In 2002, during the height of the drought, people all over Central Virginia ate off paper plates and drove around in dirty cars. Meanwhile, elected officials crossed their fingers that existing water supplies would hold out, and they wouldn’t have to truck in emergency provisions of bottled water.
That summer, the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority (RWSA) outlined a $13 million plan to expand the area’s water supply. City and County officials spent a year and a half figuring out how to divide the cost of the proposed construction projects, and the RWSA cut a $1.38 million check to the consultants who advised them.
This spring, the RWSA discovered that the water supply plan wouldn’t work. It wasn’t the first time consultants had steered us down the wrong path—20 years ago, the RWSA spent $6 million on land along Buck Mountain Creek in Free Union with the intention of building a new reservoir there, before they discovered that State and Federal regulatory agencies wouldn’t approve such a massive project.
Next month, the RWSA will consider a range of options for expanding the water supply. All of them carry heavy price tags, various levels of environmental impact and uncertain results. Now some residents—concerned about a river in their backyards and wary of Rivanna’s history of plans that go nowhere—say that before we spend millions more dollars searching for answers to our water dilemma, we should be sure we’re asking the right questions.
A river runs dry
The Moorman’s River begins with fingerlike tributaries reaching high into Western Albemarle’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Rain and snow fall on the eastern slopes of Turk Mountain, Horsehead Mountain and Pond Ridge, then follow the path of least resistance to form Big Branch, Pond Ridge Branch and several smaller tributaries that spill into the South Fork and the North Fork. These two tributaries merge at the Sugar Hollow Reservoir, which spills over the dam to feed the Moorman’s River. The Moorman’s flows east, gathering strength from Doyle’s River and a vast network of streams and creeks, before finally emptying into the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir just north of Charlottesville.
Postcard-perfect, the Moorman’s was designated a State scenic river in 1989, just a year after Frederick Williamson moved to a 9-acre rectangular property along Sugar Hollow Road. Beside his house, he set up a woodworking studio, where he carves the red maple, cherry and walnut trees growing in his yard into beautiful smooth bowls, which he sells at galleries and local craft shows.
When there’s enough water in the Moorman’s to cover most of the rocks in the riverbed, Williamson pulls down one of the kayaks hanging in his garage and takes a ride down the river, 300 feet of which runs through his property.
In the years after Williamson moved to Sugar Hollow, the Moorman’s began running dry. For two miles east of the Sugar Hollow Reservoir, the scenic mountain river turned into a rocky ditch until a stream flowing down Middle Mountain replenished the river. By 1993, the Moorman’s was regularly running dry between early June until mid-November.
It turns out the RWSA was intentionally killing the river. During the summer, demand for Sugar Hollow’s water exceeded the amount that emptied into the reservoir. So the RWSA simply turned off the tap and allowed the Moorman’s to dry up. Because the Sugar Hollow reservoir was built in 1946, by virtue of legislative grandfathering it was exempted from a State law requiring reservoirs to release water into outflowing rivers.
Moorman’s lovers were especially irked to discover that the RWSA pipes water from Sugar Hollow to the Ragged Mountain Reservoir, instead of allowing it to spill over the dam and feed the scenic Moorman’s.
“It shows that the RWSA places no value on keeping water in a river,” says John Martin, who joined Williamson and others in a group called Friends of the Moorman’s River, comprising mostly Moorman’s property owners who lobbied the RWSA to keep the river alive. “To the Authority, water is there to meet demand, period. Thinking about the value of having water in a river just wasn’t relevant.”
A huge pipe under the Sugar Hollow dam connects the reservoir to the Moorman’s riverbed, but the pipe is so old the RWSA keeps it shut, for fear it won’t close again. In 2000, after much hew and cry from the Friends, the RWSA decided to release 400,000 gallons of water per day into the Moorman’s. That amount still flows into the river each day from a faucet stuck into the pipe leading to Ragged Mountain. It keeps the river wet but doesn’t satisfy the river’s advocates.
On a recent afternoon, days of regular rain had all local reservoirs filled to capacity. Water spilling over the dam into the Moorman’s kept the river flowing with about 50 cubic feet of water per second—not nearly deep enough to boat, but deep enough that kids could safely use the rope swing at the swimming hole near Picnic Rock, along Sugar Hollow Road.
The RWSA’s faucet releases about .65 cubic feet of water per second into the Moorman’s.
“It’s a completely arbitrary amount. There was little real science behind it,” says Donna Bennett, who also lives near the Moorman’s. “It showed that the RWSA just didn’t get it.”
William Brent, an RWSA board member and longtime director of the Albemarle County Service Authority, offers a different perspective. Temporarily shutting off water to the Moorman’s River may have upset a few people, he admits, but it’s a trade-off the Authority is willing to make to ensure the taps keep flowing.
