High Voltage, High Tension

In Virginia's Piedmont, Electric Company and Critics Both Draw a Line

"The land is dear to me. Don't want to see it destroyed," says Henry C. Green, 85, of Markham. One branch or another of Green's family has farmed there since Virginia was a colony. (Photos By Bill O'leary -- The Washington Post)

Once every 10 years or so, something like this happens.

In the '70s, the Marriott Corp. proposed to erect Ferris wheels and roller coasters near the spot where Gen. Thomas Jonathan Jackson stood against the Union "like a stone wall." In the '80s, on the Stuart's Hill portion of that same Manassas battlefield, a developer proposed to build a mall. In the '90s, the Walt Disney Co. proposed a theme park version of American history at the base of the Bull Run Mountains. This year Dominion Virginia Power sees the Virginia Piedmont as a distance between two points for a 500,000-volt power line twice as tall as the oaks and as wide as an interstate.

A drama rich in plot and character invariably ensues. Those who propose to bring "progress" to this territory reliably run into resistance of which they never dreamed. No one knows how the Dominion epic will turn out -- as in the past, hardly a week goes by without another headline-filling twist and turn. But in the previous decades, against all odds, the programs of the mighty corporates have come a cropper. And in all these tales, certain themes recur.

Full disclosure: This writer has been a student of these culture clashes for more than 30 years from the perspective of his home in the Piedmont, which has a neighborhood power distribution line crossing it, and which is in the originally proposed path of the big transmission line.

The classic mistake strangers make when they look out over the Piedmont is to think it empty. Only an hour or so west of the White House, the mountains and runs, forests and fields, byways and stone walls and black wood fences -- amid which it is still easy to spot more cattle and horses than humans -- can lure the uninitiated into presuming they have arrived at the fly-over, a place as corny as Kansas. Some are even so spooked as to fear they've landed in "Deliverance" territory.

For Dominion, the surprises started with learning this place is full of names. Some call it "Upper Virginia," for example, to distinguish it from the busyness and traffic of Northern Virginia. To others it is "Hallowed Ground," as the lush coffee-table photo book about the region is called. Also, "The Mosby Confederacy," after the Gray Ghost who legendarily contributed to the theory and practice of guerrilla resistance to far more powerful forces.

In fact, this area is crammed with ideas and images, and people who value them more than they do money. Farmers and tradesmen of modest means are relieved to find their views shared by old-money names such as Mars and duPont, not to mention more recent arrivals such as the Hollywood star Robert Duvall. As in previous conflicts, what unites this resistance is the sense that not everything of great worth is captured by monetary calculations.

Quantifying 'Progress'

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John D. Smatlak, 50, has come a long way from his steel-mill home town of Johnstown, Pa., from which he escaped to the electrical engineering program at Penn State. Today, in his Richmond office with the shades drawn against the view of the James River, he is turned out in a well-cut black suit and highly polished black tasseled loafers.

The proposed Meadow Brook-Loudoun power line, as it is known, is John Smatlak's baby. He is Dominion's vice president-electric transmission, the man trying to maintain his composure as he faces all the protesters with their signs that read "Fight Dominion's Greed."

Smatlak's approach to the power line project has been a spreadsheet view of the universe. "When we decide where to route it, we plot all of the historic sites, the historic areas. How many miles through the area. How many historic sites per mile. The number of houses every so many feet. We count the number of houses within 200 feet, within 500 feet," he says.

At angry public meetings, where it was not unusual for 2,000 people to show up over three nights, Dominion distributed a survey that asked people to rank their feelings across 15 variables on a scale of one to five. How important should it be to "maximize distance from residences"? "Minimize length of line across agricultural/pasture land"? "Maintain reliable electric service"?

"We end up trying to quantify all of these issues for each segment," Smatlak says. "And then we assign a weight to those, based on what the public told us. A numeric system." And then they turn all the numbers over to their consultants.