Landowners Fear Ruin From Power Line Route

Cameron Eaton fears that a power line will drastically devalue her Fauquier County property. (By Gerald Martineau -- The Washington Post)

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.

The mere suggestion that it could be marred by this line has sent land values plummeting, said Matt Sheedy, a land developer and president of Virginians for Sensible Energy Policy, a group opposed to the power line.

"We've talked to a number of brokers, and we're being told that the real estate market is just frozen," Sheedy said. "People are backing out of contracts, and no one is prepared to buy with this hanging over them."

Sheedy's group was formed primarily to raise awareness of the line's impact on property values and to fight any effort by Dominion to confiscate private property through eminent domain. The group estimates that land directly in the cross hairs could diminish in value by as much as 75 percent.

Dominion officials have not selected a specific route for its portion of the 240-mile electric transmission line, a $1.3 billion project planned jointly by Dominion and Pennsylvania-based Allegheny Power. Last week, the company released a map of several possible routes for its section, all of which roughly track I-66 between Winchester and a substation just across the Prince William border in Loudoun.

Although Dominion can use eminent domain to take private property to build a power line across it, the company usually tries first to negotiate a settlement with a landowner in accordance with state law, said John D. Smatlak, Dominion's vice president for electric transmission.