I've been taking photos of the Mountain Valley Gas Transmission project as I come across it in my travels. One day I decided to go looking with purpose, and went to the village of Newport, VA in Giles County where the 42" high pressure pipeline passes within 150 yards of the center, placing the entire village within the blast zone in case of a catastrophic failure of a weld, valve, or section.
Most of these were taken in August of 2018, with the last one in March of this year. A majority with the Leica M4-P/Summicron-C 40/2 and Elmar-C 90/4 on Tri-X 400, a couple with the Leica CL/Color-Skopar 21/4 on Ektar 100, and the last one with the Nikon S2/W-Nikkor 35/3.5 on FP-4+ 125.
This story of a village about to blow up reminds me to my own village in the north of Spain, Galdakao, being near France and having access to the sea trough Bilbao, Alfred Nobel (yes, that one) founded a factory to make explosives in 1872 in the north and finally established in my small village by the end of XIX century.
Now reading old news I have been present in 3 incidents, one in 1974 (I was 1 year old) with 15 casualties, then in 1983 with another 3 (the father of one school mate died and they moved back to their region after this) and the last one in 1991 with another 4 dead people.
In all explosions the windows and metal fences facing the factory where broken or bended, only one of many departments were affected each time, if all in a row our village wouldn't exist by now.
As you may know in the Basque country we sadly had local (and bloody) terrorism for many years, well we locals could hear the differences types of controlled explosions that in the factory were made than terrorist strike with explosives. When someone out of the village came to live to our town and they were not aware of the factory they were terrified the first time hearing some controlled explosions in a row.
Now many years later and looking back I realise the security was really high and because of that and despite the accidents happened, it could have been much much worst.
