the Ohio Pipeline, | ZOOM |

        Or, worse yet, they fear the kind of incident that happened in June 1999 in Bellingham, Wash., that had nothing to do with Marathon Ashland. There, a high-pressure liquid petroleum pipeline ruptured, spilling 250,000 gallons into a nearby creek. Two 10-year-old boys who were fishing and swimming died in the resulting explosion.

        Since 1986, 36 people have died nationwide in hazardous liquid pipeline accidents, according to the federal government's Office of Pipeline Safety.

        The Marathon Ashland public affairs office said company officials were not available for interviews on the pipeline project. But, through an eight-page “fact sheet,” the company said the pipeline option is far safer than truck transportation, the only other alternative for moving 50,000 to 80,000 gallons of petroleum products a day to central Ohio.

        According to Marathon Ashland, trucking 50,000 gallons of petroleum from its Catlettsburg, Ky., refinery to Columbus would require 241 round-trip truck shipments per day.

        The route from Kenova to Columbus, Marathon Ashland officials say, was chosen specifically because it avoids areas where accidental spills would be a major problem.

        “For safety and regulatory reasons, we sought to avoid population centers, residential or commercial developments, and floodplains to the extent practicable,” reads the fact sheet.

        Since Marathon Ashland proposed the pipeline four years ago, environmentalists and property owners have gone to court four times in Hocking, Fairfield, Pickaway and Franklin counties to try to stop it. Each time they claimed that Marathon Ashland could not assert right-of-way, but each time they lost.

Environmental concerns

        Even if the pipeline never spills or leaks, property owners such as Mr. Daniels are concerned that construction could cause soil erosion, threatening areas such as the Camusfearna Gorge, a ravine that Mr. Daniels considers the scenic gem of his property.

        The pipeline will run across the back edge of Mr. Daniels' Glenlaurel property, through a 75-foot cut in the forest that is part of the 1916 natural gas easement Marathon Ashland is using for much of its route through the Hocking Hills.

        “There was no deception here,” Mr. Daniels says. “I knew the easement existed. I just could never have imagined that anyone would use it for something this destructive.”

        Hiking back through the cut, up and down steep ridges, Mr. Daniels points out to visitors the trees marked with white blazes, trees that are to be cut down for the pipeline project. Mr. Daniels is concerned that the construction project, so close to his property line, will cause erosion that would ruin the gorge where his guests hike, and where, from time to time, young couples come to hold an outdoor wedding.

        What angers him most is that the construction will uproot trees that are the natural roosting home of the Indiana Bat, he contends, a federally designated endangered species.

        But the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in October 2000 signed off on the pipeline construction, saying it could find no evidence that the Indiana Bat or another threatened species, the small-whorled pogonia, a wildflower found in the region, would be harmed.

Taft's role

        Opponents direct some of their unhappiness at Ohio Gov. Bob Taft, especially now that the permits have been granted.

        A frequent visitor to the Hocking Hills, the governor was there in June to promote tourism in what is the state's second largest tourist destination, behind the Lake Erie islands.

A gas pipeline already runs through the Hocking Hills | ZOOM |

        The Taft administration's Ohio Department of Natural Resources and the Ohio EPA have done little, critics say, to minimize the impact of the pipeline on the Hocking Hills or to convince Marathon Ashland to locate it elsewhere.

        “Taft's administration hasn't shown the slightest inclination to do anything about this,” says David Anderson, executive director of Appalachian Ohio Alliance, a non-profit group that has aided STOP.

        The pipeline will cross within several hundred yards of Mr. Anderson's home on Chapel Ridge Road, running under nearby Queer Creek, a stream that flows from an underground source near Old Man's Cave in Hocking Hills State Park.

        “I don't think there is a desire in Columbus to take on a big oil company,” Mr. Anderson says.

        Mr. Daniels says the governor has been a guest at his Glenlaurel lodge and earlier this year had dinner there with friends.

        “The governor is no longer welcome at Glenlaurel,” Mr. Daniels says. “He has not been our friend.”

