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.”
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.”
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.”
City Councilor Kathy Galvin (left) gave kudos to longtime Woolen Mills resident Bill Emory (right) for “sound[ing] the alarm” on the sewage stink in 2008, and not letting up. Photo by Martyn Kyle
The stench of sewage wafting throughthe Woolen Mills neighborhood hassickened residents since the early 1900s. But after the completion of a 10-year and $10 million odor reduction project at the local wastewater treatment facility, project pioneers and neighbors came together to celebrate the fact that they can finally breathe easy again.
“I haven’t noticed the smell for a while now,” says longtime Woolen Mills resident and former city planning commissioner Bill Emory. “It’s a big deal.”
Emory got a shout-out from City Councilor Kathy Galvin, who doubles as a member of the Rivanna Water & Sewer Authority board, at the May 23 celebratory picnic in the city’s Riverside Park. They were just stepsaway from the wastewater treatment facility when she gave the longtime resident kudos for “sound[ing] the alarm” on the stench in 2008, and refusing to back down.
In a July 2016 interview with C-VILLE, however, Emory said that when residents called the RWSA to complain about the sewagestink in the mid-1970s, “They would tell us smell was subjective.”
Even RWSA’s director of engineering and maintenance, Jennifer Whitaker, admitted that the organization’s initial response to residents 30 and 40 years ago was that living near pollution was a fact of life. She alluded to a former unnamed utility employee who—a “long, long time ago”—famously made light of the stink by saying, “We’re not baking cookies here.”
That wasn’t the only stomach-turning illusion of food during remarks made at the picnic.
Galvin also commented on RWSA board chairman Mike Gaffney’s mention of the treatment facility’s “gravity thickeners” that condense the biosolids into a concentrated solids product.
“Mike, I can’t get the phrase ‘gravity thickeners’ out of my head,” she said. “It sounds like [they’re used to make] a powdermilkshake, but then I think that through and I get really sick.”
The Moores Creek Advanced Water Resource Recovery Facility treats nearly 10 million gallons of wastewater each day, and while there are lots of technical terms to describe what went down during the project to stop the stink, Emory doesn’t mince words: They did it by “covering the cat box.”
Aside from installing those primary clarifier covers that put an end to open-air waste composting, the utility also installed air scrubber and grit removal facilities.
“It really is pretty amazing,” Emory said, while he and his dog waited near the Mouth Wide Open food truck that RWSA provided for their picnic celebration. He commended Gaffney’s leadership of the board during the “long, tortured” process of crushing the odors.
About 40 people ambled over to the truck to claim their buffalo chicken bites and pimento cheeseburgers as Whitaker hung back to exchange words with attendees who continued to approach her.
Surprisingly, her crew hasn’t received too much other feedback on the project, she said.
“It used to be something we spent lots of time responding to,” Whitaker said, and added that she feels as though the community has already accepted this stink-free reality as the new norm.
Laughing, she was sure to put a positive spin on the lack of public reaction: “We’re not hearing from people about how it’s not working.”
Recent low water levels in the Sugar Hollow Reservoir caused some community members to voice concern. Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority’s Bill Mawyer says the company’s strategy allows the reservoir to drop 19 feet below the top of the dam before transfer of water to Ragged Mountain is suspended. Photo by SkycladAerial
Bill Mawyer often asks a question that few can answer: Do you know where your water comes from?
“Frequently in our business, people are shocked by the amount of time and money it takes to maintain a reliable water system,” says Mawyer, executive director of the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority, the agency charged with collecting and treating water in Charlottesville and Albemarle County.
Though the governance of water issues is relatively calm today, the last two decades have been contentious, with deep divisions in the community over the best way to manage the region’s water resources. Albemarle County Board of Supervisors representative Liz Palmer recalls moving to the area in 1996 and observing the Moormans River near Crozet with almost no flow, while the dam at Ragged Mountain was overflowing.
“They were basically draining the Moormans dry, diverting all the water to Ragged Mountain Reservoir,” she says, “and nobody was protecting the river.” A severe drought in 2002, the worst on record, brought the city to within 60 days of running out of water and heightened public concern about overall supply, as did last fall’s water restrictions due to drought conditions. Palmer gained a seat on the Albemarle County Service Authority board in 2006 and was dismayed by the state of the infrastructure.
