Posted on 12/11/2006 11:40:41 AM PST by FLOutdoorsman
The 15-story towers and crackling cables that are planned to cut across the Northern Virginia countryside are just red lines on a map, a paper illustration of what could come.
But for Cameron Eaton, who learned shortly after Thanksgiving that one of the proposed routes for a new high-voltage power line slices across her Fauquier County property, they have already brought the specter of financial ruin.
She bought her 100-acre Delaplane farm last year, when it was an overgrown slice of land anchored by a rundown old farmhouse just off Interstate 66. She plowed all her savings into it. To pay down her $1 million mortgage and build up her horse business, she planned to sell a five-acre chunk within a couple of years.
Then came what her neighbors have come to regard as "the black cloud."
"I'm probably sunk by this," said Eaton, 45, seated by the wood stove she uses to heat the farmhouse. "No one will buy that land if some ugly power line could run right over their house. I'm broken off at the knees."
Across parts of Loudoun, Prince William and Fauquier counties, property owners who possess some of the most valuable land in Virginia are struggling with the sudden shock of learning that Dominion Virginia Power, which supplies electricity to most of the state, plans to erect 40 miles of power line through their back yards.
Of particular concern is that plans call for the 500,000-volt cables to be carried by a series of steel lattice towers planted along a 150-foot-wide ribbon of land stripped of trees and buildings. The area's picturesque countryside, with its emerald farms dotted by Civil War-era barns, is arguably its most valuable quality, area real estate agents say.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Many people are upset, including, Robert Duvall; that this will destroy some of the Civil War Battle Sites as well.
So why not use superconducting lines that are underground.... Oh yea, I forgot EMF has the potential for...(insert unproven theory here)
Not In My BackYard!
I admit to being torn on the issue.
An expanding population requires power and waste disposal.
There is no perfect solution and somebody will be hurt in the process.
Are these landowners People Who Matter (PWMs)? Are they like the Kennedys and the Cronkites who managed to stop offshore power development near their properties? Or are they just the run-of-the-mill rich, who have no special pull or connections?
Unless there are a few PWMs amongst them, they are going to learn the limits of the power they can buy with their wealth.
I'll never understand why they don't run the damned things underground.
Just another greedy land speculator, hoping to get rich by subdividing and rezoning and bringing sprawl to the countryside.
This would of course have made lives miserable for her neighbors. But it looks like Dominion Power might beat her to it. And I'm not all that upset.
She will get whatever the fair market value is for whatever land they take, and in fact the electric lines pose no threat to her land or horses, so she'll probably still be able to use her property the way she wanted, it will just have some ugly towers on it.
She'd probably be happier if they took some of her neighbor's houses. I doubt she'd be willing to give up her electric power to keep the wires off her property.
Of course nobody that moved in this area over the last 20 years didn't put in AC.
It is time for the introduction into the world of a small, safe, non-polluting energy generating source which can be placed into each home or vehicle and make it self-powering without the need for a grid.
Perhaps I will go invent it.
It's expensive to run 500kva lines underground, much more expensive than running them above ground.
And while it would be better esthetically, I imagine for people like this woman, having an underground cable cutting through her property would also make it harder for her to subdivide, rezone, and build out some of her property.
They're just some wires up in the air. We have them near our house, if you don't live right next to them they don't really effect you (meaning if you can't see them), but the people who WILL be able to see them from their houses will all object.
And because they have money, they will do their best to use that money to stir up other people who can get the masses to scream about it. So you'll end up with people who live nowhere near the power lines showing up to protest.
The Washington Post wouldn't be writing about it unless they were PWMs. People don't realize how much insider maneuvering goes on to get stuff like this in MSM papers like the Post and NY Times. They will try to use common folks for their story line, but they are just fronts for the PWM who don't want their name out there.
Clearly you know nothing about horse people, nor did you read the article.
How did selling 5 acres, 3 lots, for a total of $900k equate to greedy land speculator in your mind ? It seems to me that leaves 95 acres as open space. It sounds like smart business to me - use 5 acres of the 100 to finance the entire thing.
And, being on a conservative forum, why should you excoriate her for being upset at having her business plans disrupted and the possibility of going bankrupt due to eminent domain ?
If you worked for a utility you might.
In another article they stated it will add another 1 Billion to the project and it would make it hard for them to find problems with the cables.
She may have another recourse. How long had the plans for the lines been in place? The owner had to disclose anything like power lines coming. It always pays to do homework if you are property shopping. A stop by the township building can produce information about upcoming projects and zoning issues. Property dumping occurs all the time when something is coming up that will affect a property. Be careful when you buy property.
I'd much rather see those "ugly" towers than row upon row of condos and McMansions.
Air is a very good insulator until you trap it.
Pretty much anywhere in northern VA has Civil War significance or some sort or other.
What does that mean?
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