Jul 18, 2018 3 min read

Smith Township supervisors agreed to extend the hours and allow a second shift of workers building a natural gas processing plant in Smith Township.

Supervisors cast a unanimous 3-0 vote Monday during a hearing at the township building on MarkWest Energy’s request to extend work hours at the site of its Harmon Creek facility, to which the township gave conditional-use approval last year.

The site is between Point Pleasant and Creek roads, and is the second such facility being built in that area. The first is Energy Transfer’s Revolution plant.

Shane Hecht, senior project manager for MarkWest, said the extra hours would accelerate construction on the plant.

“We’d like to wrap up the construction before winter comes, and with … the longer daylight hours and the better weather, to have less impact on our neighbors and the community at this phase of construction,” Hecht said.

MarkWest – which is owned by MPLX, Marathon Petroleum Corp.’s pipeline company – received supervisors’ conditional-use approval to build the plant last year.

Brian Coppola, who lives in neighboring Robinson Township, told officials he and his wife can hear work from the hill where they live, more than a mile away.

“It’s more than just the noise. It’s school buses (carrying workers) in the middle of the night,” the former Robinson supervisor added in response to a question by Christopher Nestor, outside counsel for MarkWest. “It’s a disturbance to us. We live in a residential zoning district, and, to be blunt about it, you approved a plant in a residential zoning district.”

With Monday’s vote, officials agreed to allow up to 50 people at the Harmon Creek site between 7 a.m. to 3:30 a.m. from Monday to Friday, and 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. on Saturdays, with no work on Sundays and holidays.

The conditional approval the township granted for the plant last year allowed for construction from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays and 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturdays, with no work on Sundays and holidays.

In response to MarkWest’s request for more hours, the township previously approved a temporary extension of the hours June 18 and scheduled the hearing.

The move allows extra hours for workers to do welding, X-ray testing of pipes for leaks, final leak testing of systems, bolt torquing and cable pulling and termination. Deliveries would still occur during normal hours.

Coppola’s wife, Susan, is pursuing a land-use appeal of the township’s approval of MarkWest’s plans to build the plant. Her case cleared a procedural hurdle late in May when Washington County President Judge Katherine B. Emery found she had standing to challenge the decision.

MarkWest, which intervened in that case, is seeking to appeal Emery’s decision before the state Commonwealth Court.

Coppola’s attorney, Jeffrey Ries, argued MarkWest hadn’t previously objected to the hours township officials had prescribed when it signed off on the plans.

“The conditional-use decision that this board entered had reasonable conditions attached to it,” Ries said. “Those were obviously thought out after having taken numerous time and having submissions by counsel, myself included before those conditions were written. So those hours weren’t just thrown together; they were thought about.”

Nestor countered there “was some discussion” during the conditional-use process “about the fact that we may need to come back and talk about these work hours. It’s actually in the transcript.”