“The system was horribly antiquated,” she says. “The city and county had treated the Rivanna terribly.” After beginning the slow process of solving the myriad equipment problems, the RWSA turned its attention to preparing a long-term Community Water Supply Plan—a set of interrelated projects to take care of the community’s water infrastructure needs for the next 50 years.
Jennifer Whitaker, Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority’s director of engineering and maintenance, calls the proposed pipeline connecting the local reservoirs fundamental, and says “we cannot do without it.” Photo by Eze Amos
The crux of the current system’s challenge lies in Ragged Mountain Reservoir’s dependence on an almost 100-year-old pipe to carry 4 million gallons of water per day down from Sugar Hollow to keep it filled—Ragged Mountain’s own small tributaries cannot do the job. “The 13-mile pipe runs primarily above ground in an undulating fashion, and tends to come apart because it’s not deeply bedded,” says Jennifer Whitaker, RWSA’s director of engineering and maintenance.
Instead of spending many millions to replace that pipe, the RWSA devised a plan to solve an additional set of problems at the same time by connecting the Ragged Mountain and South Fork Rivanna reservoirs with a new pipeline so that water can be stored and shared between the two. “An interconnected system will be better for supply, for storage, for treatment and for the [Moormans] river,” says Mawyer. When the new pipeline connector is finished, the old one will be taken out of service.
Streaming service
Due to geographical good fortune, our water comes from clear mountain streams that feed into rivers, none downstream from other cities or processed wastewater. Small creeks springing from the Blue Ridge foothills trickle into Sugar Hollow Reservoir, northwest of Crozet, which spills into the Moormans River. The Moormans joins the Mechums River, flowing in from the southwest and also stream-fed, where they are rechristened as the Rivanna River (South Fork). The Rivanna, along with water from a vast 259-square-mile watershed, fills the 800-million gallon Rivanna Reservoir north of Charlottesville.
The third major reservoir in the system is at Ragged Mountain Natural Area, which sits in the northwestern crook of the I-64/Route 29 Bypass interchange. Armed with a brand new 129-foot dam, Ragged Mountain Reservoir’s capacity is the largest—a 1.5-billion-gallon bowl of water filled primarily via a 13-mile pipeline from Sugar Hollow. (Crozet and Scottsville each have small independent water systems fed by their own reservoirs.)
The South Fork Rivanna Reservoir, which holds 800 million gallons of water, lies north of Charlottesville. Currently, the South Rivanna water treatment plant processes about 8 million gallons of water a day—the majority of the urban area’s clean water supply. Photo by Skyclad Aerial
To serve Charlottesville and the urban areas of Albemarle County, the South Rivanna water treatment plant processes about 8 million gallons a day—the vast majority of the urban area’s clean water supply. Ragged Mountain’s water is processed at the Observatory treatment plant on UVA’s Grounds, and then intermingled with the Rivanna water in the spidery network of underground pipes—67 miles long—that form the main water system.
In 1972, the city and county created the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority to manage those systems for the whole region. Governed by a board of directors that includes three city and three county representatives plus one appointed member, the RWSA is its own entity—neither the Board of Supervisors nor the City Council has control over it—and its budget is self-contained as an enterprise fund collected from water bill payments.
BILL BREAKDOWN: Why county and city residents pay different rates
The city and county bill their water customers at different rates and via different agencies, so your bill may vary depending on where you live. The Albemarle County Service Authority, an independent agency, sets rates, reads meters, coordinates maintenance and replacement projects and collects funds from county residents and businesses, while the Department of Utilities, part of Charlottesville city government, does those jobs for the city.
Each entity buys processed water “wholesale” from the RWSA and then adds its own costs to produce the rate it charges customers. In 2017, the RWSA’s wholesale rate was about $1.95 per thousand gallons, plus a flat debt service amount allocated to each entity based on large capital project financing (such as treatment plant upgrades). From there, the city and county diverge in how they charge for usage.
The county uses a four-tier system in which its monthly rate per thousand gallons goes up sharply after 3,000 gallons of use, and again after 6,000 and 9,000 gallons, to encourage conservation. “The lowest tier is basically at cost,” says ACSA Director Gary O’Connell. “If you want to irrigate your lawn, and you’re willing to pay quite a bit more for it, you can.” For a county resident in 2017, an average use of 3,500 gallons per month would cost about $24.
