Is horizontal drilling
feasible for pipeline?
The city of Morgantown and MUB don’t appear to want to find a solution to a White Park 30-inch gravity fed line.
Now I’m wondering if they know there are contractors who can drill horizontal holes (pathways) from point to point relatively long stretches, install pipes in the same and manhole access the ends of the pipings. I’ve seen it done so fiber optic cables can be run through those pipelines later.
I think it was about a 3-inch line I saw pulled through the hole from access point to access point and I’ve heard they can go larger. If not and the horizontal drilling is feasible one only has to put in multiple lines till the 30-inch pipe area is met.
My efforts to talk to someone as a peon in society don’t amount to a hill of beans so whether this would-be information helpful isn’t getting to anyone in authority. My only recourse is to suggest such be considered via a letter to my newspaper.
This method if feasible, would bypass much surface structure damages and perhaps facilitate checkpoints along the pipeline, too. The feasibility of horizontal drilling/pipelining looks like it would be more economical and environmentally appreciated.
Or make White Park more of a tourist attraction and build a raised Roman viaduct and charge admission to pay for it, if they’re going to pump it uphill anyway.
Dumb to go against gravity.
Delmar Hagedorn Jr.
Morgantown
State leaders deliberately
doubled down on coal
Monday’s editorial (“Coal industry facts not lost on anyone except our leaders”) was spot on.
The maxim attributed to Aeschylus (“There is no avoidance in delay.”) certainly applies to describe the failure of West Virginia’s political leaders to lead the state through a necessary and inevitable energy transition.
The maxim tells only part of the story, however, for more than just a delay is involved. They didn’t simply ignore the obvious head winds caused by cheap and plentiful natural gas and increasingly competitive renewables. Instead, they made the conscious decision to double down on coal through approval of utility resource acquisitions that have caused West Virginia’s electricity rates to increase by four times the national average — the largest percentage increase of any state — over the past 10 years.
These same resource acquisitions have put West Virginia at a tremendous disadvantage with respect to attracting new jobs: Large employers want low-cost, low-carbon electricity, whereas West Virginia offers relatively high-cost, high-carbon (92% coal-fired) electricity.
So it is not just a matter of delay by West Virginia’s political leaders to avoid facing reality. These are deliberate decisions over the past 10 years to continue blindly down an unsustainable high-cost path, the consequences of which will burden the state for decades to come.
James Van Nostrand
Oakland, Md.
Some in GOP looking to
abolish Social Security
According to President Trump and the national conservative news media, someone who simply supports a federal government social program that helps people such as Social Security and Medicare is a “crazy socialist.”
If we go by that definition, then that would make Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon “crazy socialists” because they both signed new federal government social programs that help people into law/existence, and they both supported Social Security.
In fact, Ike wrote a letter to his brother in which he stated that any Republican who wants to abolish Social Security is “stupid.” It appears that conservative Republicans have become a lot more conservative and “stupid” since around 1980 because we sure do have a lot of them nowadays who want to abolish Social Security and move our country toward “survival-of-the-fittest” social Darwinism.
I recently saw President Trump’s acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney on television. When he was a congressman he was well-known for saying Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, that it is “unconstitutional” and it should be abolished
More and more, today’s national Republican Party stealthily advocates for a crazy, cold-hearted and creeping “survival-of-the-fittest” social Darwinism.
Stewart B. Epstein
Rochester, N.Y.
