Signs of Destruction

The Mountain Valley Pipeline—which will provide natural gas for overseas, the hell with folks around here—is coming through our area, leaving much destruction in its path. Supposedly the work is temporarily stopped, but workers were out in force today. A whole gang of them wanted to put up signs along the edge of my lawn—the place where I drive my golf-cart every morning as I go from feeding barn-cats to collecting the newspaper. When I saw a man poking into the grass that grows over our underground drainage system, I golf-carted out and stopped him.

In the picture below, there's a white stake where the sign-post will go—right over our drain that CenturyLink messed up a few years ago and spent over six months repairing.

When I told the guy about the drain, he had no idea it was there. I showed him the open part of it and pointed out where the buried part ran along the edge of our property and then crossed under the road.

A little farther down, just behind the "Be Prepared to Stop" sign, is another white stake on our property—for an identical warning sign. I convinced them to wait until my husband got home before proceeding with their work. They said they'd start at the other end first.

When my husband came home, he convinced them not to mess with the drain, which starts in the shrubbery behind the "Loose Gravel" sign, so they moved the stake up a bit.

Apparently putting in a sign no longer requires just a guy and a post hole digger. It requires a half dozen guys and a machine that makes a hole.

And several other trucks.

Apparently, the machine pushes water down into the ground and then lifts up the mud.

My house is in the background in the picture below. The pipeline doesn't come through my property, but my house is in the thousand foot blast zone.*

A lot of the road had to be blocked off to set the post.

Finally the post was in the hole, but several guys had to straighten it.

Then they poured little bags of gravel around the post.

Finally, the convoy was ready to move out.

Next came a VDOT crew spreading tar and gravel on the road which is in pretty bad shape. Apparently not bad enough shape to actually repave, though.

A lot of that gravel is going to get slung around by cars as they go past, but luckily we don't have much traffic—unless you count all the pipeline and VDOT guys driving up and down the road.

*Although we'd heard for over a year that the blast zone extends to a thousand feet beyond the actual pipeline, one of the pipeline guys said it was more like a mile. So that means not only is our house in the blast zone, but so is our Polecat Creek Farm down the road.

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