Environmental law group puts Virginia locales on its endangered list

Published February 7, 2013 by Robert Powell, III

The Charlottesville-based Southern Environmental Law Center has three Virginia locales, including its hometown, in its annual list of the top 10 places in the South that face immediate, potentially irreparable, threats in 2013.

The list includes:

Virginia and Tennessee mountains: “Mountaintop removal continues to threaten forests, streams, wildlife, and communities across Southern Appalachia, including a new project masquerading as a highway called the Coalfields Expressway. “

Charlottesville: “Despite more cost-effective, less damaging alternatives and strong public opposition, a $244 million proposed bypass would leave a permanent scar on one of the South’s most special communities.”  The law center is referring to the Route 29 Bypass. “This $250 million highway would route tractor-trailers near six K-12 schools and two U.Va. graduate schools, threaten the area’s main drinking water supply, and leave a permanent scar on the local landscape.”

Southern Virginia: “An intense, ongoing push to lift Virginia’s longstanding ban on uranium mining threatens the health of the Roanoke River Basin, which supplies drinking water for more than 1 million people.”

Other places on the list include Talladega National Forest, Alabama: Metro Atlanta’s Water Supply: Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, North Carolina: Cape Fear Basin, North Carolina: Courthouse Creek, North Carolina;  Waccamaw River, South Carolina; and Goforth Creek Canyon, Tennessee.