“Right now, I’ve got three or four critics,” says Brent. “But if the water runs out, I’ve got 80,000 critics.”
Dammed up
“We’re not talking about tree-hugging or aesthetic values,” says Martin. “You have to keep your rivers and streams healthy if you want your water supply to last.”
In other words, if our rivers are unhealthy, our reservoirs will suffer.
This is no abstraction. In fact, the principle is at work with the largest of our area’s four reservoirs, the South Fork Rivanna, built in 1966. Since then, the region’s population has more than doubled to about 125,000 people; meanwhile the South Fork reservoir has lost about 500 million gallons of capacity due to sediment that is washing into the reservoir and getting trapped behind the dam. Each year, the SFRR loses about 1 percent of its capacity, according to Stephen Bowler, who studies natural resources for Albemarle County.
The problem is complex, says Bowler. The erosion of mountains by water is, in part, a natural process. “That’s why the mountains here aren’t as tall as the Himalayas,” Bowler says.
But economic growth and real estate development exacerbate pollution—erosion happens faster when people remove trees and plants. Furthermore, pavement and culverts channel water into streams and creeks at high speeds; the fast-flowing water gouges more sediment out of the streambed. And sediment pollution wouldn’t be such a big problem for Albemarle if we didn’t have dams that block the particles’ movement downstream.
The conflict between economic growth and the land on which that growth takes place is certainly a complicated problem, but elected officials have largely ignored the issue. As RWSA board chairman Michael Gaffney points out, the Authority’s job isn’t asking questions about the health of our water supply.
“The RWSA is charged with providing water to meet the demands of the City Council and the Board of Supervisors,” says Gaffney.
Created by the City and County in 1972, the RWSA was a marriage of convenience. At the time, the Federal government offered localities millions of dollars to update antiquated sewer systems and expand wastewater services to growing suburbs. To get the money, however, localities needed quasi-independent corporate authorities to oversee the projects.
Under the Virginia Water and Waste Authorities Act, regional water and sewer authorities have neither the legal mandate nor the jurisdiction to consider the conflict between growth and the environment. That task falls to elected officials.
“The City Council and the Board of Supervisors wanted to get out of [the] water and sewer business, and they’ve been out of it for 30 years,” says Martin.
Well, not completely out of it. During droughts, when a lack of rainfall lays bare the shortfalls of our system, officials pay attention. In 1976 and 2002, droughts forced both the Council and the Supes to pass resolutions mandating water conservation. Thereafter, while we were flushing toilets with dishwater, much official verbiage was spouted on the “true value” of water and “delicate balance” of our relationship to the land.
During each recent drought, concerned citizens and groups like the League of Women Voters called for broad public discussion about the costs and benefits of economic growth, and about what current residents are willing to sacrifice to keep the bulldozers humming. But after the first heavy rainfall, the public’s interest in water dried up, and so did any chance of action from City Council or the Board of Supervisors.
But the rivers and streams that flow through the Rivanna watershed do not belong only to Charlottesville and Albemarle. They are, in fact, owned by the Commonwealth, which in the past has avoided any serious consideration of the impact of growth on Virginia’s environment. In the aftermath of the 2002 drought, Governor Mark Warner created a committee to take a broader view of the State’s water resources.
“After the drought, the State realized it needed to take a bigger role,” says Brent. “Nobody really knows what Virginia’s groundwater looks like, for example.” The progress is coming slowly, however—Brent says the Governor’s water committee is so diverse, they can’t come to any conclusions about what to do.
Dried faucets
In the 1980s, under the advice of engineering consultants Camp, Dresser and McKee, the RWSA spent $6 million on land around Buck Mountain Creek in Free Union and planned to build a new reservoir. New residents are still paying this back in the form of $200 hookup fees, but it’s unlikely that Albemarle will be allowed to impound more water in the foreseeable future.
After the RWSA bought the land, as the Authority attempted to secure the necessary State and Federal permits for the new reservoir, they discovered that the Federal Environmental Protection Agency and the State Department of Environmental Quality didn’t just hand out permission to build new reservoirs. The agencies told the RWSA they must first try other, less environmentally damaging solutions.
One of the problems is that while the State and federal governments have plenty of agencies that tell localities what they can’t do—the Environmental Protection Agency, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality and the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries are just a few of the agencies that have a say on RWSA’s water supply plan—there’s nobody to help cities and counties through the long and winding path of rules.
“There’s no advocates for a water project,” says Brent. “They’re all opponents. There’s no agency to help communities build water works.”
