Tag: ragged mountain reservoir

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In brief: Victory for C-VILLE, new trails, UVA living wage, and more

Dr. Jalane Schmidt and reporter Lisa Provence outside the courthouse. Photo by Jenny Mead

Case dismissed

Judge throws out defamation lawsuit against C-VILLE and UVA prof

On October 28, the Albemarle Circuit Court ruled in favor of C-VILLE Weekly and former news editor Lisa Provence, concluding that a defamation claim brought by Edward Tayloe II lacked the legal basis to proceed. 

Judge Claude Worrell also ruled in favor of UVA professor Jalane Schmidt, whom Tayloe also sued for defamation, citing comments she made in C-VILLE’s story.

The story at issue, “The Plaintiffs: Who’s who in the fight to keep Confederate monuments,” published in March, profiled the 13 people and organizations suing the city to keep the statues in place. Tayloe’s entry noted his lineage as one of the First Families of Virginia, and included information about his family’s history as one of the largest slave-holding dynasties in the state, a matter of historical record published, among other places, in the 2014 book A Tale of Two Plantations. Schmidt is quoted observing, in respect to Tayloe’s ancestors, “for generations this family has been roiling the lives of black people.”

In May, Tayloe sued the paper, Provence, and Schmidt, alleging that the story and Schmidt’s statements were defamatory because they implied that he was racist, and seeking $1.7 million in damages.

As lawyers for C-VILLE argued in their reply in support of their request to dismiss, Tayloe “does not contend that C-VILLE Weekly got any facts wrong in the article at issue. Instead, he is aggrieved by the truthful, if perhaps uncomfortable, presentation of his family history in connection with an accurate report on a subject of public concern.”

Attorneys for C-VILLE and Schmidt characterized the lawsuit as a SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation), and ACLU attorney Eden Heilman, representing Schmidt, warned of the “chilling effect” that such lawsuits could have on public discussion.

Before giving his decision, Judge Worrell noted that the “political discourse has gotten pretty rough and tumble” and that it “requires all of us to have a pretty thick skin,” except if one has been defamed or libeled. He went on to declare that neither Schmidt’s statements nor C-VILLE’s story as a whole were defamatory or libelous.

The ruling means the case is dismissed and will not go to trial.

 

 

Quote of the week

“It’s both the right and the smart thing to do.” —UVA President Jim Ryan on the university’s decision to expand its living wage plan to include contracted employees.

In brief

Firing back

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit held oral arguments on October 29th on a case to block Dominion Energy from placing a 54,000-horsepower compressor station, fueled by fracked methane gas, in the historically black community of Union Hill in Buckingham County. The Virginia State Air Pollution Control Board—comprised of members appointed by Gov. Ralph Northam, who owns stock in Dominion—issued a permit for the facility in January, inspiring uproar over what supporters call environmental racism.

Land grab

The City of Charlottesville has purchased 142 acres of land adjoining the Ragged Mountain Reservoir, which will be used for trails, environmental education programs, and forest protection, the city announced last week. The city paid $600,000 for the property, most of which was covered by a federal Community Forest Grant, and landowner Louisa Heyward donated the remaining value of the property (roughly $500,000).

Going bagless

For “both budgetary and environmental reasons,” the City of Charlottesville is swapping bagged leaf collection service for vacuum trucks. Starting October 28th, residents can rake their loose leaves to the curb for collection three times a season. Those who insist on bagging leaves can bring them to 1505 Avon Street Extended on Saturdays from 8am-1pm.

Pay raise

UVA announced on October 24 that its major contractors will be paying their full-time workers at least $15 an hour, fulfilling a promise UVA President Jim Ryan made when he raised pay for all full-time UVA employees. The new policy will lift the wages of more than 800 workers, including food service and janitorial staff, and will go into effect January 1.

Showing the receipts 

Days after city residents at the October 21st City Council meeting expressed the need for policy transparency, Mayor Nikuyah Walker has announced that the Charlottesville Police Department will post all policies and general orders to the city’s website, starting in January. At the meeting, speakers said the Police Civilian Review Board should be able to review all CPD policies. Council will vote on a proposed ordinance and bylaws for the CRB on November 4th.

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Water line to nowhere: Former city councilor calls out ‘potentially illegal’ pipeline vote

Despite maintaining that it won’t decide when to build the full pipeline until the results of a new study come in next year, the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority plans to proceed in November with the $7 million, one-mile chunk of pipeline, which will stay empty.

