Self-monitoring is the rule

The DOT is responsible for designing, maintaining and inspecting its own projects for proper sediment and erosion control.

“On every project, I have someone designated to keep up with erosion control. They are supposed to do weekly checks and after every major storm event,” Wilson said, citing state law. However, the DOT did not document any inspections to erosion control devices during the two recent days of heavy rainfall, nor did they document any inspections immediately after the rain.

“I’ve not gone out and looked yet to see what needs to be done,” said Jim Moore, DOT inspector, Thursday morning (May 8) at 10 a.m., three days after the first half-inch of rain fell and 24 hours after the last drop of rain fell on the site.

“A rain this severe, our measures are not designed for this type of storm. We didn’t anticipate this kind of a storm,” Wilson said Thursday. “As soon as it is dry enough and we won’t create more damage, we’ll get back out there and fix it.”

Highway workers spent some of Thursday, all day Friday, and Monday morning repairing erosion control measures along the length of the project.

Understaffed for oversight

There are three levels of oversight for highway projects. The first two levels are by the DOT itself. The DOT site inspector who monitors construction activity and keeps an eye on the contractors is also in charge of keeping up with erosion measures. The state DOT office has a team of inspectors that will visit projects to make sure the on-site inspectors are doing their job.

“It’s kind of an in-house police,” explained David Harris, an environmental inspector with the DOT in Raleigh.

The third level of oversight comes from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, which is charged with monitoring highway projects for compliance.

It took a DENR inspector 15 months to make his first visit to the Waynesville highway project. Dennis Owenby, a DENR inspector for highway projects in Western North Carolina, made his first trip to the site in March in response to a complaint that mud was washing into the road. He told the DOT to improve certain sediment control measures and returned a week later to see the work had been done.

“We try to work with them for voluntary compliance,” said Owenby.

Statewide, DENR has not issued a fine or stop work order against the North Carolina Department of Transportation in more than three years. DENR has only issued about a dozen “notice of violations,” a warning one-step below a fine, to the Department of Transportation statewide in the past three years.

“There have been no stop-work orders and there have been no fines in three years at least,” said Mell Nevils, head of the DENR erosion control division in Raleigh. “The DOT has the ability to approve its own sediment and erosion control plans. They do a very good job of inspecting their own projects and shutting them down.”

Owenby is one of two inspectors charged with overseeing road projects in19 counties.

Nevils said DENR is severely understaffed. DENR has 7,000 to 7,500 erosion projects to monitor statewide and only 32 positions. But, given the state’s habit of saving money by not filling vacant positions, about five positions have been vacant for the past couple of years. As a result, Nevils has spent a lot of time in the field doing inspections himself.

Given the number of inspectors and number of sites, the average visit to a site is once every four months, Nevils said.

“That is not adequate oversight,” he said of the once-a-year inspection rate on the Old Asheville Highway project. “We do need more people.”

The North Carolina Sediment Control Commission made a recommendation six years ago that the state hire enough state inspectors to check every site twice a month.

“To do that we needed 130 people. We had 20 at the time,” Nevils said. Now at 32 positions, Nevils still has only a fourth of the staff he needs to do the job the state has assigned his department.

DOT holds water, though

Nevils said the DOT has improved tremendously in the past decade, however, and that “given the amount of land-disturbing activity they do, they do a pretty good job.”

Roger Watson, a representative of the state Homebuilders Association on the North Carolina Sediment Board, agreed that the DOT does an effective job at monitoring their own pollution control measures.

A local environmental group, Haywood Waterways Association, has scientific data that backs up Watson’s opinion. The group has been taking water samples upstream and downstream of the Old Asheville Highway project for more than six months.

“From a casual observation — and the empirical data has appeared to support it — the DOT sediment erosion control measures have worked. They’ve either maintained or reduced the amount of sediment entering Richland Creek from that area,” said Bill Schaefer, who collects the samples for Haywood Waterways and takes them to Asheville for analysis. “If you stand there and look at it you say ‘Gee whiz, look at this mess,’ but DOT’s measures are working.”

Of the $11-million project, the DOT will spend about $500,000 on sediment control, according to DOT estimates. The DOT has already spent $140,000 on erosion control measures, and the project has another18 to 24 months before completion. A moderately heavy rain can cost the DOT $5,500 to repair the erosion control measures.

The largest single erosion control expense is $135,000 to restore the banks of a 600-foot section of Raccoon Creek. The DOT was required to do environmental work as mitigation to make up for negative impacts the highway project will have on the environment elsewhere. Workers have temporarily moved the creek over while spending two months creating a new meandering streambed.

Random records

The DOT has failed to keep accurate weekly records of erosion control checks and maintenance for the Old Asheville Highway project.

Federal law requires all construction projects where one acre or more is disturbed to document inspections of its erosion measures weekly and within 24 hours of every rainfall of a half an inch. Private developers are required to keep these records in a separate log book.

