THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, September 24, 1994 TAG: 9409230078
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Profile
SOURCE: BY ESTHER DISKIN, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 219 lines
WHEN THOMAS LEAHY was hired by Virginia Beach to lead its search for a new supply of water, he was a bachelor with a blue convertible, a Hobiecat and an apartment near the beach.
He believed a pipeline to Lake Gaston would soon be pumping millions of gallons to the thirsty city.
That was more than a decade ago.
Now Leahy is 41. He's married with two kids and a two-story house in a suburban neighborhood. Say so long to the sporty car and sailboat. Say hello to weekends and some weeknights spent coaching his kids' sports teams.
Somewhere in the woods near Lake Gaston, there's 7,000 square feet of concrete for an unfinished building to pump water out of the lake. Six baby blue sections of pipe stretch over rivers along the pipeline's proposed path. After $32 million and 76 miles of legal warfare, not one drop of Lake Gaston water has flowed to the city's taps.
Coming up dry after all these years may have broken another man. Someone who wasn't, like Leahy, an engineer with a vision. Day after day for 14 years, Leahy lined up the cold facts defending that dream.
``I'm tired of it,'' he says. ``But I'm stubborn. I want it to happen or be here if it doesn't go.''
He is just one voice on a team of elected officials, high-ranking city staff and lawyers who keep finding ways to pull the pipeline out of the bureaucratic mud.
But Leahy is different. Others get distracted by many tasks. As project manager for the pipeline, Leahy has one purpose: Get it built. If it doesn't get built, he'll take the blame.
``None of the council members, the city manager or anyone has made me feel like - `You're the field goal kicker with a 50-yard kick and we're behind two points,'' he says. ``It's self-imposed. I kind of feel that if the project doesn't happen, it'll be because I made a mistake somewhere along the line.''
Play by the rules
and get burned
His passion for the project inspires awe among those who work alongside him.
``Every single document out of 50,000 pages he's read,'' says Bill Macali, a senior attorney in the city attorney's office who talks to Leahy daily about the project. ``He works like a dog, constantly. He knows more about the project than any person on Earth.''
Leahy's mind has soaked up the details. He remembers paragraphs, even loose quotes, from memos long forgotten by the people who wrote them. The facts - from thousand of pages and days of phone conversations - rush out in a torrent.
In some ways, it's easy to remember. The way he sees it, the important facts about the pipeline have not shifted in all these years. But he's learned how the human equation can overwhelm those facts.
And that has changed him to the core.
When he started as project manager, he believed that facts alone would persuade federal and state agencies to put their muscle behind the project.
That didn't happen. The reason, from Leahy's point of view, is that the validity of the pipeline has been twisted, distorted and often completely lost in the political war between Virginia and North Carolina.
``It's amazing how little facts have got to do with it,'' he says. ``With the federal government, I think facts have very little to do with anything that gets done. And people feel comfortable with that, a system where facts have very little power.''
He's spent years of his life assembling reports to wave in the faces of judges and bureaucrats. He often doubts that anyone reads them.
He's grown cynical about government, particularly the federal system, from watching its inner workings too closely, for too long. He talks about ``conspiracy'' among federal officials. He mentions the Whitewater hearings, with officials' repeated denials and ``I don't recalls'' as a perfect example of how broken the system is.
One conversation from the pipeline war sums up for him how people who play by the rules get burned by the system.
Six years ago, the National Marine Fisheries Service switched oversight for the pipeline project from its Northeastern regional office to the Southeastern office. With that switch came an abrupt reversal of the service's years of support for the project.
There was no explanation. Leahy's phone calls weren't returned. Finally, he reached a scientist who had been handling the project before offices were switched. Leahy asked him what had gone wrong: ``His last words to me were, `You guys have done everything right. I wish everyone had done it exactly like you. But I can't help you.' ''
A grin and a growl
in the hallway
With each setback, Leahy wonders about the influence of a man who wants to kill Leahy's hope of building the project. North Carolina Special Deputy Attorney General Alan S. Hirsch, who took over the Lake Gaston case in 1985, is someone Leahy considers his personal antagonist.
``I consider him my adversary,'' Leahy says. ``I don't think of him as my counterpart. He's a lawyer and a politician, I'm an engineer. I'd like to think there's a difference.''
Leahy simply cannot understand how Hirsch could study the facts and come to a conclusion opposite his own. He can't understand how anyone could.
The two have met a handful of times. Leahy may shake hands, but he won't make small talk. ``I try to be civil by not saying anything,'' Leahy says.
One meeting went beyond a handshake.
Leahy, in Washington to head off a North Carolina bill, ran into Hirsch in an ornate hallway outside a Senate committee room. ``He came up with a grin that said, `Some of us are interested in the environment,' '' Leahy recalls. ``I tore into him a little bit.''
Even on that memory of an event six years ago, the two men disagree about the facts. Leahy recalls a ``Crossfire-style'' debate. Hirsch says he can't remember any fuss. ``I seriously doubt we got into it,'' Hirsch says. ``He has his view and I have my view. I do my best not to argue.''