        Gov. Taft would not comment on the project, his communications director, Mary Anne Sharkey, says.

        “The governor relies on his people in the departments involved to deal with these situations,” she says. He “understands that trade-offs have to be made in a society that depends on gasoline.”

Losing "its teeth'

        The Ohio Department of Natural Resources had its authority to act in the pipeline matter trimmed severely last year by the Ohio General Assembly. It eliminated a requirement that the department had to find “unavoidable public necessity” and get approval from the governor before an easement could be used in a state nature preserve.

        The department “lost its teeth,” says Mr. Sahli, who was legal counsel for Ohio EPA in the 1980s.

        What opponents have wanted since the pipeline project was announced is a formal, independent environmental impact statement, which they say is typically done for a project of this size with as much potential for disturbing waterways and natural areas.

        “This shouldn't even be a question,” Mr. Sahli says. “Environmental impact studies are done all the time for projects that don't have a fraction of the impact this one could have.”

        In November, Ohio EPA and the Army Corps jointly held public hearings on the proposed pipeline at Lancaster and Rio Grande, Ohio. Marathon Ashland officials say they have done their own assessment of potential environmental impact and concluded that the project will have “minimal impact” on the environment.

        An environmental impact statement, according to Marathon Ashland, would be “redundant” because the concerns of the public were heard and addressed at the public hearings.

        Guy Denny, who retired three years ago after 23 years as chief of natural areas and preserves in the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, called for an impact study at one of the public hearings last fall and said he is “astounded” that, nine months later, no such study has been ordered.

        “If you ask Marathon about an Environmental Impact Study, they say they already did it themselves,” Mr. Denny says.

        The Army Corps could have ordered an environmental impact statement but did not.

        Steve Wright, a spokesman for the Corps' Huntington district, says that since none of the other state or federal agencies that looked at the project — including the Ohio EPA, the federal Office of Pipeline Safety or the U.S. Department of the Interior's Fish and Wildlife Service — asked for an environmental impact study, the Corps decided it was not necessary.

        “We normally rely on these agencies to look at projects and make a determination,” Mr. Wright says.

Alternate routes?

        Opponents also say neither state nor federal officials have forced Marathon Ashland to explore alternate routes.

        “There are other rights-of-way that can be used without doing this kind of damage to a pristine, unspoiled area,” says Mr. Anderson of the Appalachia Ohio Alliance.

        Marathon Ashland officials say all the alternatives were explored and rejected for safety reasons. The route chosen, the oil company maintains, poses the least threat of harm in the event of an accident.

        It is a project, the oil company says, that will, by going through this sparsely populated part of the state, have “zero” impact on endangered and threatened species, on permanent loss of wetlands, on warm water habitat streams.

        Still, the assurances from the petroleum company do little to calm the fears of Hocking County property owners such as Mr. Daniels and Mr. Menchhofer, who came to the Hocking Hills decades ago to escape the urban tangles that are fueled by gasoline.

        “Stopping the project is not our goal necessarily,” Mr. Menchhofer says. “Keeping it from ruining the land we have decided to call home is.”
       

150-mile oil pipeline carries worries to lush central Ohio
Tennis worker recalls terrifying trip
Enduring sculpture finds second home
Area residents urged to conserve water
Obituary: Museum's curator Sterling Cook Jr. 'extraordinary'
Officials: Dockside best bet for bucks
Tristate A.M. Report
Unity fest gathering meant to heal
BRONSON: Racial paranoia
CROWLEY: Kentucky politics
HOWARD: Some Good News
PULFER: Federal research
Activists test creek for waste
Democrats make strides into GOP-held ground
Turtlecreek targets building site
Common genetic abnormality often undetected
Ex-officer's wife had multiple stab wounds
Rail tower closes after nearly century
Recent grads enter 'real world'
State fair's haunted house spooks some firefighters
Students dig into archaeology class
Additional child molestation charges filed against Howell
Boone Co. fair kicks off fun
Fighting a river of trash
Man charged in roommate's death