The city, by contrast, uses a seasonal approach instead of tiers, charging users about 30% more in the summer months than in the winter, again with an eye toward conservation. For the 3,500 gallons example using an average annual rate for 2017, a city user would pay about $29.50 per month. The city’s rates are higher than the county’s due to increased maintenance expense, particularly the recent capital costs of replacing aging or leaky pipeline under city streets, some of which is more than 100 years old. As well, a 1981 agreement allows UVA, an entity that represents about 30 percent of the city’s customer base, to be charged for water use at roughly half the rate paid by the rest of city users.
The RWSA handles the “wholesale” side of the water business, maintaining infrastructure such as reservoirs, dams and pumping stations, and providing drinking water treatment at five plants spread throughout the county. The RWSA has two main customers—the Albemarle County Service Authority and the City of Charlottesville’s water utility department—and each of these manages the “retail” side, setting rates, checking meters and selling water to residential and commercial water users.
The water system has come a long way from its earliest days. “In the 1800s, Charlottesville’s only water supply was a well pump in the location where today’s Sacagawea statue sits at the intersection of Fifth and Main streets,” says RWSA’s Whitaker. More recently, rapid population growth has led to growing pains that culminated in the water wars of the late 2000s, and to new ways of looking at our future water supply.
Muddy waters
When unveiled in 2006, the Water Supply Plan proposed a new taller dam at Ragged Mountain Reservoir to store more water, and a nine-mile pipeline along Charlottesville’s west side to connect the reservoirs. The plan immediately sparked a pitched battle between community groups, city and county leaders and the water agencies. A conservationist group called Citizens for a Sustainable Water Plan, co-founded by Dede Smith, who would later be elected to Charlottesville City Council, raised questions about the necessity, expense and environmental impact of a new Ragged Mountain Dam.
Two more years of studies, presentations and public meetings addressed alternatives to the dam such as dredging the Rivanna Reservoir to make it deeper (which was rejected by the RWSA as insufficient and too expensive), as well as mitigation plans to replace the trees and woodland habitats that would be flooded by the expansion. The parties finally signed off on the Water Supply Plan in 2012, and construction on the dam was completed in 2014.
Originally a proponent of dredging, Smith’s current focus is on “freeing the Rivanna River” now that the dam has been built. “There is an opportunity here to realize the true benefit of the plan by removing the South Fork dam and relying on the Ragged Mountain dam alone to solve our water problems.”
In addition to conflicting views on the dam, the city and county also failed to see eye to eye on the need for an expensive new pipeline. During the plan’s negotiation from 2007-09, city representatives took the position that the pipeline was not a priority because Charlottesville wasn’t going to grow and thus didn’t need more water.
Gary O’Connell, now executive director of the Albemarle County Service Authority, was serving as Charlottesville’s city manger during negotiations between the city and county in 2007-09 to build a pipeline connecting the Ragged Mountain and South Fork reservoirs. He calls the city representatives who said Charlottesville wasn’t going to grow and thus didn’t need access to more water “short-sighted.” Photo by Eze Amos
Gary O’Connell, current ACSA executive director, was serving as Charlottesville city manager at the time and thought the city was being short-sighted. “All you have to do is drive up West Main or down Fifth Street and you’ll see [the idea of no growth] was crazy,” he says.
But county officials felt so strongly that both the dam and pipeline were needed for the community’s growth that they agreed that the county would shoulder the bulk of the projects’ costs—85 percent of the Ragged Mountain Dam’s $35 million, and 80 percent of the pipeline’s projected $100 million. “Without that agreement, the whole thing would have fallen apart,” says O’Connell.
Smith thinks the city made the right decision. “I don’t believe the pipeline will ever be built,” she says, “because the plan was premised on a water demand of 14 million gallons per day (MGD), and we have been stuck at less than 10 MGD for more than 15 years.”
To cover future eventualities, the Water Supply Plan contains a caveat: If the city should eventually use more than its 20 percent share of the new water capacity generated by the dam, it must repay its share of the cost of both projects to the county in an annual “true-up” process, which could run to the millions of dollars owed. To ensure accuracy, the county has installed meters in pipes at points all along the city/county boundary lines, to measure exactly how much water the city is using each year.
Pipe dream
The road to complete the next phase of the water plan is likely to be a long one, says Palmer, now a RWSA Board member. “Water will have to be on the city’s agenda again very soon, because we have to make a decision about where we place the pipe,” she says.
