Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 18, 1994 TAG: 9402180226
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JAN VERTEFEUILLE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
About 200 tons of tree debris, mostly stumps and roots, were stored on land owned by Explore for about five months last year, in violation of state law. The state ordered the site cleaned up last fall, and the wood was taken to the Roanoke Regional Landfill.
The violation became public this week when the landfill authority was asked to waive the $8,000 fee it charged Explore to accept the debris.
The Roanoke Valley Resource Authority refused to waive the fee but allowed Explore to pay it over three months.
Park engineer Richard Burrow said Thursday that the freak windstorm last June left the park looking as if it had been hit in places by a "small tornado," felling a lot of trees the week before the park's first open house of the season. In order to clean up the park quickly, workers removed the trunks and trucked the remaining stumps to a nearby piece of property Explore owns in Roanoke County, he said.
Transporting the stumps off park property to another piece of land caused the problem, Burrow said.
"If we had disposed of them in a ravine [on the same piece of property], the state wouldn't have had a problem," he said. "We never intended to leave the stumps there. But it was sort of an out-of-sight, out-of-mind thing."
Kate Glass, state environmental inspector, said the Department of Environmental Quality received complaints about the dump, but she did not say who complained. Glass inspected the dump in October and ordered Explore officials to remove the wood, which they completed in November.
Lee Garman of the Roanoke County Planning Department said stump dumps are common anywhere land is cleared. As in Explore's case, violators usually are cited, which means they are given time to clean up the dump before they are fined.
by CNB