Hold off on dredging reservoir

Thomas Olivier John Cruickshank Charlottesville
Published: July 26, 2008

Residents of Albemarle County and the City of Charlottesville have found themselves and their representatives contemplating calls for a reconsideration of the area’s long-term water supply plan. Citizens for a Sustainable Water Supply triggered this discussion by asserting that the estimated cost of dredging the Rivanna Reservoir provided at the time of current plan development was drastically inflated. This led, in their view, to unwarranted dismissal of dredging as an important tool for increasing water storage capacity.

In recent months, the Piedmont Group of the Sierra Club has supported a reconsideration of dredging as a key mechanism for providing water storage capacity. In our view:

The Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority should get new estimates on the cost of dredging to restore the capacity of the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir prior to implementing a new water supply plan. In light of revised dredging cost estimates, the Rivanna Reservoir should be retained as a water storage facility to the greatest extent practical.

If a new dam is constructed at Ragged Mountain Reser-voir, any increase in capacity of this reservoir should be done incrementally as needed. Con-struction of capacity beyond known needs could lead to population growth that is costly, unsustainable and not desired by our residents.

Any water supply plan should maintain healthy stream flow of the Moormans River and other waterways in our watershed.

The Ragged Mountain Reservoir was recognized in the 2004 report of the Albemarle County Biodiversity Work Group as a biologically important site in the county. Destruction of the biological resources at Ragged Mountain undermines our commitments to natural resource protection and is highly undesirable.

We commend local governments and boards for their recent decision to create a task force to consider the need and scope of a dredging study and report their findings later this year. We believe the task force should focus on dredging to restore water storage capacity. Finally, we ask local government decision-makers to hold decisions on implementation of the existing plan until more information on dredging is available.

Thomas Olivier is conservation chair and Cruickshank is chairman of the executive committee of the Piedmont Group of the Sierra Club.