By Zina Raye
Resident of Tucker County and a PMP certified project manager who specializes in IT infrastructure and software development.
Please don’t get starry-eyed over the prospect of tax revenue from the Ridgeline Facility. Ask the harder question first: who will pay for the burden of a firefighter response when 30 million gallons of diesel fuel, stored at the top of the Pendleton Creek watershed, catches fire?
My questions were shaped by my professional bias as a risk-averse project manager. I know some people think these concerns are overblown, even though the proposed storage volume is roughly equivalent to three Exxon Valdez tanker spills. Some people continue to point out that the power plant is proposed on industrial reclaimed land, as if putting three 10-million-gallon tanks on top of an old mine labyrinth makes it somehow safer.
Now, a year later and with some changes in the world, I want to revisit the topic, because it is rare to be able to observe the consequences of such a scenario without it happening to you or on your own land. To see what a fire at the Ridgeline Facility could look like all you have to do is type “drones oil refinery Tuapse” into a Google search.
The massive fire and billowing dark clouds above storage tanks that have a total capacity comparable to Ridgeline (1.5 million cubic meters in Tuapse case) show the scale of what could happen right here in Tucker County.
It is an unnerving but informative image for any community that’s considering large-scale infrastructure development. With so many facets of the Ridgeline proposal being unknown or explicitly kept secret, and regardless of whether or where such a facility is planned in Tucker County, it behooves us and our elected officials to look beyond the vague promises of jobs and revenue.
You don’t need to go too far for the public risk examples. In March 2026, Iran directly struck two Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers in the United Arab Emirates, while a near-miss from a one-way attack drone damaged a third AWS facility in Bahrain. According to AWS, the attacks caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery, and triggered fire suppression systems that led to significant water damage. This appears to be the first documented instance of a data center being a direct target rather than collateral damage.
War is the extreme example of public risk from data center developments, but the full picture is painted with more common strokes: a mechanical failure, a once-in-a-generation storm, mine subsidence, and the ever-present risk of human error.
We love our local volunteer firefighters. But are they truly prepared for this? And more importantly, is the developer prepared to support them?
If we are going to ask local emergency services to respond to an industrial fire of a scale never before seen in this region, then the dialogue needs to happen now, during the planning and permitting phase.
Questions that should be asked and answered publicly, on the record, include:
Water
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What is the estimated daily water demand to fight a full-surface, diesel-tank fire, and where exactly will that water come from during drought conditions?
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What are the estimated downstream impacts if firefighting runoff enters the Pendleton Creek watershed, which feeds into the Blackwater and ultimately the Cheat River?
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What redundancy exists if on-site fire suppression systems fail due to a power loss, sabotage, a lightning strike, or a cyberattack?
Funding
4. Will the developer purchase and dedicate specialized apparatus for local departments, or will taxpayers be on the hook for those costs?
5. Who bears financial responsibility for long-term environmental remediation after a catastrophic fire?
6. Where will firefighting foam be stored, in what quantities, and who pays to maintain and replace it?
Training and Infrastructure Needs
7. How many hours of specialized industrial-fire training will local volunteer departments receive annually, and who funds that training?
8. How often will multi-county joint exercises be conducted with Grant County, Randolph County, and the state emergency management?
9. How many additional tanker trucks, pumpers, foam tenders, and water-supply vehicles are required to sustain a response to a multi-day, diesel tank fire?
10. How quickly can outside industrial firefighting teams realistically reach Tucker County in winter weather?
11. Are local hospitals equipped to handle mass casualty burn and smoke inhalation incidents?
Planning
12. Has an evacuation model been completed for Parsons and downstream communities in the event of toxic smoke plume or contaminated runoff?
13. Has the developer demonstrated the ability to contain boilover events, cascading tank failures, or secondary explosions?
14. What setbacks and blast-radius calculations were used in the site layout?
15. Will there be hardened infrastructure, counter-drone capability, or merely chain-link fencing and cameras?
16. What is the worst-case scenario modeled by the developer, and will the public be allowed to review it?
And perhaps the most important question of all: if this facility generates private profit but creates public risk, who is being asked to subsidize whom?
These are not anti-development questions. These are governance questions. They are the kinds of questions responsible elected officials are to ask before, not after, the sirens begin to wail.