THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 11, 1996 TAG: 9608090159
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Letter
LENGTH: 36 lines
Pipeline amounts to `stealing'
Your newspaper seems to avoid printing anything that might jeopardize Virginia Beach's attempts to steal water from residents of the Roanoke River Basin.
My analysis of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's (FERC) so-called Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) showed the EIS and approval of the proposed pipeline by politicians such as former Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown to be bogus and a hoax. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission was shown to be politically motivated and their hired so-called scientists who put the flawed EIS together to be incompetent and dishonest.
Your June 22 paper had a front page article related to Virginia Beach's proposed Lake Gaston pipeline. You water thieves showed renewed concern about your plans to steal natural resources from the rightful owners who live in the Roanoke River Basin. Your editorial writer even referred to Norfolk's water availability study being made public as ``not neighborly.''
What hypocrites! Anyone in Virginia Beach who supports the illegal and immoral inter-basin transfer of water from the Roanoke River Basin while sponsoring propaganda contained in a bogus FERC EIS has a right to accuse other humans of not being a good neighbor? Are you being good neighbors to the tens of thousands of tax-paying landowners who live around Lake Gaston and up and down the hundreds of miles of shoreline from Virginia's mountains to North Carolina's coast, that are within the Roanoke River watershed?
Any water Virginia Beach might want or claim it needs is either in the Atlantic Ocean, the James River, or as Norfolk has exposed, in the network of sources already available to Norfolk and/or the Beach.
George E. Burdick
Environmental Consultant,
Wildlife Biologist by CNB