Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, June 26, 1990 TAG: 9006260161
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-3 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: By CARLOS SANTOS RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH
DATELINE: BROADWAY (AP) LENGTH: Medium
Past the junk, down a narrow passageway, is a mud-covered oil drum. Further into the cave somebody has scrawled, in fading ink, his love for Marsha and framed it with a cartoon heart pierced by an arrow.
Most of the cave formations, stalactites and stalagmites that took eons to form have been snapped off for souvenirs and are probably gathering dust now on somebody's television.
The only sign that the cave is alive, which is the way cavers think of caves, is a brown bat clinging upside down to a cave wall. The bat, awake and breathing fast, could fit in the palm of a hand.
Virginia has some 3,000 wild caves, as beautiful and as much a natural resource as forests and oceans, but often vandalized, used for dumps, cemented shut, bulldozed, polluted by sewage and petrochemicals and mostly ignored.
Caves are dark, dank, muddy and unfamiliar, home to bats and pigmentless bugs.
But their champions are vocal about a world that has its own peculiar beauty and worth.
"If we don't work hard to protect them now, we won't have any," said Gary Berdeaux, a longtime caver whose family owns Endless Caverns near Harrisonburg. Endless Caverns is one of 10 commercial caves in the state.
"Caves are under a good deal of pressure," said David Hubbard, a geologist and caver who has made more than 500 caving expeditions.
"People who just don't have a good conservation ethic dump carbide [from lanterns], break off things, write on the walls . . . "
But the threat to caves has become more than vandalism.
Cave pollution stories abound.
John Holsinger, a biology professor at Norfolk's Old Dominion University, has stood in a cave under an elementary school and, as toilets flushed, watched the sewage flow in.
Caves often are used as dumps. A recent survey by Karen and Ernst Kastning - she is a member of the Virginia Cave Board, he is a geologist - showed that in two dozen western Virginia counties there were more than 3,000 illegal dumps in sinkholes and caves.
Dangers to cave systems can crop up virtually overnight. In Lee County, a lumber mill expanded and rains now sweep the resulting tons of sawdust into a cave.
"It snuffs out every bit of life," Holsinger said. "It smells and the water is black . . . It killed every damn thing in the cave stream."
A good example of development threatening caves is in Lee County in Southwest Virginia, where officials are debating where to put an airport.
One area being considered for the projects is a karst, a region made up of porous limestone containing deep fissures and sinkholes, and characterized by underground caves and streams. This karst, just west of Jonesville, is 10 miles long and one mile to three miles wide.
Karsts are harder to protect than caves because they usually involve a lot of property.
"It would seriously impact the whole environment," Holsinger said of the proposed development. "Anytime you build any kind of facility you do a lot of changing of the land, bulldozing and filling. You change the drainage going into the ground. They don't know the problems of building on a karst area."
Federal officials also are pondering whether to place a federal prison on the karst, a site known locally as the Cedars and the one where the sawmill is fouling the cave.
The building of the airport likely would encourage the building of the prison, Holsinger said. "Then you have industry moving in and development moving in. You can see it going. The domino effect."
"Caves are a direct link to the water table," Berdeaux said. "You don't foul the water you drink. You foul a cave, you foul the water table."
Water quality is probably the most pragmatic reason for protecting karst areas and caves, even in rural areas where wells can easily be contaminated.
But practicality aside, caves are beautiful and delicate.
Despite their harsh environment, they are homes to sensitive ecological communities and it doesn't take much to destroy them.
"You can correlate caves with deserts," Hubbard said. "They both have harsh and unforgiving environments. Life in caves grows very slowly. Disturbances are far-reaching in their impact."
by CNB