Above ground, a golf course. Just beneath it, potential health risks.

CHESAPEAKE

Last fall, one of the most unusual golf courses in the country opened along a busy suburban road near two Fentress area neighborhoods with more than 50 homes.

Its undulating fairways reach a high point of about 35 feet, towering over the flat farm fields and backyards nearby. A series of small lakes, some as deep as 20 feet, is carved into the course's 217 acres.

What sets Battlefield Golf Club at Centerville apart, however, isn't the course's layout or water hazards; this 18-hole playground is sculpted from 1.5 million tons of "fly ash," a charcoal-gray powdery substance left behind by burning coal to make electricity.

If this were not a golf course, an industrial park or a similar venture, it would have to be regulated like a landfill. But because of a provision in the environmental regulations encouraging the "beneficial use" of fly ash, it's considered a "coal combustion byproduct" project instead of an industrial waste landfill.

The ash for Battlefield Golf Club came from a Dominion Virginia Power coal-burning plant 20 miles west in Deep Creek. Monitoring wells at the plant's fly-ash landfill have shown that unacceptably high levels of arsenic leached into groundwater. Arsenic, one of a number of heavy metals found in fly ash, has been linked to cancer, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Nationwide, the EPA is taking a fresh look at the leaching risks posed by fly ash from plants like Dominion's and how to track them.

Seven years ago, homeowners near the golf course knew fly ash posed a threat to water quality and voiced their concerns to developers in community meetings. The city's approval of the golf course in 2001 came with a long list of conditions, two about water.

- If a homeowner's well ran dry or showed signs of contamination, he would have a seven-year window - which closes in June - to get a new well from the developers.

- Within six months after earthmovers started work on the site, the developers were supposed to begin twice-a-year groundwater tests to make sure drinking water would be safe for golfers.

State officials confirm there has been no such testing on the site, though there is no running water to test - only bottled water is available for patrons.

In addition to lacking running water, the golf course trailer has had only outhouses for lavatory facilities.

Earlier this month, after questions were raised by The Virginian-Pilot, a city building code official issued a "notice of violation" to the golf course for not having the proper permits. The course was not supposed to operate until the matter was resolved.

On Thursday, the city temporarily shut down the course after discovering it still was operating. A court date is set for next month, said Heath Covey, a city spokesman.

Fly ash and water should not mix and are supposed to be separated by at least 2 feet, according to state regulations. Yet, the lakes cut into the course are not installed with liners.

U.S. Department of Agriculture soil maps show that the property is considered "very limited" for development as "lawns, landscaping and golf fairways" because of ground saturation levels. The grounds are so saturated that in 2006 Chesapeake Health Department officials denied the golf course's application to build a septic field for restrooms.

State officials say environmental regulations do not require ground-water monitoring wells at the golf course because it is using fly ash in a beneficial way.

 

 

The project began in early 2001 with a use-permit application filed in Chesapeake by an executive with a company called Combustion Products Management Inc., or CPM, based in Ithaca, N.Y.

On June 20, 2001, the City Council approved the project on a 9-0 vote after 10 minutes of deliberation.

Lornell Holley, president of the Whittamore Road Civic League, was among those who spoke out about the golf course. He grew up in a house just down the street from the site. A civil servant with a science background, Holley said he knew enough about fly ash to be concerned. "I have seen fly ash, and I know what fly ash is," he said.

Although he was not opposed to the golf course, he was concerned about the fly ash, particularly the potential for contamination of wells, because all of the area residents have them, he said. In meetings between about 30 community members and representatives of Dominion and the developers, residents were assured that the project was completely safe.

"Everything I would come up with or the community would come up with, they would have answers for," Holley said.

Later, he brought his concerns to City Hall, where he was assured the project was sound, he said.

Throughout, Holley said he understood that some testing was on going to ensure the integrity of the water supply.

"I was under the assumption that there were going to be on-site monitors," he said.

Mayor William E. Ward, before the council vote, asked Max Bartholomew, a Dominion executive, to confirm the safety of the venture, asking "if there are any environmental concerns we should be aware of."

"No, sir," Bartholomew told the council. "We at Dominion Power are fully in compliance with all the federal and state regulations. We do periodic testing, and we monitor the fly ash."

 

The developer's business address listed on Chesapeake planning documents is 105 Cherry St., Ithaca, N.Y., a scrap recycling facility. For decades, this site had numerous environmental problems, according to media reports.

The owner of the property is Neil Wallace, a lawyer. Another Wallace company, Combustion Products Management, was the developer of the Chesapeake golf course. CPM was insolvent, or unable to pay its debts, at the time the City Council approved the project, court records show. Even as the project was winding its way through City Hall in the spring of 2001, a local trucking company was suing Wallace's company in Circuit Court, claiming it was owed more than $56,000 for hauling fly ash, apparently within Dominion's property. The companies later reached a settlement.