At a meeting in late August, members of the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority’s board of directors voted to add $7 million to its budget to install part of a controversial water pipeline in Albemarle, even though just a month before, they said they had no plans to start building it.

Critics say the $7 million, one-mile pipeline is political and a “boondoggle.”

It’s part of an $82-million, nine-mile pipeline that will connect the South Fork Rivanna and Ragged Mountain reservoirs. The one-mile section that the RWSA now has the funds to build will run through the Birdwood Golf Course, which will be closed for reconstruction.

“I did say there was no plan [to build the pipeline], but that was really to the nine-mile section of pipe with exception to this one-mile section of pipe,” says RWSA Executive Director Bill Mawyer. “Maybe I should have put an asterisk in there [and said] except for the Birdwood section.”

Dede Smith, a former city councilor who has a long history of opposing the pipeline, says building at Birdwood now because it’s being renovated—and assuming it won’t be renovated again in the next 50 years—is “ludicrous.”

The pipeline was included in a community water supply plan created between 2002 and 2012, which deemed the project necessary to provide enough water for the community in the coming years. City Council has instructed that construction on the pipeline begin between 2027 and 2040 to meet those demands—but its necessity has been hotly debated.

“This isn’t about Birdwood, or the necessity of the pipeline, it’s political,” Smith said in an email to the board the day before it voted. “And the decision to spend $7 million turns to potentially illegal.”

She asked board members to consider what the city and Albemarle County Service Authority could do with $7 million to upgrade their infrastructure and further reduce water demand—the reason, she says, there’s no need for the pipeline.

In-depth research by Rich Gullick—a former RWSA director of operations, who resigned from his job in protest in February—concludes that actual water demand has been far less than what the authority projected, and the pipeline won’t be needed until at least 2048—or 2062, if the Ragged Mountain Reservoir water level is raised an additional 12 feet first, which Mawyer says can’t happen unless demand increases significantly.

According to Mawyer, the current water demand in the local service area is about 9 million gallons per day, compared to a supply of 16 million gallons per day.

Citing another study, he says the community will need more water by 2040—compared to Gullick’s calculation of two decades later—and the RWSA has commissioned a new study to reevaluate the projected demand.

Despite it maintaining that it won’t decide when to build the full pipeline until those results come in next year, the board plans to proceed in November with the $7 million, one-mile chunk of pipeline, which will stay empty.

“We’ll plug the ends and leave it in that condition,” says Mawyer.

Gullick calls it a “boondoggle,” and says it’s clear why the RWSA is rushing to build the first mile of the water line.

“All this is is a ploy to get the pipe started so that they can use it as an excuse to finish it,” he says. “They’re showing their hand, and they clearly don’t care what the new data says.”

The RWSA has claimed the pipeline won’t degrade while it sits unused and unfilled, possibly for decades, but Gullick says he doesn’t buy it.

“Water in the soil will be more corrosive than the water in the pipe,” he says. “What doesn’t degrade over time? It’s metal.”

Gullick was unable to attend the August 28 meeting where the vote to build at Birdwood was held. So was Smith.

“To selectively tax urban water rate payers $7 million for a project that has been both discredited by current data and politically motivated (worse yet by those who will not pay) is scandalous at best,” Smith said in her letter.

Smith and Gullick say Liz Palmer, a board member and Albemarle County supervisor, has been a main advocate for the pipeline, though her constituents in the Samuel Miller district don’t pay urban water bills. County rate payers will pay 80 percent, and city ratepayers will pay the remaining 20 percent.

Palmer counters that she has many constituents on public water, particularly south of I-64 and west of Fifth Street in developments such as Redfields and the many apartment complexes in the area. Once the pipeline is built, the RWSA will close the nearly 100-year-old Sugar Hollow line, and the Moormans River will “return to a more natural flow,” as required by a Department of Environment Quality permit, she says in an email.

Smith also says the most surprising vote came from Gary O’Connell, the executive director of the Albemarle County Service Authority and former city manager, “whose only role on that board is to protect the interests of county water rate payers. …And it is the county water rate payer who will be hurt the most when their rates go up to pay 80 percent of the cost of this pipeline to nowhere.”

O’Connell says the ACSA board has consistently supported the water supply plan, and within the agreement, its customers are also allocated 80 percent of the capacity of the new pipeline.