“The pipe” will be a 3-foot-wide ductile iron pipeline that requires a 20-foot easement to bury. Water-related construction projects are rarely low-cost affairs, often requiring deep tunnels or excavation through solid rock, navigating past roads and railroad tracks and around existing development. Though the pipeline’s projected southern wedge runs through mostly UVA-owned land around Ednam Forest and Farmington, the path becomes more congested as it has to skirt residential areas near Barracks Road and Albemarle High School and commercial tracts near Lowe’s and Sam’s Club. After the pipe is installed, says Mawyer, “we restore the land and replant it, and it’s generally invisible once it’s done.”
With a timeline that estimates three to four years to acquire the necessary easements along the pipeline’s nine-mile route and eight or more years to design and build it, along with managing various financing and environmental issues along the way, it’s a long-term project with a hefty price tag.
“The misnomer is that the pipeline is just a pipeline,” says Whitaker. “It’s also pump stations and intakes and pretreatment and treatment plants, and all of those pieces have to be built simultaneously. But the new pipeline is fundamental to the community meeting its long-term water needs and we cannot do that without it. The only question is when.”
The RWSA Board met in January and decided that beginning the full-scale pipeline project immediately would mean unwieldy spikes in staffing needs and debt financing, so they are currently looking at a time frame that would begin construction in 2027, but could shift that earlier as other items on their to-do list are completed.
Go with the flow
After last fall’s city and county water restrictions were enacted in response to drought conditions, many in the community wondered why the much-touted Ragged Mountain Dam had not prevented the need for restrictions. The answer is that the Water Supply Plan is only partly complete—the proposed pipeline is the linchpin to a full circuit that will assure a reliable water supply in the future.
Right now, low water levels in the Rivanna Reservoir, such as the September/October 2017 drop to 42 percent of capacity, mean that the whole system has to rely on the 64-year-old Observatory water treatment plant, which can’t fully sustain the urban area by itself. “It’s built to treat up to 7 million gallons per day, but practically it can only treat 2 or 3 million, and it really needs to be more like 10,” says the ACSA’s O’Connell. O’Connnell says increasing the plant is the next short-term project on the horizon, and that it can be completed in the next three or four years.
Bill Mawyer, a North Garden native, spent 15 years as assistant director of Henrico County’s public utility operations before taking the helm at the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority in November 2016. Photo by Eze Amos
And once the pipeline is built, explains the RWSA’s Mawyer, we’ll have a “circular circuit.” “If the Rivanna Reservoir gets so low that the pumping station there can’t function properly [as happened last fall], then we can switch it over and bring water up from Ragged Mountain Reservoir, where we have a huge amount of storage,” he says. “And when Rivanna is overflowing, we can store that extra water at Ragged Mountain.” The two sources will be connected, providing needed redundancy and reliability in the system.
Acquisition of the right of way easements along the new pipeline’s route is already underway, as are improvements to both the Rivanna and Observatory water treatment plants. Also ongoing is construction of an additional water line to connect the southern Avon area to Pantops, to ensure the eastern-most part of the county is in the loop. Next up will be projects to replace older Ragged Mountain water lines coming into the city, and pumps to increase their capacity and reliability and to be ready for the core pipeline project.
Sea change
The past two decades have also ushered in a keen awareness of environmental issues that water management policies can address. “In the early 2000s, in part because of the drought, the community started looking at meeting the ecological needs of rivers,” says Whitaker, “to make sure we maintain environmental health as well as human health.”
That new perspective meant a change in water release policies, particularly for the Moormans River, which is now allowed to flow freely downstream from Sugar Hollow Reservoir with limits on how much is fed through the older Ragged Mountain pipeline for storage. Similarly, the Rivanna Reservoir, when not spilling over the top, releases water to replicate what its feeder streams are contributing from the watershed, to better preserve aquatic life downstream.
Palmer wonders about the expectations of the public regarding the most visible measures of the water supply. “Reservoirs are meant to be drawn down, but what is the public’s tolerance for going into water conservation on a regular basis and watching levels go down?” she says. “That’s the way they’re supposed to work, but it makes people nervous.”