As for the pipeline, Hirsch says the facts about it aren't closed to one interpretation, as Leahy insists. ``He seems to question the sincerity of our point of view,'' Hirsch says. ``The governor, attorney general and tons of scientists disagree with his position.''
Since then, Leahy's learned restraint. ``When I started out, I could really get in someone's face,'' he says. ``I probably still have a bit of a pit bull reputation.''
From Tinker Toys
to desalting plants
That Leahy ended up at the helm of a multimillion-dollar water project doesn't surprise anyone who knows him. Ever since he was a kid, Leahy was figuring out how to build things. The projects kept getting bigger.
At 2 1/2, his mother says, he wrapped a piece of string around some Tinker Toys to build a wobbly carousel. As a teenager, his head was always stuck under the hood of the family's station wagons.
In college, he took down and rebuilt parts of his motorcycle in his dorm room and kept the parts in a box under his bed. ``Tommy was a builder upper,'' his mother says. ``He loved to put things together.''
His other love was water. His earliest memories are of family trips to the white sandy beaches of Hawaii, where he learned to swim. When his family's military travel brought them to Virginia Beach during his high school years, he bought a surfboard.
After graduating from the University of Virginia with a degree in chemical engineering, he told his father he'd get a job by the beach. His father thought he was kidding.
He landed on the North Carolina coast, building experimental desalting plants for Dow Chemical. He moved to California, where he designed a model desalination system at the aquarium in San Francisco.
His experience caught the attention of Virginia Beach City Manager Aubrey Watts. In 1980, Leahy was hired to help the city compete for a federal grant to build a small desalination plant and to supervise studies to determine the best options for a water supply for a city stuck in the middle of a drought.
The city won the desalination grant, but the funds were cut from the budget less than a year later. Leahy doesn't waste time mourning about it: He says the technology is still too expensive to be practical for the city's water needs.
In November 1982, the City Council voted to pursue the Lake Gaston pipeline. Leahy vowed to get it built.
``There is no place in either state that the water could come from and have less impact,'' Leahy says. ``The Roanoke River is the largest and most regulated river system in either state.''
He had a chance to walk away from it all. Nine years ago, a company that repaired chemical processing plants offered him a ``pure engineering'' job. Goodbye to bureaucratic logjams. Goodbye to political battles.
He turned it down. Company officials called him back a few years later, and he said no again.
Quitting isn't a question he understands. ``I have to finish it,'' he says. ``I am an engineer. I want to build this project.''
Lost on country roads
and legal highways
It's hard to find a piece of Leahy's life that isn't taken up by the Lake Gaston pipeline.
As he studied for a master's degree from Old Dominion University in public administration, every paper he wrote had something to do with the pipeline. When he jogs or works out, he often goes over the wording of letters and reports.
Only when he comes home - to a Red Mill neighborhood he calls the ``Leave It to Beaver'' street - can he leave the work behind. His wife, Pam, says she's more likely to talk about kids in her kindergarten classes than he is to discuss his work. ``It's old news,'' she says.
He immerses himself in the family whirl. Both of his kids, 7-year-old Thomas and 10-year-old Jennifer, play soccer. He coaches two nights a week and attends matches on the weekends. When soccer season ends, swim season starts. ``Our lives revolve around the kids,'' he says. ``They drive everything.''
He wants his children to understand what he's trying to build, the project that has occupied his days ever since they were born. On ``Take Our Daughters to Work'' day this spring, he took Jennifer out to see the pipeline.
So far, there's not much to see, because a judge's order prevents the city from making more than a small beginning. There's the concrete outline of the pump station. And the city has spent $4.5 million to build six river crossings for the pipeline, along the old trestle support for an abandoned railroad.
Since 1990, Leahy has been out only a handful of times. On a recent trip, he got lost on the country roads. ``Wayne knows these roads inside and out,'' he muttered, staring at the map.
Wayne Phelps is the engineer whom Leahy hired to supervise the construction. While Leahy has been tied to his desk with legal battles, Phelps got the fun of watching construction. He even pressed the button to blast through rocks at the pump station site - which makes Leahy a little bit envious.
When Leahy visits the pipeline, cynicism and frustration drop away. He puts on a hard hat and chats with contractors finishing up a paint job. He walks along narrow grating across the rivers, describing how the water floods over the banks during rainy seasons. He raps his knuckles against the solid pipe.
His spirits rise.
Someday, he says, the people in power will understand the facts. Someday, he believes, he'll finish the job. He says: ``Everyone likes to look back on their life and say, `I did something important.' People need drinking water. This is very important.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color staff photo by Lawrence Jackson
Thomas Leahy, the Virginia Beach engineer, standing in Lake gaston,
above, has vowed to build the pipeline.
Leahy on Hirsch: " I consider him my adversary. I don't think of him
as my counterpart."
B/W Photo by Lawrence Jackson
The pumphouse room of the Lake Gaston pipeline is just off the lake.
Construction is at a standstill until the future of the pipeline is
decided.
KEYWORDS: LAKE GASTON PIPELINE ATTORNEY LAWYER PROFILE by CNB