Jim Moore, site inspector for the widening project, said he has some notes about sediment measures in his site log book, but does not make regular documentations.

“We just look at it and try to fix it,” said Moore.

“Granted, our documentation is not up to par,” said Rick Styles, project engineer for the road widening project, when asked to produce the sediment and erosion documentation since the start of the project.

Jamie Wilson, construction engineer over Division 14, said site inspectors are going to start keeping erosion control records in a separate folder.

Harris, DOT environmental inspector in Raleigh, said while keeping the log is important, the most important issue is making sure sediment is not running off the site.

“Yes, it is important that those guys are documenting to satisfy (federal law), but it’s more important that they’re out there checking those devices and fixing them to make sure they’re working,” Harris said.

According to Nevils with DENR in Raleigh, “Projects can change on a daily basis.” If DOT and DENR inspectors only make it to sites occasionally, documentation is the only way inspectors can know how the erosion measures have been holding up the days, weeks and months prior to their occasional visit.

Harris said weekly notes in a log book still would not prove that the site inspector was making the checks, however. Owenby, the DENR inspector, said he did not ask to see documentation of erosion control checks when he visited the Old Asheville Highway site.

The law requiring weekly documentation of erosion control measures was amended in March of this year to include all developments of one acre of more. Previously, the law has applied only to developments of five acres or more.

“It’s going to get tighter and tighter. Eventually it’s going to get to the point where individual landowners who wanted to apply fertilizer to their lawn would have to take a soil sample,” Harris said. “It’s coming in stages.”


April showers bring failed measures

Phillip Gibson, a member of the North Carolina Sediment Control Commission who is the the French Broad Riverkeeper, said the state has good erosion control laws but does not do a good job enforcing them.

“The law is very clear. You have to keep your dirt on your property,” Gibson said.

Dirt was not staying put anywhere during last week’s rains, and the Old Asheville Highway project was a visible example of that. Mud flowed across the highway like liquid plasma, in one case seeping under a person’s trailer and out the other side while the trailers’ occupants stood outside in the rain and watched.

To prevent the road from flooding, wire screens and gravel meant to stop sediment were cut open and pried back, allowing silt-laden water to flow into inlets unchecked. In another area, a 200-foot-long earthen berm meant to pool water had a channel cut through it, allowing mud to flow into the creek branch on the other side of the berm.

Possibly the most silt was lost downstream when a flooded Raccoon Creek, which had been moved into a temporary channel, blasted under silt fences and destroyed an earthen barricade to reclaim its old stream bed. It washed away a 10-foot-wide by 200-foot-long swath of fill dirt from the old stream bed in the process.

Just downstream from the project, silt clogging Lake Junaluska has proved a costly nuisance. For two winters, bulldozers have scooped sediment off the bottom of the drained lake, using $1 million in state funds and about $300,000 in donations and grants. It is a seemingly endless task, with the bulldozers scraping away one scoop of silt at a time and the entire lake bed stretching before them.

“When we have a heavy rain like we have in past in days, we see about 900 truck loads of sediment if we were to turn around and dig out what had come in,” said Joetta Rinehart with Lake Junaluska Assembly. “When this rain comes, you don’t know where it’s coming from, but the whole lake was red.”

Gibson said that while the state has tough laws, developers are not given the tools they need to comply.

“The sediment measures we have today are not designed to filter sediment, they are designed to slow water down so that large particles will fall out,” Gibson said. A gravel pile in front of a drain creates a retention area where water pools up, giving sediment a chance to settle to the bottom before the water flows through.

“The sediment law is a performance-based law. The law says you have to keep your dirt on your property. How you do it is up to you,” Gibson said.

Gibson is pushing the state to allocate money for sediment control experiments in the mountains to develop better techniques. He also wants a demonstration site where developers could see the proper installation of erosion control measures.

“The state has funded studies in the Piedmont region and the coastal region,” Gibson said. “We need to go through each measure and find out the applicability of it in the mountain region.”

Rick Styles, a project engineer with the DOT in the most western division, said he couldn’t agree more. But the DOT isn’t waiting for a separate state study.

David Harris with the DOT environmental unit hopes to conduct a sediment control study in the mountain region in the next couple of years to test erosion control devices the DOT can use when building in close proximity to a stream. Harris said many of the secondary roads that need widening have no road shoulder and no buffer between streams and the road where run-off could be pooled, allowing sediment to settle out.

“We need research dollars for Western North Carolina. The measures that people are using don’t work here,” Gibson said. “The other question it begs is whether we should be developing as close as we are to streams in the mountains.”

Harris agreed that building close to streams is tricky, and in the mountains, roads often follow waterways. When widening a road, proximity to a stream sometimes makes it very difficult to adhere to erosion control standards. But not widening the road is not an option, Harris said, because that would put the environment before people’s need for new roads.