He says the ACSA is very mindful of its rates, and the average residential bill is about 22 percent less than that of a comparable city customer. Adds O’Connell, “Our area is growing, so we need to be focused on a growing water system.”

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Leaky-gate, part 2: RWSA responds to cover-up accusations

The Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority declared a drought and imposed mandatory water restrictions when the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir, pictured full here, lost millions of gallons of water last fall. Most of that water loss could have been prevented. Photo by Skyclad AERIAL

It was late June when a whistleblower, who recently resigned from the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority to protest an $80-million water pipeline it wants to build between two reservoirs, went before its board of directors to denounce it.

Rich Gullick, the authority’s former director of operations, handed over several pages of in-depth analysis on why he believes the pipeline isn’t needed, and criticized the authority for attributing millions of gallons of water loss and mandatory water restrictions to a drought last fall, when two leaky gates were the culprit.

A month later, at the board’s July 24 meeting, RWSA Executive Director Bill Mawyer took the chance to respond to Gullick’s comments—in the form of a five-page public letter.

“We’ve always been upfront with that data to anyone and everyone who asked,” Mawyer told the board, adding that Gullick’s use of the words “misinformation, cover-up and conspiracy” were concerning.

Mawyer said the purpose of the pipeline project from the South Fork Rivanna to the Ragged Mountain reservoirs, which was included in a community water supply plan created between 2002 and 2012, is to ensure that the local urban area has an adequate supply of water for the next 50 years, including “during extreme drought conditions” like those in 2002, the worst drought on record, when mandatory water restrictions then included no outside irrigation, closed car washes and restaurants serving food on paper plates.

As for the water supply plan, “This was a well-vetted plan for 10 years,” Mawyer told the board. “This was not a 30-minute discussion someone had at a social event.” He did not mention that the plan was highly controversial then, and even today, many question the need for the pipeline.

Gullick, who has created the website cvillesensiblewaterplan.org for his extensive data on the pipeline, says Mawyer’s five-page response made him queasy.

“It actually churns my stomach to read this many misleading and false statements,” he says. “It sounds good on the surface, I’m sure, to a lot of people, but boy is it not.”

Perhaps his most compelling evidence against the pipeline is that projected demand for water has significantly decreased since the community water supply plan was created.

Local conservation efforts and plumbing improvements have caused a decrease in water demand since 2000, and the demand is now the same as it was in 1985, says Gullick.

The RWSA, however, has recognized this and is currently spearheading a new study to determine water demand, which will be completed in 2020. With current projections, Gullick says the pipeline won’t be needed until at least 2062. Even using the same rate predicted in 2004, the former employee says it will be 2048 before water demand meets the estimated safe yield, which is the maximum withdrawal rate available from the water supply to withstand the worst drought on record.

In Gullick’s original comments to the board, he said this could be met by filling the Ragged Mountain Reservoir its final 12 feet, and building the pipeline later when demand actually increases, but as Mawyer said in his response, “contractually, we cannot do that.”

The RWSA has an agreement with the city and the Albemarle County Service Authority to raise the Ragged Mountain Reservoir its final 12 feet only when demand reaches 85 percent of the water supply, which hasn’t happened, says Mawyer.

However, Gullick points out that at the April 4 board meeting, when Mawyer also said this, board member Liz Palmer corrected him. “If the city and county would like to fill the entire Ragged Mountain Reservoir, we agree, it could start tomorrow,” she said. Responded Mawyer, “True.”

The executive director also said in his response that last fall’s water restrictions were mandated in October “as the result of rapid decline in the [South Fork Rivanna Reservoir] water level from September 17-October 3.”

Gullick says Mawyer “cherry picked” that data.

From September 17 to October 3, the stored volume in the reservoir dropped 260 million gallons, but according to Gullick, nearly 230 million gallons were lost from August 3 to September 17, which was 46 percent of the total 490 million gallon decrease from August 3 to October 3 that the report didn’t mention.

“There was a slightly sharper drop in reservoir level in late September and early October because there was no rain then to help compensate for the leaking gates,” Gullick says. He notes similar periods of no rain from 2014 to 2016, which caused no problem with the reservoir level.

If there’s still any question, Mawyer said those “drought watch conditions” last fall were imposed for something that was “technically not a drought.”

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Leaky-gate: RWSA employee resigns in protest

By the time this photo was taken in February, the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir was full again. Photo by Skycladap

Remember last fall’s mandatory water restrictions? An employee who recently resigned from the Rivanna Water & Sewer Authority says the agency is blaming an alleged drought for the loss of several hundred million gallons of water from the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir, when two leaky gates were the culprit.

