West-bound traffic on Central Avenue was being detoured to a different route to Ocean Boulevard Tuesday afternoon. A flagger was directing cars up North 12th Street to Commercial Avenue and over the hill on narrow side streets to Ocean. Traffic on the four-lane Central Avenue was down to one-lane eastbound while the pipeline work was being done. World Photo by Lou Sennick

Among much hoopla, Gov. Ted Kulongoski, along with the Coos County Board of Commissioners and other dignitaries, shoveled the first mound of earth for the natural gas pipeline project on July 10, 2003.

But in the wake of lawsuits and alleged violations by permitting agencies, some residents have been left wondering if the economic promise of the pipeline is worth the cost.

In November, the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality issued penalties totaling $11,400 against MasTec North America Inc., the company hired by Coos County to construct the pipeline. The fines centered on a series of water quality violations that the DEQ charges occurred between August and October as a result of the horizontal drilling in waterways.

MasTec has appealed those fines.

Commissioner John Griffith said the county chose to drill under some streams less than 30 feet wide to protect the environment. According to Griffith, typical pipeline construction consists of damming and trenching in streams. The county didn't choose that method because it wanted a pipeline that would be held to a higher standard, he said.

At the same time, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began investigating and subsequently issued cease and desist orders and notices of non-compliance to MasTec and Coos County. (See "Permit problems," Page A7.)

According to records provided by the Army Corps of Engineers, MasTec continued the work despite the orders and without adequate permits.

Myrtle Point resident Del Knight and six other landowners along the pipeline route filed the suit, which asks for more than $500,000 in damages caused by "frac-outs" - eruptions of debris and drilling materials into streams caused by the horizontal drilling.

Knight, who also is president of the Coos County Coalition, a group of residents that has charged there are problems with pipeline construction, said drilling problems caused silt to damage sensitive salmon spawning grounds, increasing stream turbidity as much as 2,400 times in some areas.

A second lawsuit, filed in early December 2003 in federal court, is charging that Coos County and MasTec have violated the federal Clean Water Act by allowing illegal discharges in streams during the pipeline's construction.

The plaintiffs - Sierra Club, the Coos County Coalition and the Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Project - are seeking more than $4.3 million in fines and civil penalties.

MasTec has not responded to the first lawsuit, according to Brent Foster, a Portland lawyer working with Thane Tienson of Landye, Bennett and Blumstein, which filed both lawsuits.

The suit was filed to bring compensation and relief to people who have said their water supplies were damaged as a result of MasTec activities, Foster has said.

The second lawsuit, according to Foster, deals with the most fundamental aspects of the Clean Water Act, which stipulates that discharges are not permitted without the proper permits.

Clark Besack, project manager for MasTec, was directly responsible for overseeing the directional drilling, the lawsuit claims, and was aware of the problems. Besack has not returned repeated phone calls to The World.

In addition, the lawsuit contends that both the county and the Board of Commissioners have been aware of the discharges and have allowed drilling to continue.

Commissioners will not comment pending litigation.

According to Coos County pipeline lawyer Jay Waldron of Portland, the county expects to file a response to the second lawsuit by the end of February.