In 1996, the RWSA again embarked on a plan to expand the water supply without any public discussion about balancing economic growth and environmental health. The Authority hired VHB, which subcontracted much of the engineering work to another firm, O’Brien and Gere. At the time, Councilors and Supervisors couldn’t have been less interested in tap water. In the late ’90s, homeowners were suing the RWSA’s sister agency, the Rivanna Solid Waste Authority, because the Ivy Landfill was leaking contaminants into their groundwater.
“Landfill issues were taking so much of Rivanna’s time for so many years,” says former City Councilor David Toscano. “Council was not as engaged in water issues as it should have been. But, until a crisis emerges, people aren’t focused on it very much.”
In the fall of 2002, VHB presented the RWSA with a $13 million plan to expand the local water supply by raising the height of the dam on the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir. Brent and City Public Works director Judith Mueller spent a year and a half hashing out how Charlottesville and Albemarle would divide the cost of the project (basically a 27-73 percent split, with the County absorbing more of the cost to reflect the growth occurring there).
Then, this winter, the RWSA hired a new consulting firm, Gannett Fleming, to implement VHB’s plan. As the consultants and the RWSA reviewed it, they uncovered a major error. VHB had predicted that raising the South Fork dam would add an extra 7 million gallons per day of capacity. In fact, the new dam would only provide an extra 2.9 gallons each day. The project has been put on hold.
“Basically what happened is that VHB did not understand what O’Brien and Gere were telling them, or else they wrote it down wrong,” says Martin.
Tapping in
The combination of intense growth, and the lack of political willpower to seriously examine its impacts, reminds Albemarle resident Ed Imhoff of California, where he used to be a water planner.
“We’re under pressure because we’re so darn attractive,” says Imhoff. “Everybody came out West, and they weren’t prepared. They paved their rivers and lost their groundwater because real estate was so important. It became a mania to build subdivisions, build freeways and control the water supply. They let the environment go, and they messed up a lot of country.”
Now, as California spends millions to restore rivers it destroyed during its peak growth years, Imhoff suggests the City and County do as much planning on the front end to avoid making environmental mistakes it might regret.
This spring, Imhoff sat on a County groundwater commission that used new data about Albemarle’s geography obtained by the County’s Natural Resources department. The Board of Supervisors is now considering the commission’s recommended groundwater ordinance, which would require developers to drill test wells before breaking ground on a project. They must be able to prove the site has enough groundwater to meet the projected demand. Imhoff says the RWSA should commission a similar citizen panel to help figure out the water supply problem.
“There’s a lot of talent in this area that’s not being utilized,” he says. “We need something stronger than an advisory committee that’s just going to rubber stamp whatever the Authority already wants to do.”
Ridge Schuyler, who directs water conservation projects for the Nature Conservancy, a national environmental group based in Arlington, wants to help the RWSA collect data that might help the Authority find a more environmentally friendly way to supply our region’s water. The Conservancy is working on a hydrological model of the Rivanna Watershed, which would show how, left to their own devices, rivers and streams would flow without human interference. The model could help the RWSA develop a water supply plan that minimizes environmental damage. Furthermore, it would help the RWSA coordinate its water supply plans with other jurisdictions.
“We rely on an integrated system,” says Schuyler. “So we need to think about it in an integrated manner.” The RWSA, for example, is considering piping water from the James River, a source for Louisa, Fluvanna and Richmond. “If we take from the James, and they take from the James… pretty soon there is no James,” Schuyler says.
Albemarle watershed manager Bowler posits the question this way: “How much growth can you support with the fiscal and environmental impacts we’re willing to accept? The choices need to be laid out and communicated so we can reach a consensus, or come as close as we can.”
On May 25, RWSA’s lead consultants, Gannett Fleming, presented the Authority’s board with a list of 18 different water supply options, ranging in cost from $17.4 million for doing nothing but replacing worn out infrastructure to $82 million to raise the dams at Ragged Mountain and Beaver Creek.
On a recent afternoon, Hannah and Charlotte Lowson, who earn money nannying during the summer, brought Charlie, Henry and Lola Manning down to Picnic Rock to swim. Now, after heavy rains, “my dad can’t stand up out there, and he’s 6’2",” says Charlotte. In drier times, when excess water is piped over to Ragged Mountain, “it’s only about waist-deep,” she says.
“What a great place to be a kid,” says Frederick Williamson, after Hannah points out the spots where the snakes sunbathe and the swallowtail butterflies congregate. A hopeful bare-chested kayaker drives by, one bare foot out the window of his car, boats strapped to his roof. As local waterways fall increasingly under technological domination, Williamson hopes the RWSA sees the value of life in the Moorman’s.
“It’s so easy to just turn on your faucet,” he says, “but I think if people saw where their water comes from, they’d be more careful with it.”