Bluegrass Uprising

By Madeline Ostrander, The Nation

29 December 13

As American energy production booms, thousands face pipelines in their backyards.

orrie Reed lives alone in a trailer on a rural road outside Frankfort, Kentucky, on two acres of land that her late husband bought more than twenty years ago. He left the property to her and their daughters when he died in a motorcycle accident. “He told me before he passed that the place was going to be mine, and the only way I’d lose it was if I let somebody mess me out of it,” Reed says.

Ever since this past summer, when land agents approached her—twice—to ask permission to survey a proposed pipeline route across her property, Reed repeats these words to herself. She walks with a limp, an injury from a collision with a dump truck during the years that she worked on road maintenance crews. She owns a pistol because she is afraid of the feral dogs that she says are common in the area. She held the gun in her palm when the pipeline consultants pulled into her gravel driveway. “You’re trespassing,” she told them.

Still, she decided to sign the paperwork allowing them to survey. A day later, a letter arrived at her house from the Bluegrass Pipeline Blockade, a loose-knit network of Kentuckians organized mainly through Facebook. Reed learned that the pink survey ribbons in the field across the street from her land marked the potential route of a two-foot-diameter transcontinental pipe. It would haul a mix of butane, propane, pentane and other chemicals—called “natural gas liquids,” or NGLs—from fracking wells in West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Nine years ago, a four-inch NGL pipeline about a tenth as big destroyed five homes in eastern Kentucky and left a state trooper with severe burns after he rescued a 3-year-old child. In August of this year, a ten-inch NGL pipeline ruptured in western Illinois, shooting flames 300 feet into the air.

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