Marlene Condon, Crozet nature writer and photographer, recently sounded the alarm about reservoir levels in Sugar Hollow. “The streams in my area were drying up by last summer,” she says, “and the water authority should insist that people start conserving sooner during times of drought. When reservoir levels fall it means more is going out than coming in, and they should only be transferring water to Ragged Mountain if it is absolutely necessary.” The RWSA’s current water supply strategy allows the Sugar Hollow reservoir level to drop to 19 feet below the top of the dam before suspending the transfer.
CLEANUP CREW: Filtered water is constantly monitored for contaminants
Despite a flash fad in California and Maine where some are paying $15 for a gallon of completely untreated stream water for its supposed health benefits, water supply professionals recommend strongly against drinking raw water. “Crazy,” says Dave Tungate, the RWSA’s water manager, who goes on to list the ways in which water is processed to make it clean for drinking.
The first step is to remove the particulate—dirt and organic matter like leaves, wood and bugs. Raw water collected in reservoirs is piped to a treatment plant, where a coagulant is added to make the particles stick together (in a process called flocculation) and settle to the bottom of sedimentation tanks. At this point the water is visibly clearer, but “it’s not the stuff you can see that can hurt you,” says Tungate. “It’s the stuff you can’t see.”
Next, the water is treated and filtered for micro-contaminants such as giardia and cryptosporidium, microscopic parasites from animal activity in the river that can cause sickness in humans and their pets. New “granular activated carbon” filtration systems have been installed at every treatment facility in the county and are set to go online this spring. These systems filter out even more organic material in the water so that no acid byproducts are released during the final chlorination step.
The last phase balances the pH of the water to keep it neutral, disinfects it with chlorine, mixes in a corrosion inhibitor to keep pipe metals from leaching into the water and adds fluoride. “Water is a biological and chemical system and we are constantly gauging what’s coming in, and standardizing what’s going out,” says Jennifer Whitaker, the RWSA’s director of engineering and maintenance.
Toward that end, the filtered water is constantly monitored using an online turbidimeter for any kind of suspended matter from clay or silt particles to viruses and bacteria, and lab samples are tested for bacteria, algae, metals such as lead and nutrients (like nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizer), as well as for residual byproducts from the treatment process itself. Charlottesville/Albemarle water meets or exceeds all federal and state standards for water quality.
Occasionally, city residents may notice their water taking on a milky or cloudy aspect, but the cause is usually benign. “The most likely cause of cloudy water would be dissolved air in the water,” says Tungate, which occurs more often when cold water from outside is piped into a warm house. Tiny microbubbles form as the oxygen tries to escape, and will dissipate after a minute or so of sitting still.
Gary O’Connell, whose office walls are covered with framed images of brook trout and fly-fishing lures, agrees with the need for greater public understanding. “I’ve fished a lot in the upper Moormans above Sugar Hollow and there were years where that part was dried up,” he says. “The natural flows come and go, so to think that a reservoir is going to be the same level year-round is not realistic.” Still, he and the other city and county water managers are focused on how to plan for future environmental uncertainty.
“There’s a lot of research being done on adapting to climate change for water utilities,” he says. “We’re seeing the peaks and seasonal variation, dry periods and extreme rain, and we know that has to be factored in to our projections. We’ll be doing a big study in 2020 to look at long-term supply and I think that climate change will have to be a factor in there.”
Regarding the pipeline project, Board of Supervisors Chair Ann Mallek is resolute. “As representatives, we have to make sure that we stick to our convictions and do not shy away from agreements and plans we already have, because that will create chaos,” she says. “Everything takes longer than you think it will, so let’s get started. To people who cringe because we have to build two pump stations—well, so what? You put solar power on them and you go to town.”
For her part, Whitaker, who joined the RWSA in 2003, says, “this is a fantastic time, from an engineering perspective, to be in this organization. We’ve taken parts of this system that were very broken, from a capacity, pollution and safety standpoint, and fixed them, and now we’re designing for the future. Watching this unfold is very rewarding; we get to see the execution of the Water Supply Plan actually starting to happen.”
No, this is not a new brewery. These 8,900-gallon tanks in Crozet at the water treatment plant provide carbon filtration to the water from Beaver Creek Reservoir, and they’re going in throughout the entire Rivanna water system. Rammelkamp Foto
Summer of 2012, Charlottesville was rocked by two events that were ultimately reversed because of intense public opposition: the firing of UVA President Teresa Sullivan and a plan to add chloramines to the water supply.
