THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 20, 1996 TAG: 9610200075
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KAREN WEINTRAUB, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: ALONG THE LAKE GASTON PIPELINE LENGTH: 160 lines
This is an unlikely place to begin one of the largest public works projects in Virginia Beach's history, here, along the banks of a quiet lake, 125 miles from City Hall.
Standing at the edge of Pea Hill Creek, an offshoot of Lake Gaston, the placid water brings to mind days of sailing, fish dinners on a pier and evenings chasing fireflies.
But a shrill, insistent beep shatters the reverie. A huge front-end loader, jammed into reverse, empties its payload of stones into a huge pit.
Two concrete tubes big enough for a man to walk through lie at the bottom, feeding into a massive concrete building.
By March, if the construction schedule holds, these tubes will mark the starting point of a 76-mile pipeline that could one day allow Virginia Beach residents to water their lawns without wells and wash their cars with a garden hose.
But construction won't be easy.
Before it's over, contractors will spend nearly $120 million and lay 20,000 pieces of pipe, along a route which passes through swamps, under roads and over streams.
Each section weighs at least as much as two Ford F-250 pickups. And after the pipe has been laid, workers must leave the route looking like they had never been there at all.
They must do all this knowing that every rainy day will set them back, pushing them closer to their deadline and closer to the day their construction permits expire.
More than a decade of legal battles over the pipeline has drawn so many headlines that few people have a sense of what the pipeline will look like or how it will work.
But now, the pipeline is becoming a little more concrete - literally. Workers have already laid more than 39 miles of concrete and iron tubes since resuming construction in March. They are working at seven different sites along the route, laying pipe, finishing the pump station and building water control facilities.
Most of the work will be completed before anyone knows whether a drop of water will ever be allowed to flow through the pipeline.
Opponents in North Carolina and upstream along the Roanoke River are still fighting hard against the project.
While most of the sparring has been confined to the courts, two minor acts of vandalism have disrupted the construction. Someone cut the silt curtain workers extended into the lake to contain sediment, and a boatload of teens opened fire on construction workers with a BB gun.
The city's construction manager drives an unmarked 4x4 in his weekly trips along the pipeline route, but says the locals have never been anything but polite.
The workers at this site are driving hard to get pipe in the water before the start of the tourist season in March. If they're not done by then, they'll have to wait until fall, possibly delaying the pipeline's scheduled spring 1998 opening.
Getting pipe into the water is no easy feat. First, workers built a coffer dam at the edge of the lake, so they could dig a dry pit for the pipe.
Now, they're almost finished installing the pipe and next week should be ready to backfill the pit. Then, they'll remove the dam and - with drilling rigs and divers - dig up the lake bottom to lay the 30 feet of pipe that will begin this extremely long straw.
Wayne L. Phelps drives this route a couple times a week, 250 miles round-trip from his home in the Greenbrier section of Chesapeake to the pump station on Pea Hill Creek.
At each construction site he checks with the engineer's resident representative and helps resolve problems. Phelps' second stop of the day is with a pipe-laying crew just now crossing Route 601.
The crew severed the rural road early that morning, turning the smooth concrete into a gaping crevice. Although the damage looks dramatic, the road will be usable again by nightfall, the resident representative promises.
On a good day, a crew of seven to 10 pipe fitters can lay 800 feet of pipe.
Crossing a road slows things down a bit, because the men have to tear up the concrete surface, dig a 10-to-12-foot hole, install the pipe section, cover it with a heavy fabric mat and refill the pit with stones. If they filled it with the same dirt they dug up, the new pavement might settle and crack.
This crew and others like them will fit approximately 20,000 pieces of pipe end-to-end over the next year.
Up to 60 million gallons of water - enough to fill 450 Olympic-sized swimming pools - will travel through those pipes every day. The water's journey will take about 24 hours from the intake on Pea Hill Creek, across five counties and the town of Jarratt, to the beginning of Norfolk's water system just outside Windsor in Isle of Wight County.
Norfolk will process all the water from the Lake Gaston pipeline, which will be divided among Virginia Beach, Chesapeake and perhaps Franklin and Isle of Wight County.
Because the pipeline will carry water and not something environmentally dangerous, such as oil, leaks are less worrisome. But if the lengths of pipe are not fitted together well, it will be hard to maintain the water pressure across 76 miles, and the pumps will have to work harder, at greater public expense.
Bumps in the line can cause air pockets, messing up pressure; angled connections can stress joints, leading to leaks.
Avoiding such problems is second nature to most of the workers.
The resident representative at the Route 601 site, Gorman Pinkston, has worked on pipelines for 48 years; his counterpart a few miles away, Welford Lucy, is a newcomer to construction work at about 30 years.
Lucy's crew has been together for a dozen years and has the synergy of a ballet troupe.
First, a worker uses a gigantic backhoe to dig a deep trench. With the shovel end, he moves a rectangular guide into place, using it to set the size of the hole he digs. Then he scoops up a length of pipe from the mile-long supply arrayed alongside the route and drops it into the guide.
Just before he nudges the section gently up against the previous piece, a crew member walks out of the pipe already installed and smears grease along the rim of the new piece and the inside of the old. That lets the two pieces slide easily together.
Two more crew members atop the pipe pull taut a sheet of black plastic wrapped around the middle. The plastic is designed to keep the acids in dirt from eating through the pipe.
As they finish, the backhoe worker begins digging a hole for the next piece of pipe and another backhoe driver piles fill-dirt on the completed sections.
Lucy's crew works with ductile iron pipe, a thick black tube that measures 20 feet in length, 5 feet in diameter and weighs 8,500 pounds.
Other crews along the line prefer concrete pipe, which is thicker and three times heavier than the iron.
The men working near the end of the pipeline in the Isle of Wight County town of Walters are using concrete pipe.
It's harder to get the concrete sections to the site, because only two pieces fit on the back of a flatbed, half as many as ductile iron. But concrete works better in the soggy soils outside Walters.
This crew, from Michael Baker Jr. Inc., a Virginia Beach engineering firm, is lucky to be at work, resident engineer Kenneth D. Jobe says. If they hadn't pushed ahead for six days the previous week, rains would have stranded them on the wrong side of a swamp.
All their advances and effort could be imperiled, however, by one unfavorable decision from a three-judge panel in Washington.
The panel is considering pipeline opponents' arguments that the project is unnecessary, and even if it is necessary Virginia Beach must get North Carolina's permission before pumping a drop. That isn't likely to come easily from the project's greatest foe.
Also on the horizon is North Carolina's threat to shut down the pipeline in 2000, even if water is allowed to flow in 1998. Virginia Power, which runs a hydroelectric plant on Lake Gaston, must get a new 50-year operations permit at the turn of the century, and North Carolina has threatened to hijack the permit if the pipeline is pumping.
Virginia Beach officials knew they were taking a gamble when they decided late last year to resume construction after a five-year court-mandated break. But no one in Virginia's most populous city will even admit the possibility - at least not out loud - that the pipeline will remain dry.
Phelps, the project manager, can only make sure the construction work gets done and the pipeline works like it's supposed to.
Whether that pipeline will ever carry water has not yet been decided. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
BILL TIERNAN/The Virginian-Pilot
Graphic
The Virginian-Pilot
UPDATE ON THE LAKE GASTON PIPELINE
SOURCE: Virginia Beach Department of Public Utilities
[For complete graphic, please see microfilm]
KEYWORDS: WATER SUPPLY PLAN NORTH CAROLINA
VIRGINIA LAKE GASTON by CNB