Mechanics liens alleging nonpayment of nearly $68,000 were filed against CPM by Atlantic Coastal Clearing & Grading Inc., which broke ground on the golf course site, and Hassell & Folkes, an engineering and surveying company. As contractors alleged nonpayment, the property changed hands twice. City real estate records show that Weaver Fertilizer, which had owned the site for decades, sold it to Whittamore Properties LLC in early 2002 for $1.15 million. S. Grey Folkes Jr., a principal of Hassell & Folkes, which filed a $14,365 lien against Wallace's company in 2002, also was a principal of Whittamore Properties LLC, records show.

In 2003, Whittamore sold it to Wallace's company, CPM Virginia LLC, for $1.65 million. Dominion said its role in the venture was limited to supplying the fly ash and that it did its due diligence to ensure the safety of the project.

"We were not the applicant on this project but only the supplier of material," said Dan Genest, a Dominion spokesman. Dominion paid Wallace's company to take the fly ash, according to a videotape of the City Council meeting on the night the project was approved.

"In every aspect, it's the same as dirt, as it's been explained to me," James R. Bradford of Hassell & Folkes, the developer's agent, said on the tape.

The fly ash offered a "very cost-effective way to build the course since the applicant is basically being paid to accept the material," Bradford said.

The developer is "using those proceeds to assist in the development of the golf course, and subsequently, it allows him to keep his greens fees and his operating costs significantly down in the future."

While work continued slowly on the site for a few years, the project took off in early 2007 with a third acquisition of the property - by a Norfolk-based LLC managed by J. Mark Sawyers, son of U.S. Rep. Thelma Drake. Sawyers' company bought the property from Wallace's company for $700,000, about $500,000 less than the assessed value of the property, city real estate records show.

In a recent interview, Sawyers said all his company did was take over the project and that its only goal is to run a successful golf course. Sawyers said his mother is not involved in the project.

The same month Sawyers' company acquired the golf course - January 2007 - it was granted a tax break from the city because the course qualified as "open space" according to state code, as long as it "operated as a public service and maintains park-like characteristics."

 

Power companies are anxious to find alternatives to placing fly ash in industrial landfills. It's widely used as a material for road construction and concrete. They are working as partners with the EPA to find more such "beneficial uses."

As of 2006, about 125 million tons of "coal-combustion byproducts," including fly ash, were produced nationwide, of which about 43 percent was used in commercial applications, according to the American Coal Ash Association Web site. The EPA hopes to push that figure to 50 percent in 2011. Dominion produces nearly half of its power from coal burning. The utility has asked York County for permission to expand an ash landfill that would be more than twice as high as Virginia Beach landmark Mount Trashmore.

Dominion's Chesapeake operation, however, which generates about 160,000 tons of fly ash a year, has found a solution to its fly-ash dilemma. Virtually all of it - 99 percent, company officials say - now is being processed and sold to local cement manufacturers, within about a 150-mile radius.

The golf course in Chesapeake, though, which contains more than seven years' worth of fly ash from the Dominion plant, ranks as the biggest to date of 15 "beneficial-use" projects across the state, according to Department of Environmental Quality records.

Dominion officials say a chemical additive mixed in with the fly ash used on the golf course acts as a binding agent, making any heavy metals in the ash unable to dissolve and preventing them from leaching.

A "pug mill," a kind of blender that looks like a water tower, in which fly ash was mixed with water and an additive, still can be seen on top of Dominion's fly-ash landfill, off the northwest end of the High Rise Bridge.

Dominion identified the two additives used with the fly ash as either "cement kiln dust" or "lime kiln dust."

An attorney with Earth-justice, a California-based environmental group, however, disputed the long-term effectiveness of either substance as a remedy for potential leaching.

Mixing fly ash with cement kiln dust "would likely do nothing to improve the situation," said Lisa Evans, a project attorney with the group. "A quick search for sites where (cement kiln dust) has caused serious groundwater and surface water contamination should have made this obvious" to state regulators, she added.

Evans, who has worked on issues related to fly ash for eight years, was an EPA attorney before switching to advocacy work. She was instrumental in obtaining Superfund status for an Indiana town in which fly ash was linked to well contamination.

Evans pointed out that cement kiln dust is itself considered a "special waste" by the EPA and has its own Web page, www.epa.gov/epaoswer/other/ckd/index.htm.

W. Lee Daniels, a professor at Virginia Tech and a fly-ash expert familiar with soils in the Chesapeake area, said all fly ash has soluble constituents that eventually will leach, particularly sulfates and borates.