On the latter, in a rare show of unanimity, City Council and the Albemarle Board of Supervisors, along with the area’s two water authorities, voted to halt a previously approved plan to add chloramines to the water supply, and instead opted for granular activated carbon filtration to meet more stringent EPA mandates.
Five years later, giant carbon filtration tanks—they’re called contactors—are being installed in all Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority and Albemarle County Service Authority water treatment plants, and work should be completed by the end of the year.
The chloramine controversy erupted nearly a year after the water authorities had approved the addition of the chlorine/ammonia combo, which was blamed for the off-the-charts elevated lead levels in the early aughts in D.C. homes—and children.
However, chloramines are cheaper and safely used in 76 percent of Virginia’s public water supplies, according to RWSA’s former executive director, and are used in Henrico County, where its current director, Bill Mawyer, previously worked.
Carbon filtration “helps remove organic products from water so when we add chlorine, it doesn’t create disinfectant byproducts,” says Mawyer. It was the byproducts that the EPA was tightening up on, and by filtering, “there’s an incentive to try not to let them form in the first place.”
Rivanna’s largest water treatment plant, South Rivanna, is getting eight of the granular activated carbon contactors, says Mawyer, while Crozet, North Rivanna, Observatory and Scottsville are each getting two, a project that is “close to $30 million,” he says.
Even after the capital investment, filtration will continue to cost an estimated $1 million a year to replace the carbon in the contactors, says Mawyer.
And what about that nine-mile pipeline?
As controversial as chloramines were, that wasn’t the biggest water drama to roil the community. That would be the Ragged Mountain Reservoir mega-dam, which split the community for years into dam supporters and those who favored dredging the silting South Fork Rivanna Reservoir.
Part of the dam plan, which was approved in 2011, included a nine-mile pipeline from the Rivanna reservoir to fill Ragged Mountain, which is now 96 percent full, according to Mawyer, using water piped instead from Sugar Hollow Reservoir.
The nine-mile pipeline plan languished, and Mawyer says the water authority will turn its attention to determining a route and obtaining easements in the next few months. The pipeline will transport water both to and from Ragged Mountain, “uphill both ways,” says Mawyer, and require pump stations at both ends. In 2009, it was estimated to cost $62 million.
Some, like former city councilor Dede Smith, who opposed the Ragged Mountain dam, are dubious. “As for the pipeline, I have contended for a long time now, that it will never be built,” she writes in an email. “The irony is that what we have now is RWSA’s original plan for the Community Water Plan, and that is an expanded Ragged Mountain Reservoir using the clean Moormans River as its source. While the introduction of a South Fork Rivanna pipeline may have brought majority approval to the plan, the pipeline was always unrealistic both in logistics and cost. And in truth, now that the expanded RMR is filled, the original plan is working pretty well…at least for now.”
Lonnie Wood, the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority’s interim executive director, says components number four and five on the map are the “main culprits” for the stink. Courtesy of RWSA
The smell of sewage has wafted through the east side of Charlottesville for decades, driving out some residents, nauseating the ones who have stayed and even leaching into the surgical suites at Sentara Martha Jefferson Hospital, according to complaints by the hospital’s director at a Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority board meeting in 2014. But there’s good news: On July 15 the RWSA kicked off the final phase of a $9.33 million odor control project, which should finally stop the stink.
The odor comes from the RWSA’s wastewater treatment facility, Moores Creek Advanced Water Resource Recovery Facility, located near the Belmont-Carlton and Woolen Mills neighborhoods.
Though the first half of the treatment plant wasn’t built until the 1950s, signs of the smell can be traced back to the early 1900s. In the summer of 1916, the city’s main sewer pipe—then a straight pipe running from town into the Rivanna River—broke.
“Foul odors wafted across the mill village from the leak,” wrote Andrew Myers in The Charlottesville Woolen Mills: Working Life, Wartime and the Walkout of 1918. “The stench ended only with the arrival of the coldest winter in twenty years.”
The sewage smell has intermittently passed through town ever since.
In 2008, water engineering firm Hazen and Sawyer evaluated the issue and recommended a five-phase odor control project that would set the RWSA back almost $34 million. The authority stuck with a two-phase, long-term master plan it created in 2007, and the first phase of that was completed by mid-2012. In January 2014, RWSA was allotted $2 million from a capital improvement plan, and $9 million from the organization will initiate the final phase when construction begins next month.
