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DAVENPORT, N.Y. – Three years ago, Anne and Bob Stack moved from Nevada to the hills of central New York. They planned to build their retirement home on a lot next to Anne’s brother’s house, and were working with a local builder whose eco-friendly homes they had been reading about for years.
But days after reaching New York, the Stacks received a letter of behalf of Oklahoma-based energy giant Williams Companies, Inc. saying that the company was planning to build a pipeline that would run 75 feet from their future home – and that they would need about three acres of the Stacks' land for construction.
What's more, there was nothing the Stacks could do about it.
“You get it on the computer and there it is,” said Anne Stack, referring to the court notice giving their land to Williams. “They win. We lose ... It feels surreal.”
With all the natural gas being produced in the U.S. through hydraulic fracturing, energy companies have been building pipelines at a fever pitch. More than 100,000 miles of gas pipelines have been built in America since 2002. Often, the land companies need to build pipelines is in private hands, so it has become commonplace to take land over the objections of landowners. The practice is allowed under a little-known federal law from the 1930s, which gives private pipeline companies the right of eminent domain.
Williams, which delivers almost one-third of the natural gas used in the U.S., has been using eminent domain to take land in villages, farmlands and forests of northeastern Pennsylvania and central New York to build the 124-mile Constitution Pipeline. The 30-inch, high-pressure natural gas pipeline will cross nearly 300 rivers and streams, and require cutting down hundreds of thousands of trees, leaving behind a clear cut in places nearly half a football field wide. More than 100 landowners have had property taken against their will to build Constitution – and none of them are happy.
“People think that they own their land and that they have the right to their land, but in fact, the government owns all the land,” said Anne Marie Garti, a founding member and counsel for the group Stop The Pipeline. “When the government needs your land, it has the right to take that land."
Eminent domain, which is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, allows the federal government to take private land for public use with fair compensation. But what's happening with the pipeline is different, and far more outrageous to residents, Garti says.
It's giving that right to a private corporation.
Once a pipeline is approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the company will try to negotiate with the private land owners. If that doesn't get anywhere, they can seize the land by eminent domain, and a court will determine what's fair compensation.
Williams spokesman Mike Atchie says more than 500 landowners willingly negotiated with the company and got good deals. He points to the Delchenego Rod and Gun Club in Sidney, New York, which agreed to allow the Constitution Pipeline to run along the back of its shooting range for about 2,000 feet. Neither Atchie nor the club will say exactly how much money they agreed upon, the club president saying only that it was in “the thousands.”
“Many times, we pay them two, three, even four times as much as the appraised value to have the pipeline on their property,” Atchie said, adding that eminent domain is a last resort. “That’s not the approach we want to enter into,” he said.
The Stacks say that no amount of compensation for their land is fair.
“What’s fair about destroying our land, permanently destroying it? There’s nothing fair about it,” Anne Stack said. “It’s all bullcrap. I mean, give me a break.”
Before federal regulators allow pipeline companies to exercise eminent domain, those companies are supposed to take steps to limit the impact on landowners. Atchie says Williams has done just that, adjusting Constitution’s original route by more than 50 percent.
“At this stage, we’ve worked with these landowners for three years. So we’ve negotiated with them, negotiated with all landowners along the row,” Atchie said. “And at some stage, the project is going to move along because it is a net benefit for the overall community, for the country to have domestic energy for domestic use.”
For nearly 40 years, Dan and Laura Jean Brignoli have lived in the hills of Davenport, in a home they built by hand. They thought they’d be taking it easy now, but fighting Constitution has become a full-time job.
As mad as they are about the two acres of land Williams took by eminent domain, they're far more concerned about safety. In the last 20 years, nearly 400 people have been killed in pipeline accidents, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.
“If you look at the history of pipelines and the problems they’ve had … there’s so many bad records by these pipeline companies,” said Dan Brignoli. “It makes you scared.”
The Brignolis took America Tonight to the spot that concerns them most: a stream along the road in front of their house. They say they’ve seen the stream overflow the banks and totally wash out the road. They wonder what will happen when the pipeline is buried underneath the creek.
“Our presumption is that [the flooding] would take the pipeline out,” Laura Jean Brignoli said.
That’s not just idle speculation. A little more than three weeks ago, two of Williams’ pipelines ruptured in West Virginia, damaged by high water at a stream crossing. Several nearby homeowners were forced to flee.
Not far from Constitution's path, an older pipeline, built by another company, crosses through the town of Blenheim, carrying liquid propane from Texas to upstate New York. Coming down from the hills, the pipeline cuts through Gail Shaffer’s farm. Twenty-five years ago, as her father was about to feed his cattle, he noticed something unusual.
“My father knew instantly when he saw this white gas coming out of the ground, he knew what it was,” she said. “He ran in and called the company to warn them, and they told him it was very dangerous, to get out immediately.”
She added: “And that’s when the line went dead.”
Somehow the pipeline had cracked. An enormous cloud of propane drifted half a mile downhill toward main street Blenheim. Shaffer suspects that men working on the pipeline might have damaged it. To this day, nobody knows what ignited the explosion.
Two people were killed, including an assistant fire chief who had been warning people to get away. It could have been even worse: Just minutes before the explosion, a school bus full of kids passed through the center of town.
At the time, Shaffer was New York’s secretary of state. Fire investigators from her office, some of whom had been in Vietnam, told her “the way the windows were caved in was just like the effect of a napalm bomb.”
“When you talk about pipeline safety, I tell people that is an oxymoron, because it’s never really that safe,” Shaffer said.
It’s a point that was reinforced by two more accidents in the area involving the same pipeline: an explosion that destroyed a home in 2004 and a leak that caused an evacuation in 2010.
Dan Brignoli
Lost land through eminent domain
The company that built that pipeline also took the Shaffers’ land by eminent domain.
“You know, eminent domain is the ultimate power they can use for ‘a public purpose,’” Shaffer said. “And we, in rural areas particularly, are very vulnerable because we have [a] lesser population, lesser political power.”
Atchie, the Williams executive, says the company assesses environmental conditions and constructability of a given areas and builds to meet those needs.
“Yes, on occasion there have been incidents, but we’ve learned from those incidents and we make sure we deploy the best practices to make sure that we’re operating this line – and every other line – at the safest level possible,” Atchie said.
Davenport residents like the Brignolis are running out of options. The courts have consistently ruled against opponents of the pipeline and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has endorsed the Constitution project. Last year, the couple traveled to Washington, D.C., for a meeting with Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., but they say he didn’t show.
Garti of Stop the Pipeline still can't believe corporations such as Williams are allowed to “come in and trample on people’s property.”
“Most Americans, particularly up here, have spent everything that they have to buy their land. It is their entire asset, and they don’t like that taken away from them,” she said. “So when this corporation comes in, they try to say, ‘Well, we’re just taking this little strip of land.’ But in fact, they’re destroying what people thought of as their land. They’re destroying … their quality of life.”
Just weeks ago, the Brignolis, along with many of their neighbors, got a letter from yet another company. That company wants to run a pipeline through their property too.
Now, the Brignolis worry their community could become a pipeline freeway.
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