tom frederick – C-VILLE Weekly

Reservoir reservations: Critics still question Ragged Mountain plan

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 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.

‘Stinky neighborhood’: Will a $9.3 million project pass the smell test?

Nauseating smells from a wastewater treatment plant have long plagued the neighborhoods of Belmont-Carlton, Woolen Mills and others nearby. After a series of semi-unsuccessful smell-combatting projects, the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority says these odors may finally meet their match.

RWSA Executive Director Tom Frederick, a member of RWSA since 2004, says the smells from the Moores Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant have lingered since his first day on the job and, he imagines, for decades before, beginning when the city first built a treatment facility there in the 1950s.

So where do the smells come from? Frederick doesn’t mince words.

“We receive and have to treat what gets flushed from the toilets of 120,000 homes,” he says. RWSA’s 80-acre facility treats 10 million gallons of wastewater per day, which comes from city and county homes and businesses.

Jim Duncan, a realtor with Nest Realty, has sold houses in the Belmont area for 13 years and says his clients have told him the odor in Belmont is there intermittently.

“It’s a known issue that’s been discussed for many, many years,” he says, and when it comes to buying and selling houses, the seller isn’t under any obligation to make a disclosure. “It’s something that [buyers] could do their research and know about.”

He does say a good buyer’s agent should inform a client of the potential smell, but he’s never seen a Belmont house stay on the market for a prolonged period of time because of the stink.

Longtime resident Bill Emory, who purchased his Woolen Mills house in 1987, says he was unaware of the sewage plant’s proximity when he moved in.

“It later made itself known,” he says, “just through the smell.”

Emory adds that real estate agents don’t usually say, “Oh, by the way, this is known as the stinky neighborhood.” But, as Duncan says, the smell in Emory’s neighborhood comes and goes. He’s situated about three-tenths of a mile away from the plant.

Admitting that the odor does affect the quality of life in Woolen Mills, Emory still says he’s never considered moving.

Emory says RWSA’s previous odor-control efforts, such as reducing the amounts of released nitrogen and phosphorous and only operating certain machinery during the day to prevent nighttime stink, have had an effect on the strength and frequency of the smell.

As part of a two-phase, long-term master plan created in 2007, RWSA completed a number of projects, including moving a septage receiving tank away from the front gate and enclosing it, covering some channels and providing wet chemical scrubbers that vacuum air space and remove odor compounds, to finish phase one by mid-2012. The authority was allotted $2 million from a capital improvement plan in January 2014, solely for the purpose of managing odors, and the newest investment of $9.3 million (not from the CIP) will initiate the second phase of the project.

Emory is hopeful that the latest advancement will finally get the job done and applauds Frederick for working patiently over the years and investigating the odor issue with sound scientific and engineering methods.

After an odor study and sampling, a team will construct a new grit-removal facility on the property and cover or decommission some older amenities known to cause bad smells. A network of air piping throughout the treatment plant will capture the odors, which will be treated using advanced biological scrubbers, as well as existing chemical scrubbers.

While the group is still accepting construction bids for the project, Frederick says the contract should be set by January, and workers will begin ordering equipment in March or April. Once construction begins, the project will take 18 to 20 months to complete.