“This project, as well as previous efforts starting in 2006, definitely had engineering, scientific, financial and community challenges to solve,” said Lonnie Wood, RWSA’s interim executive director, in a press release. “The [Albemarle County Service Authority,] city and county have worked well together to bring solutions to these odor problems for our neighbors through the RWSA.”
“I’m cautiously optimistic,” says Bill Emory, a former planning commissioner who purchased his Woolen Mills house in 1987 and who has lived in town since 1971. He adds that though the smell has always persisted, the RWSA has only worked diligently to eliminate the foul odors for the past decade or so. When residents would call on a regular basis in the mid-1970s, Emory says, “They would tell us smell was subjective.”
But the stench is real, and comes from the 10 million gallons of wastewater that RWSA treats each day at its facility. Last December, then-RWSA executive director Tom Frederick said it best: “We receive and have to treat what gets flushed from the toilets of 120,000 homes.”
The final phase of the project is on track to be completed by the end of 2017. Improvements include the installation of covers over key wastewater treatment systems and construction of a biological scrubber, which will vacuum the air above the systems to remove odor compounds. A sewage containment pipe and grit removal facilities will be installed, making it possible to eliminate the daily use of outdoor basins, such as post-digestion solids settling basins and the outdoor biosolids storage and handling area. RWSA will also purchase custom-covered trailers for transporting the biosolids.
Emory says it “feels good” that the project Frederick eventually got his board to approve is near completion, though the RWSA board, he says, has always been sensitive to the wants of ratepayers—most of whom do not want to pay increased rates to fund a project that doesn’t affect them.
“When you’re in Crozet and you flush the toilet, you don’t think about the smell it makes on the east side of Charlottesville,” Emory says.
But in light of the celebration, and quoting The Disagreeable Man at the July 15 kickoff, Albemarle County Supervisor Rick Randolph said, “The good are better made by ill, as odors crushed are sweeter still.”
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.
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 5million 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.
Concerned citizen Scott Fox wants construction crews to clean up the sandbags they left in the Rivanna River. Staff photo
It’s been nearly three months since Albemarle County resident Scott Fox first noticed a number of plastic bags littered across the bank of the Rivanna River behind his house, caught on rocks and tree limbs in the water and trapped below the water’s surface.
Fox, who lives in a small, A-frame house right on the river’s north fork, says he’s seen about 100 plastic bags at one time in the mile-long stretch of water that circles his property. The plastic comes from sandbags used in an emergency water main repair and relocation, according to Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority Executive Director Tom Frederick.
In a routine check last summer, an RWSA inspector noticed that, because of erosion, part of a pipe in the Rivanna’s north fork was exposed in the river bank, says Frederick. Federal regulations require a series of steps before contractors can begin fixing the pipe, so although the discovery was critical, the authority wasn’t able to begin relocating the pipe until November and had plans to finish by January, weather permitting.
During a recent trip to Fox’s house, at least 25 bags were visible around the river—some strung up in trees blowing in the wind and others submerged, but given away by dark, round shadows under the water’s surface. As it started to snow that day, some bags began to blend into the landscape.
Trash spotted on the Rivanna River. Staff photo
RWSA is committed to restoring the area, but the weather, Frederick says, is a major factor in delaying the cleanup.
With recent snow and rain storms, river flows, or water levels, have been dangerously high. “We’re at nature’s mercy,” Frederick says. “We’re not going to put somebody in jeopardy.”
When Fox made his initial complaint, the RWSA asked contractors to clean up the area and an engineer was immediately sent to Fox’s house. The contractors gathered some bags, according to communications manager Teri Kent, but high waters prevented them from eliminating all trash. They will eventually need to take a boat down the river to collect it all, she says.
In the meantime, Frederick says the trash in the river won’t harm the environment.
“It’s inert material,” he says. “It’s construction material that was properly put in place and washed away by the flood.”
But Fox is frustrated with what he calls the “overwhelming pollution” and the contractor’s failure to remove it.
“If you put a thousand bags in the water, I want to see a thousand come out,” Fox says. “Right now, they’re showing me 20.”
The perfect solution? Fox has one. He proposes taking the issue to someone such as Rob Bell, a member of the Virginia House of Delegates and an Albemarle resident, and asking that the state mandate labeling materials that could become litter.
“Can we please put names and phones numbers on bags and anything else they put in the river?” he asks.