 

If Dominion had sought to develop the Centerville site as a fly ash disposal site, it would have had to follow an intensive and expensive permitting process that would have required liners in any lagoons on the property and a series of groundwater-monitoring wells.

Because the project met the criteria for the "beneficial use" of fly ash, as spelled out in state regulations that mirror federal environmental policies, it is considered exempt from the permitting process. Though it does not classify fly ash as a hazardous waste, the EPA considers it a solid waste, subject to regulation, while at the same time promoting its beneficial use, such as in construction projects.

Locally, these include road beds for parts of Interstate 64, embankments for the Great Bridge Bypass and fill material under the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality's Tidewater office.

Though deemed safe enough to be used in such projects, fly ash has been at the center of regulatory actions elsewhere in which contamination of well water has been documented.

Late last year, a class-action lawsuit was filed in Maryland, citing the contamination of at least 34 wells of homeowners living near a fly-ash disposal site belonging to a local power company. Before the filing of the suit, Maryland regulators had issued a $1 million penalty against the utility. That case still is pending.

The town of Pines, Ind., was declared a Superfund site by the EPA after tests in 2000 and later linked contamination of drinking-water wells to hundreds of thousands of tons of fly ash dumped years earlier by a local power company. The Chesapeake golf course has 1.5 million tons.

EPA researchers in recent years have begun to take another look at the risks posed by leaching of metals from fly ash and other products of coal combustion.

Soil data from the United States Department of Agriculture Web Soil Survey show that the Chesapeake site is "very limited" for golf-course development because of wet soils on the site.

DEQ criteria required a 2-foot vertical separation between fly ash deposited on the course and the maximum seasonal water table - the soil depth at which water saturation reaches its highest level.

While developers' filings with DEQ cited a series of 12 test borings "during March 14-16, 2001, to determine the water table location during the wettest season of the year," neither DEQ nor the city of Chesapeake has the results of those tests.

Folkes, of Hassell & Folkes, the developers' agent, said he knew such borings were done.

"I know the water table was significantly lower than the geological maps show," he said. The creation of man-made lakes on the course "dropped the water table way down," he added.

"They never really had a problem maintaining that separation," Folkes said of the required 2-foot distance between water and fly ash. "It was never even a close call."

Dominion officials said the company has copies of a consulting company's tests for the water-table location, but its attorneys declined to release them, citing proprietary reasons.

In 2006, the Chesapeake Health Department denied an application for a septic field on the site because a soil scientist found evidence that the seasonal water table was 0 inches, virtually flush with the soil surface.

Several years earlier, developers had set up a three-well monitoring program to determine the water-table location, according to Chesapeake Health Department records. All three wells, however, eventually were damaged by being driven over or in some other way, effectively compromising the monitoring, the records show.

The course's "lakes," or water hazards, are unlined, said Don Brunson, a DEQ official who visited the site several times during its development.

While DEQ's criteria prohibit the placement of any fly ash within 100 feet of any perennial stream or "existing water well," they don't block the placement of fly ash near man-made lakes or retention ponds, said Milton Johnston, waste program manager in DEQ's Tidewater office.

Erosion from several large, waterside mounds on the course show thinning of the earthen cap, a recent visit to the course showed.

In one spot, a gaping rivulet sloping downward toward a retention pond exposed a foot or more of brown material, at the bottom of which was a clearly visible gray-black substance the same color as fly ash.

 

Until the city temporarily closed it last week, the fledgling course had been off to a good start, said Mike Waugh, its club pro.

It already has about 160 members, he said, many who come from Norfolk and Virginia Beach. On June 20, the course will mark the seventh anniversary of its approval by the city - the date that also marks the deadline for nearby homeowners to seek remedies from the course owners if any well problems were discovered. Some residents living near the golf course said that was news to them.

"We didn't know that," said Jean Stephenson, who lives on Murray Drive, just in back of the first fairway. She and her husband bought their home in 1999, according to city real estate records.

Though the golf course is exempt from the requirement to have a landfill permit, DEQ officials did a walk-through of the property in the fall to ensure that the site was capped with at least 18 inches of earthen material, to cover the fly ash. In October, they issued an approval letter that came with a caveat that the earthen cap was not to be disturbed. Site plans now pending before Chesapeake's Public Works Department soon could lead to more construction activity on the course.

The plans call for a permanent clubhouse with a well, a sewage-treatment facility, an 80-plus-space parking lot and a reforestation area on a corner of the property.

It's possible that approval of the plans could come within weeks, said Mark Curry, a Public Works official.

 

Robert McCabe, (757) 222-5217, robert.mccabe@pilotonline.com