When we attended the Dominion Power Towers community briefings a few weeks ago, we asked every company representative we could buttonhole three questions:

• How much of the new electricity capacity would go up on the grid to serve other states rather than being delivered to Loudoun County customers?
• Why couldn't the new lines go along Dominion's existing rights of way?
• Why not simply bury the new lines?

No satisfactory answers were forthcoming.

Now, in the face of severe public displeasure and well-orchestrated public opinion campaigns, Dominion has reconsidered their "Power Towers Across Hallowed Ground" approach and indicated that they may run the lines along their existing towers, a strategy their representatives said was "absolutely impossible" a few weeks ago.

This will cost ratepayers, upwards of $200 million, and it still begs two of the questions.

If they were so ill informed about the answer to one question, the decision makers in Richmond and Washington, D.C. should not allow any action at all until Dominion provides satisfactory answers to the other two.

Knowledge may not give us the power we need to stop this entirely, but without it, we'll have no power at all.