CITIZEN POWER ALLIANCE

Until about a month ago, Sullivan's Diner on Old Ithaca Road in Horseheads regularly opened at 6 a.m. Nowadays, owners Peter and Marta Krajnik have the coffee on and grill hot for anyone who pokes their head in the door at 4:30 a.m.

The reason for the earlier start covers 35 acres behind the eatery. That stretch of land has been transformed into a base camp for the local leg of the $500 million Millennium Pipeline project, a natural gas line running across the southern part of New York state.

In the pre-dawn darkness, it's hard to take in the magnitude of the operation. But once the sun comes up, the scene at The Center, an industrial park along state Route 14, is eye-opening. Bulldozers and other pieces of heavy earth-moving equipment sit side-by-side, looking like a storage lot outside a vehicle-manufacturing plant.

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