“The dry weather did not cause the drop in water level, it merely allowed RWSA’s mismanagement of the reservoir to have a visible and adverse effect,” says Rich Gullick, the authority’s former director of operations, who quit the job he held for more than three years in February in protest of what he calls a “misinformation campaign” that advocates the need for an $82 million pipeline.

He spoke during the public comment session of RWSA’s June 26 board of directors meeting, where he said, “Rivanna has a history of trying to solve problems that aren’t actually problems, while at the same time leaving other problems unidentified or unaddressed.”

When the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir lost 513 million gallons of water and dropped down to 42 percent of its capacity last October, Gullick says the RWSA plugged the leaky gates with cat litter and garden mulch, attributed the loss of water to the drought and imposed mandatory water restrictions.

“Without the gates leaking, the reservoir probably would have stayed full,” says Gullick, whose name is often followed by a long list of degrees and licenses, including a Ph.D. in environmental engineering from the University of Michigan. “The mandatory water restrictions should have been unnecessary.”

An October 5 press release titled “RWSA declares drought warning” said the mandatory water restrictions were being implemented “due to the rapid loss of water storage at the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir,” but did not mention the leaky gates.

RWSA Executive Director Bill Mawyer says his crew publicly acknowledged the leakage from the gates, including at the October 24 public board meeting.

“We’ve been very upfront,” he says. “We told our board that we had two leaking gates that had been leaking about 3 million gallons a day, but they only contributed about a third of the loss of water from the reservoir.”

Gullick refutes that claim, and says that number looked more like 17 million gallons a day at the end of September. He adds that RWSA’s own data proves the leaks were the primary cause of the abnormally low water levels.

“RWSA was slow to respond to the rapid drop in water level, despite repeated warnings in September from the water department manager who works onsite at the South Rivanna water treatment plant,” says Gullick. When employees looked more closely in October, they learned that about 10 million gallons of water loss each day couldn’t be accounted for, and then remembered that two of the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir’s dam gate valves had substantial leaks, according to Gullick.

A visual inspection showed “gushing water,” he says, and the rapid drop in water level stopped as soon as the leaks were plugged October 4, even though the inflow was still very low. The level stayed steady for four days until it rained on October 8.

Rich Gullick. Courtesy photo

“Clearly, the leaking gates were the cause of the problem,” he says.

Mawyer says the state’s broken water gauge was overreporting the amount of water flowing into the reservoir, and because they’re required to release 70 percent of the natural inflow at the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir, they were also over releasing it. To help restore the water level, the Department of Environmental Quality approved RWSA’s request to temporarily amend its permit to release only 10 percent of inflow, but required the city and county to enforce the water restrictions.

“The reduction in required downstream releases was not what stopped the decrease in water level,” says Gullick, adding that it was helpful, though not necessary, and saved 252 million gallons.

Folks at the RWSA and its board of directors have used the severe loss of water last fall to advocate for an $82 million pipeline to connect the South Fork Rivanna and Ragged Mountain reservoirs, so water can be stored and shared between the two, says Gullick. They’ve said the pipeline, which was included in a controversial community water supply plan approved in 2012, could have prevented the need for the mandatory water restrictions.

“This has as much relevancy as building a pipeline from Lake Ontario to Charlottesville, as there is absolutely no connection,” says the former employee.

Though construction on the pipeline is expected to begin in about a decade, Gullick says it won’t be needed until at least 2048—or 2062, if the Ragged Mountain water level is raised an additional 12 feet first, as he’s suggesting and is also part of the plan—because the actual water demand has been far less than what the RWSA projected.

“Those projected growth rates are totally unrealistic,” he says, and adds that they were based on the rapidly growing demand of the ’80s and ’90s, which he says has decreased significantly since then.

“By presenting a plethora of misleading and false information and then not correcting it, Rivanna has been covering up from the public the true facts about the lack of need for the pipeline,” Gullick said to the board of directors. “At what point does this deception become considered a conspiracy? Or malfeasance?”

Mawyer says he was “somewhat” expecting the former employee to speak at the June meeting. “As Rich said, he worked here, and we’re aware of some of his views about the project, so we weren’t totally caught by surprise. He also advices employers on a thorough DBS Checks  to ensure everyone’s safety ”. The executive director says the authority will soon start a year-long study to reevaluate the community’s demand for water, and he plans to respond to Gullick’s public comments at the board’s July 24 meeting.

