Dominion officials rehearsed their message about safety of fly ash, report says

CHESAPEAKE

Dominion Virginia Power executives and developers pressed a clear and simple message about building a golf course from coal waste.

Once treated, the material was “safe as dirt.”

 But in closed-door meetings, Dominion executives deliberated for months about the tone and substance of these simple pronouncements, according to recent court filings. 

The executives anticipated public questions, and rehearsed and parsed their answers. They drew lines on what to share with regulators and what to hide.

In one memo about preparing for a public hearing, a participant wrote, “Do not mention hazardous vs. drinking water. Just say 'completely non-hazardous.’”

It worked. State regulators raised little resistance. Local officials trusted the energy company’s judgment and granted approval.

But court records show the trust eroding as the 1.5 million tons of coal ash, containing hazardous materials, flowed into the rural community by the truckload.

More than 400 people have sued Dominion, the golf course developer and owners in Chesapeake Circuit Court this year for more than $1 billion in damages. Residents  contend that the energy company ignored consultants who told them hazardous materials would leach into drinking water wells. They called the development a “toxic waste site masquerading as a 'golf course.’”

A longtime Dominion employee, who lives next to the course, talked with  a company  executive  and endorsed the project to neighbors and the Chesapeake City Council. In a sworn statement, he said his home and property are contaminated and his son’s asthma grew worse. He’s now suing the company  for which he has worked for 24 years.

A contractor who helped build the course also became disillusioned.

Residents living near the golf course say in their suit that Dominion Power wove stories that a golf course built from potentially hazardous materials could be safely constructed on low-lying farmland.

Virginia Dominion Power officials maintain they met and often exceeded legal requirements to study and disclose the risks to regulators and the public. Company officials say they continue to work with city, state and federal officials to address environmental concerns.

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The problem was a growing pile of coal waste at Dominion’s Chesapeake Energy Center, or CEC, visible from the High-Rise Bridge on Interstate 64 , according to letters between the energy company and the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality.

A state engineer  warned Dominion that the coal waste was piled too steep and may have violated their permit, according to a 2001 letter.

One solution was to combine the ash with other compounds, stabilize  it and use it for a safer purpose. Coal ash is widely used as an ingredient for road beds, concrete and other construction materials.

Dominion officials offered the  coal ash  for treatment and fill at a  new golf course being built on a 217-acre site off Centerville Turnpike. A Dominion vice president, Martin Bowling, wrote to DEQ regional director Frank Daniel in January  2002 to announce that the proposed golf course  would, “beneficially use a large quantity of coal combustion byproducts from the Chesapeake Energy Center.”

Officials from Dominion and CPM, an  ash management  company building the golf course, helped get the project approved.

In handwritten notes of a March 2001 meeting among golf course developers and Dominion officials, the team frankly discussed an arsenic problem in the groundwater under the Chesapeake plant. Officials needed to practice answers for residents’ queries.

The author of the handwritten notes is not identified in the lawsuit. The person attended several high-level meetings involving company officials from  public relations, legal and environmental engineering departments. The notes were filed with the court by attorneys for the residents. They were found among more than 1,300 pages of documents filed in two suits since March.

Lawyers who brought the lawsuit on behalf of the residents declined to comment for this story.

Before an early 2001 public hearing, officials prepared a list of sample questions.

For example, to answer whether the ash was a danger to the wells that supplied water to all the residents, the memo suggested that in a probable worst-case scenario, the groundwater leached from the coal ash would meet six of eight federal standards for drinking water. In a handwritten aside, the author warned not to mention the material was “hazardous vs. groundwater.”

In a final note preparing for the hearing, a practice question asked, “How will the golf course help this community?”

The answer included another question: “A golf course also increases the property values in the area.” It was punctuated, in parentheses, with a question mark.

In another meeting about environmental issues, Dominion and CPM officials discussed deeper problems.

“If public thinks ash is benign, what happens if/when citizens find out what may be different?” an April 2001 memo noted. The author noted that Dominion has given DEQ some information, “but they don’t have all info (have some worse).”

Max Bartholomew, a spokesman for Dominion, attended many of the planning meetings, along with officials from CPM, according to the notes.

In June, Bartholomew assured then-Mayor William E. Ward that the company monitored the fly ash and there were no environmental concerns that the city should be aware of. The City Council approved the project.

Residents maintain they would have fought the project if they  had known the risks. Dominion said  it provided the material for the project, but the  developer, CPM, treated it and built the golf course. The company lawyers say the residents’ case is seriously flawed and should be dismissed on legal grounds.

Dominion spokesman Dan Genest said in a statement the matter is in litigation and “we will therefore provide responses to all of the plaintiff’s allegations at the appropriate time and in the appropriate venue .”

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Outside the conference rooms, two former backers of the project gradually came to view it differently.

Derrick Howell earned  $60,000 a year as a golf course “shaper,” using a bulldozer to carve landscapes to an architect’s the exacting requirements.

 Howell had one bulldozer to manage the treated fly ash dumped by up to 100 trucks every day. He led a crew of  up to five men to bury and shape the material, he said in an interview.

At closed-door meetings with contractor CPM and Dominion, Howell and his boss asked for more labor. But, he said, “It was always about moving fly ash.” Howell is not a party in the lawsuit; he said he spoke up because a friend living near the course asked him.

Bob Stephenson, according to his sworn statement, moved  his wife and two boys into a four-bedroom house on Murray Drive in March 1999. Their back yard is adjacent to the golf course.

Stephenson is a longtime Dominion Virginia Power employee.

He  trusted his company. He stood before his neighbors and the City Council and endorsed the golf course project, according to his statement.

Soon, dump trucks hauling fly ash were making hundreds of trips past his house. “This went on for years,” he said. Some even turned around in his driveway.

One of his sons has asthma, and it grew worse in the dark ash clouds, he said. Eventually, they would have to stop drinking their well water.

Stephenson still works for Dominion. His family still lives in their home on Murray Drive.

The neighborhood no longer uses well water for cooking and drinking. Instead, families line up outside a small shack in the parking lot behind Centerville Baptist Church, where a spigot delivers fresh water. People fill up plastic jugs several times a week.

The city has assessed the Stephenson’s home and four-acre property at $373,000. He’s been told not to bother putting it on the market.

In a brief interview, he said, “I don’t think I can give it away.”

Louis Hansen, (757) 222-5221, louis.hansen@pilotonline.com