Residents near Chesapeake golf course fear fly ash runoff

CHESAPEAKE

Karen Fox is no stranger to fly ash, or to flooding.

She and her family live on Murray Drive in a roughly 40-home community on a single street just south of Battlefield Golf Club at Centerville. Their well is in the backyard.

In the early 1970s, as a girl living in the shadow of Dominion Virginia Power's coal-fired power plant in Yorktown, she watched her grandfather sweep fly ash off the shingles of her family's home.

"I remember it being all over the roof, the house, the porch," she said.

Her father, Ted Basta Jr., who grew up in the same house, died at the age of 43, from a rare form of anemia, Fox said.

This spring, Fox and many other people who live nearby, all in homes with wells, learned that the golf course was contoured with 1.5 million tons of fly ash, a powdery residue laden with heavy metals, left from the burning of coal for electricity. The ash came from Dominion's coal-fired power plant in Deep Creek.

"My head could spin around three times," Fox said.

For decades, neighbors say, the street has been subject to chronic flooding. Until recently, Fox and others on Murray Drive assumed that water damage was the primary thing they had to worry about.

Not any more.

Recent tests indicate there are high levels of arsenic, lead, manganese and other heavy metals in groundwater under the golf course. The findings have led them to wonder about the cocktail that may be created when heavy rains wash over the course and a drainage ditch on its southern border overflows - as it did July 23, when a storm dumped 4.5 inches on the Fentress area, according to city officials.

"We had summer winds, storms, we had flooding that occurred," Fox said. "What's to say that didn't roll off?"

Peter deFur, a Richmond-based environmental consultant and part-time faculty member at Virginia Commonwealth University, said those questions are well-founded.

"The citizens are exactly correct," he said. "They have every reason to be concerned."

The first concern is whether "the floodwaters are mobilizing any contaminants," he said.

"I think the authorities need to get some samples from those floodwaters," deFur added.

W. Lee Daniels, a Virginia Tech professor and fly ash expert, said the flooding in the area confirms his sense of the hydrology on and around the golf course, which appears to have a high water table, limited relief and drainage, and limited upper-soil permeability.

He added, however, that he doubts the flooding posed much of a contamination problem, because of the sheer volume of the water moving in the area.

At an Aug. 20 meeting, those who live nearby criticized city officials who came to offer an update on testing.

"How about the flooding? What are we going to do? You going to supply us with canoes or what?" asked Dennis Sears, a Murray Drive resident for 27 years. He said the July 23 storm caused waist-high flooding.

"This belt buckle," said Sears, pointing, "matches up with the headlights on my Expedition."

"That's how deep the water was I had to go through from the shallow end of Whittamore (Road) to my house," he said. "Built my house in '81. I'm fed up. Y'all give me a break."

Richard Fagan, 61, who also moved to Murray Drive in 1981, said the water stood at 24 inches at his mailbox and 30 inches on each side of his property.

Fagan also worries about what's running off the site.

While the golf course is supposed to have an 18-inch earthen cap, Fagan said, he has seen signs of erosion from Centerville Turnpike.

"You can see areas where the soil has eroded away and the golf course is working to cover it up," he said.

Mike Waugh, the golf pro at the course, said erosion-control maintenance has been under way since the course opened in fall 2007.

Additional top soil was brought on to the course in recent weeks, as well as sod and grass seed, Waugh told residents after being questioned about earth-movers seen on the site.

"It's just a function of trying to make the golf course better," Waugh told residents.

"The context of the recent rains was that we had more water to irrigate seed and sod to go into the off-season," he said in an interview, adding that drought-like conditions existed before the July storm.

Jerry Kanter, who built a home on Murray Drive in 1995, said he has been complaining to City Hall about the flooding for nearly a decade.

"For years, I have e-mailed all City Council members, the mayor and Public Works pictures after flooding events hoping to get some response from them, to no avail," he wrote in an e-mail.

The response became a mantra: " 'There's no money,' " Kanter said.

City officials, however, say that has changed.

The current, approved capital-improvement budget includes $2.1 million to address the problems, according to an e-mail from Lizz Gunnufsen, a city spokeswoman.

Construction is estimated to begin late next year, she wrote.

On Friday, an inmate crew began cleaning ditches on Land of Promise Road near Long Ridge Road; a city crew was also looking at pipes on Murray Drive, according to Gunnufsen.

Fox said that when she and her husband, Stephen, bought their home in the fall of 2002 - the City Council OK'd the project in June 2001 - they knew a golf course was in the works, but not that it would be built with fly ash.

"I would've never gotten out of the car," Fox said.

As the golf course project unfolded over several years, Fox and her neighbors watched as countless truckloads of what they thought was dirt was dumped on the land 1,000 yards or less from their homes.

Developers said the fly ash was treated with a binding agent to block leaching.

Fox says her family wrestles daily with anxiety about the potential health effects of living in the path of the reported groundwater flow under the course.

Though they drink bottled water, she and her family are still cooking with well water and showering in it.

"Every time you go to turn on the water, it's a conscious thing," she said.

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