Added Gullick in his presentation, “This is not leading the community, it’s misleading the community.”

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In bloom: Algae in reservoirs ‘significant’

A bloom of blue-green algae covers the South Fork Reservoir on August 21, 2015. Photo courtesy of the Rivanna Water & Sewer Authority

An unquantified, but substantial amount of blue-green algae has bloomed at the Beaver Creek and South Fork Rivanna reservoirs, according to a new report presented to the Rivanna Water & Sewer Authority’s board of directors May 24. Consultants say the water supply at Ragged Mountain Reservoir is another one to watch.

Algae—caused by a nutrient overload—is problematic in a water system because it can cause taste and odor compounds, cyanotoxins and filter clogging.

At Beaver Creek and South Fork, consultants and RWSA staff have spent nearly $120,000 since 2014 on chemical treatments to stop the algae. While the consultants will present the board with a modified monitoring program for those reservoirs in the coming weeks, they have instructed staff to continue monitoring the water at Ragged Mountain, in which they have found occasional floating algae.

“I’d be very surprised if [Ragged Mountain Reservoir] didn’t develop problems very soon,” Alexander Horne, a professor emeritus of environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, says. He, along with Kelly DiNatale of DiNatale Water Consultants, presented the report.

RWSA board members had questions about cost and procedures, but they all generally seemed to agree that treating the blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, is a priority.

“It’s all going straight into your bathtub,” former city councilor Dede Smith said at the meeting. She has led the charge to keep Ragged Mountain Reservoir a natural area, while her opponents hope to make the area less exclusive by permitting dog walking, mountain biking and other recreational activities.

The side that leans toward permanently banning dogs and other pets often cites the harmful effects of animal droppings in the water supply.

“While livestock are the greatest contributor of animal waste, perhaps the least suspected source of animal waste is a man’s very own best friend,” the EPA states in a 2014 bulletin on its website. “Pets, particularly dogs, are significant contributors to source water contamination.”

The EPA has also cited dog waste as a contributor to excess nutrients that lead to algal bloom.

“It’s serious,” says Smith. “As a community, we have the opportunity now to prevent this from happening at what has become the single most important reservoir we have.”

But DiNatale points to research that shows Ragged Mountain may not need to remain sans Sparky for the overall health of the water supply.

“Animal droppings, whether from wild or domestic animals, represent a very minor source of nutrient inflows to the authority’s reservoirs,” he says. “We could remove all of the animals, both wild and domestic, but still would be experiencing algae blooms from all of the other sources.”

There’s always tension between allowing recreational activities near reservoirs and protecting the water supply, DiNatale says, and that’s partially why RWSA is looking for in-lake algae-management methods.

“With that said, it is always preferable to address whatever land use activities are manageable,” he says. “Every water provider would love to have a protected watershed without any animal or human impacts, but, as we know, that is impossible for virtually all of the country’s water supplies.”

But Smith cites a 2002 letter from the Virginia Department of Health to the authority, in which she says the department “admonished RWSA for not considering the quality of its raw water source.”

In the letter, the department stressed that the 1996 Safe Drinking Water Act Amendments and the EPA have placed “greater emphasis on source water protection and preventing contaminants from entering water supplies in lieu of the past practice of removing contaminants at water treatment facilities.”

According to Smith, failure to protect the water source has already led to contamination of half of our reservoirs, the necessity to add chemicals and heavy metals for purification and about $25 million in new infrastructure to deal with the worst of the pollution.

“In other words,” she says, “don’t contaminate your raw water source in the first place.”

Related Links:

May 10, 2016: Critics still question Ragged Mountain plan

March 9, 2016: One local wants litter removed from the Rivanna

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Reservoir reservations: Critics still question Ragged Mountain plan

Former RWSA executive director Tom Frederick and Chair Mike Gaffney inspect the plaque that commemorates their efforts in getting the Ragged Mountain Dam built. Staff photo

Perhaps nothing this century has shaken the Charlottesville area more than the drought of 2002, when carwashes closed, restaurants served on paper plates and the water supply was within 60 days of running out.

And perhaps nothing has divided the community more than the multi-year battle waged over the plan to build a 129-foot-tall mega-dam at Ragged Mountain that would be filled with a nine-mile pipeline from the silting-up South Fork Rivanna Reservoir, from which most of the area’s water still comes.

