THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, June 18, 1996 TAG: 9606180303
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KAREN WEINTRAUB, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 113 lines
Virginia Beach officials said Monday that they would consider turning down a potential $700,000 savings to take a stand against a new study of Norfolk's water system.
The study, released Monday, concludes that Norfolk can safely spare 2 million gallons more per day for Virginia Beach. Over the past three years, Norfolk had imposed a surcharge on such extra water to discourage overuse of the region's largest water system. Eliminating the penalty on that water would save the Beach roughly $700,000 a year.
Norfolk officials have said that they are willing to drop the surcharge on that water, but Virginia Beach is not sure it will welcome the bargain.
``If accepting the additional 2 million gallons a day implies we agree with the report, I think we probably will not be accepting it,'' Beach City Manager James K. Spore said Monday. The Beach Council has called a special executive session for today at 4 p.m. to discuss its response to the study.
If the Virginia Beach City Council decides not to take the 2 million gallons a day of water that the study found, Norfolk might sell it elsewhere, perhaps to Chesapeake, said Norfolk Utility Director Louis Guy.
Should the Beach turn down the extra water now, he added, Norfolk could not guarantee it will be available to its neighbor in times of drought.
Norfolk officials said they commissioned the $700,000 report nearly five years ago to determine exactly how much water the city could sell to Virginia Beach, which has no water system of its own, and to Chesapeake, which also must buy some water.
Guy said the study is one of the best ever done this side of the Mississippi River.
The 1 1/2-inch-thick report, completed by the Pennsylvania-based engineering firm of Gannett Fleming, was released Monday to The Virginian-Pilot. It concludes that Norfolk already has 2 million gallons of water per day more than had previously been estimated. It also found that there could be up to an additional 16 million gallons a day more if Norfolk makes some technical changes to its system.
Virginia Beach officials, who have reviewed the report for about two weeks, said Monday that the conclusions were overstated and misleading.
``We characterize this additional water they report as `paper water,' '' Clarence O. Warnstaff, Beach director of public utilities, said Monday. ``You cannot drink with it. You cannot bathe with it. You cannot wash dishes with it.''
Beach City Manager Spore said he's not willing to risk his city's drinking water supply on a study's untested theories.
``If any of these assumptions aren't correct and we do have another drought and the system doesn't perform as theoretically predicted, it would be (Norfolk's) customers who would suffer,'' Spore said.
Norfolk's contract with Virginia Beach specifies that it will sell leftover water only after meeting the needs of Norfolk citizens and Norfolk Naval Base.
Virginia Beach leaders are also worried about how pipeline opponents will use the report. North Carolina and those who live along the Roanoke River basin that supplies Lake Gaston have long argued that the pipeline is unnecessary because Hampton Roads has enough water to meet its needs.
Guy said that the report does not find that the Gaston pipeline is unnecessary.
``What we've done here is found out how we can manage our existing water supply,'' he said.
``The water supply ought to be planned at least 50 years ahead,'' he said. ``If we got 60 (million gallons a day from Lake Gaston), maybe that would take us close to 50 years.''
The pipeline would provide up to 48 million gallons of water per day to Virginia Beach, 10 million gallons per day to Chesapeake, and up to 1 million gallons per day each to Isle of Wight County and Franklin.
Last Friday, opponents filed their final briefs in an appeal of the last pipeline permit. Both North Carolina and the Roanoke River Basin Association argued that the 76-mile pipeline, which would cost $150 million, would bring substantially more water than needed into South Hampton Roads.
Norfolk's latest study didn't find any new water in the region; it just suggested ways the city could get more out of what is already there. Since the last in-depth water supply study was conducted in 1984, Norfolk has installed new pumps and built another pipeline to connect its main treatment plant with reservoirs in Suffolk.
The 125-year-old Norfolk water system relies on a number of sources. They include reservoirs the city owns in Suffolk; the Blackwater and Nottoway rivers in Southampton County; and nearby reservoirs, including Lake Whitehurst and Lake Wright in Norfolk and Little Creek Reservoir, Lake Smith, Lake Lawson, and Stumpy Lake, all in Virginia Beach but owned by Norfolk.
The study found that with better balancing of the sources of water, Norfolk could draw significantly more from its system. The report did not count several deep wells, because Norfolk cannot now mix the well-water with surface water without lowering water quality.
The report found that Norfolk could add as much as another 16 million gallons a day to its total by better managing the sources. The work would take two to three years and cost less than $10 million, according to Louis Guy, the Norfolk director of utilities.
Virginia Beach officials Monday disputed those conclusions, saying they did not believe Norfolk's water system could produce more water than it has in the past.
In a statement Monday, Virginia Beach officials cited five main concerns they had with the report:
It overstates the amount of water that could reasonably be expected to flow into the Norfolk system. Surrounding watersheds had far less water during the 1980-81 drought than is assumed in the study, Beach officials said. To arrive at the figures used in the report, Warnstaff said, thunderstorms would have had to have been hovering directly over Norfolk's reservoirs.
The study improperly assumes that Norfolk would able to take virtually all of the flow of the Blackwater and Nottoway rivers without new permits.
It wrongly assumes Norfolk can take significantly more groundwater without new permits.
It uses ``overly optimistic'' figures to arrive at ``theoretical'' amounts that Beach officials said could not be replicated in the real world.
It assumes that Norfolk could operate its reservoirs at what the Beach believes are ``dangerously low levels.''
Guy said Virginia Beach officials are not correctly interpreting his study because they have only reviewed it for two weeks. Norfolk does have the ability to draw down the Blackwater and Nottoway Rivers, he said, and can probably get the permit to treat well water without too much difficulty. by CNB