Editorial

Editorial

For groundwater’s sake

Like the rest of Virginia, the government and the people of Rappahannock County are becoming groundwater conscious — as they should.

It is this fragile resource that the Amissville citizens focused on in their fight to block the county’s proposal to build a new landfill on the 100-acre Stover tract east of the village.

Their concerns brought increased awareness and greater environmental protection measures for the proposed landfill: a double-thick synthetic trench liner, an early warning leak detection system underlying the liner, and extra monitoring wells. Joyce Engineering is doing computer modeling of a “worst case” scenario — predicting where contaminated groundwater would go should it escape the landfill site — and studying the possiblity of incorporating a lined leachate collection pond in the first phase of landfill construction. The value of the site’s “shallow aquifer” is also being assessed.

It’s all in the name of groundwater protection.

So why in the name of groundwater protection is the situation at Rappahannock Lakes being ignored?

In 1979, the Health Department ordered improvements to that subdivision’s community water system after it was discovered that water coming from the taps in the 24 homes served by the system had “little things floating around in it” —fecal choliform, or in terms more easily understood — human waste.

The well serving the development had only a five-gallon per minute flow and to augment that inadequate source, a spring downhill from a septic system had been connected; believing the spring to be the source of the fecal choliform, the Health Department directed that the spring be disconnected and the primary well dug 60 feet deeper.

Fecal choliform in the spring could have been an indicator of serious groundwater contamination. No one * bothered to find out.

Certainly the water quality data for this community r water system doesn’t tell us anything. There is no new information in the .Health Department’s Rappahannock Lakes file after February 1979 — immediately following the disconnection of the suspected spring.

Hugh Eggborne, who took over as the Health Department’s supervising engineer for community water systems in early 1980, says apparently the department was advised that Rappahannock Lakes no longer met the definition of a community water system. What the changes were, the records don’t indicate. Mr. Eggborne promises to investigate, however.

And if he determines that Rappahannock Lakes no longer meets the definition of a public water supply, he should relay the information to local sanitarian Jack Lockhart, who continues to balk at assessing private wells on the grounds that the subdivision has that public system.

Charles Shepherd, the district’s current sanitary supervisor, says that for lots as small as those in Rappahannock Lakes to support septic fields, the soils must generally be rated good. But the soil maps for Rappahannock County show the predominance of soil types in that subdivision as poor to fair.

And at the public hearings on the setback variance sought by a prospective buyer of a lot in the subdivision, it has been reported that the lake in the development is ' polluted.