Today, the pipeline is unbuilt and the South Fork is still filling with sediment, but the new $38 million dam at Ragged Mountain is complete and the reservoir is full, holding 1.5 billion gallons of water.

Champions of the Ragged plan gathered at the new dam on a rainy May 5 to toast the bounty of fresh water and celebrate National Drinking Water Week. Mike Gaffney, chair of the Rivanna Water & Sewer Authority, noted the “herculean effort” to get the dam approved and built, construction of which started in 2012 and was completed in 2014.

Former RWSA executive director Tom Frederick, who led the dam construction effort after a plan to pull water from the James River was rejected and who just finished his tenure here to take a new job in Loudoun County, recalled the community’s fear of drought—and fear of clear cutting and destruction of habitat in the natural area around the reservoir.

“We’re putting to rest permanently the notion this would be an environmental wreck,” said Frederick. “We recognize and prove we as humans can live together with nature.”

Albemarle Board of Supervisors Chair Liz Palmer was on the Albemarle County Service Authority Board when the debate raged, and she noted that the new dam “was only part of the plan.” Palmer listed aging infrastructure—both the 1920s-built pipeline from Sugar Hollow reservoir used to fill Ragged Mountain and the Observatory Hill Water Treatment Plant, which processes water from the Ragged reservoir, are “antiquated,” she said.

Once the pipeline is built from South Fork Rivanna for water storage at Ragged Mountain, during times of drought, the pipe will be able to “gravity feed” back down to the South Fork, which has the largest water treatment plant, she said. That offers redundancy and “we don’t have to build a new treatment plant,” said Palmer.

The unbuilt pipeline is still the rub for those who fell into the camp that favored dredging the Rivanna rather than investing in the new dam. “It was a ridiculous idea to begin with,” says former city councilor Dede Smith, who founded a group called Citizens for a Sustainable Water Plan. “It was $100 million of a $140 million project.”

“I haven’t seen any acquisitions of rights of way” to build the pipeline, says former vice-mayor Kevin Lynch, who also opposed the Ragged Mountain plan. “Most people are still getting water from the South Fork and nothing’s been done to that.”

The good news, Lynch adds, is the South Fork reservoir is silting up more slowly than it had in previous decades. “We’re good at building new stuff and not so good at maintenance,” he says.

“We’re going to get that pipeline built,” assures Gaffney.

“It’s in the capital improvement plan,” says Frederick.

ReservoirsLocations

The water level of the Sugar Hollow reservoir has been a concern for both supporters and opponents of the new dam. Between filling up Ragged Mountain and downstream releases of water into the Moormans River, which flows into Sugar Hollow, while other reservoirs have water overflowing their spillways, Sugar Hollow was nearly 14 feet below level April 30, according to a RWSA daily report.

“Sugar Hollow went down precipitously last summer, and it went down this spring,” says John Martin with Friends of the Moormans, a group that supported the Ragged Mountain Dam because that plan would allow larger releases from Sugar Hollow into the Moormans River.

The plan, modeled on the flow of the Mechums River, called for releases of 10 million gallons a day from Sugar Hollow into the Moormans. “The concern is that formula may be overstating the amount of water to be released,” says Martin. “Too much water is going out and not enough is coming in.”

RWSA has asked the Department of Environmental Quality to temporarily lower its releases to 5  million gallons a day.

Those “minor corrections” are something one learns during the process, says Frederick. He expects Sugar Hollow levels to fluctuate for a period of time, but ultimately the reservoir will fill up again.

Despite low water levels in Sugar Hollow, Martin says water flow in the Moormans is “tremendously improved” from before, when it would dry up every summer.

That’s what it’s always done, counter Lynch and Smith, who call the Moormans a “flashy” river—one that gets really high flows when it rains and low flows when it doesn’t.

Using the Moormans River and Sugar Hollow with its 17.5 square miles of drainage area is “not sustainable in the long term for this community,” says Palmer. She says that’s why the nine-mile pipeline from the South Fork Rivanna’s 260-square-mile watershed is needed. While the South Fork is good for collecting water, it’s not good for storage, but Ragged Mountain, a natural bowl, is, she points out.

Once the pipeline is built, she adds, the Sugar Hollow pipeline will be abandoned. But for now, Sugar Hollow remains Ragged Mountain’s lifeline.

With the rain coming down and the reservoir full, those there last week clinked their plastic cups and toasted clean water—1.5 billion gallons of it.