MORGANTOWN — The gravity-fed, raw-water pipeline that will connect the new Morgantown Utility Board reservoir to the utility’s treatment facility will either run through White Park in some capacity or a pumping station will be required to move the water, adding millions to the project’s cost.
Even so, Doug Smith, MUB’s assistant general manager and chief engineer, said the utility intends to meet with concerned residents and stakeholders weekly over the next month or so to figure out exactly what path the pipe should follow.
About 30 people packed into a conference room at MUB’s Green Bag Road headquarters Friday morning for the first of these sessions, despite it being held on less than 24 hours notice.
The park issue came to the fore recently, when trees along the 1st Ward park’s main trail were tagged with orange and white markings. According to MUB, the orange markings indicate trees that will be removed if the current plan is followed, while white markings are historically significant trees to be avoided.
Smith explained that MUB intended to run the pipe along the existing trail clearing in an attempt to minimize the number of trees impacted. He said the 30-inch pipeline needed typically requires a clearance of 40 feet to allow equipment enough space to operate.
MUB Spokesman Chris Dale said that if the original trail plan is followed, between 250 and 300 trees may need to be removed.
Attendees listed a variety of reasons why MUB’s planned route is unacceptable — from the degradation of a coveted recreational space, to soil erosion, to impacts on migratory birds.
While Smith said he was sympathetic to those issues, the utility is constrained by gravity.
In order for the line to work with the topography, there is a narrow swath it must fall within, and that swath not only runs through the park, but through old pad sites from above ground oil tanks, some of which have been confirmed contaminated.
Dale said the risk of running through contaminated tank pads “is present everywhere in the available path and cannot be escaped.” He said MUB will do what it can to avoid the pads, but if unknown contamination is encountered, MUB will “deal with it appropriately.”
As for the pipeline, Smith said MUB’s existing plan was drawn up with the goal of sparing as many trees as possible.
“From our perspective, we agree. We don’t think along the trail is the best, but we made our own internal assumption that minimizing the number of trees down was the best thing to do,” Smith said. “That’s how we ended up there.”
It was also noted that during six public feedback sessions in late 2015, there were never any comments made regarding the pipeline path or White Park.
Asked if those plans were detailed enough at the time that residents should have reasonably known the pipe would run through the park, Dale said they were.
That said, Smith conceded MUB didn’t do enough to bring the potential impacts to the park to people’s attention, and he’s hopeful these meetings can help alleviate that misstep.
“We hope that what we can do is come to an understanding between all of us for the best possible project,” Smith said. “At the end of the day, we don’t want it to be a net negative. Not all of us are going to get everything we want, but we want it to be a net positive for Morgantown.”
MUB’s new reservoir, the George B. Flegal Dam and Reservoir, will serve as a secondary water source in case of contamination in the Monongahela River. The project is currently under construction and has a total cost of $47 million.
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