VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (WAVY) – For over a year, Broad Bay Island residents have worked to stop barges full of mud from coming up a creek and crossing in front of their waterfront property.
Tuesday night, they won that battle.
Virginia Beach City Council agreed with the residents and backed down.
“Stop the sludge means we don’t want other people’s sludge on our waterways,” said Broad Bay Island resident Lynn Hume last March.
The city wanted to use hopper barges to dump sludge, dredged from inlets across Virginia Beach, onto a piece of privately owned land. That property, which is zoned as residential, is a 100 yards across the creek from Hume’s home.
Fifteen months after the fight began, it ended with city council pulling the site on Long Creek from consideration.
“With what we’ve gone through, nothing surprises me. When it comes to the City, we have been deceived so many times and misled by city staff so many times, that is why it got out of hand and that’s what upset us,’ said resident Ed Cunningham.
It took Tom Fraim and the Beaches and Waterways Advisory Commission to finally convince Virginia Beach that the Long Creek site isn’t the right location. The Zoning Administration also told the city that, but the city pushed ahead anyway.
“It gets on our plate because it is controversial, and yes, the people of Long Creek were very well organized” Fraim said.
“Stand up and be heard, and the system can work if you get people involved,” exclaimed Broad Bay Island Resident Mike Megge. “We worked that system. It took a lot of hard work, a lot of organization and a lot of dedicated people.”
Getting a little media attention doesn’t hurt.
“A lot of time, you don’t know what happens with a story, but it give people closure to a story when you exposed it. You followed it through to the end, and I think that helped the whole process,” Megge added.
The alternative site for neighborhood dredging is up the creek at a city-owned property, between the Lynnhaven Marine Boatel and the Marina Shores Shoppes.
The land is owned by Gale Levine Higgs who did not want to do an interview, but told 10 On Your Side on the phone, “So much has to happen for this to happen…I gave the strip of land to the City for drainage purposes only…not for a sludge transfer station.”
Higgs made it clear legal action could follow if the city plans on using the site for anything other than drainage.
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#WeLoveShoreDrive 
History repeats itself!
Jeff Thomas
Virginia Beach
History repeats itself
Jeff Thomas
Virginia Beach
History repeats itself.
Frank Benjamin
Virginia Beach
City of Virginia Beach is, as we speak, removing nitrogen rich sediment from the navigation channel in the Western Branch of the Lynnhaven River by mechanical dredge/truck operation. Removal of this valuable sediment will degrade the remaining salt marshes of the Western Branch.
A more economical pipeline dredge project would have cut dredging costs by 80%. And the dredge spoils could have be used to reestablish those fringe marshes that were destroyed by (home owners tax deductible) fringe marsh dredging and bulkheading done in the fifties and sixties. As teenagers we watched our valauable fringe marshes destroyed by draglines and bulkheading operations. Skip Rawls DMD, Alison Drescher DDS, Ashby Taylor MD, Jimmy Gregory, ,Poe Hern, City Treasurer John Atkinson, Terry and Kayo Barco, Jay Wood, the three Meredith boys and Butch and Steve Mundy used to hunt, fi9sh and/or trap the entire Lynnhaven Basin Watershed back then. We had widgon, black ducks, redheads, canvasback and thousands of lesser scaup. And beautiful black muskrats, otter and mink.. Now its all a City of Virginia GBach Bird Scanctuary, minus the birds!
And the guy that fought us tooth and nail on the pipeline dredge/fringe marsh restoration was our own Colonel David Hansen, deputy city manager. The same USACE Engineer who blew $2.1 billion dollars on the notorious Red River Waterway in Louisanna. To promote grain barge traffic. . Dredgeing the marshes of the beautiful Red River. Now unused. Too slow!
Colonel Hansen et al blew $2.1 billion dollars on the Red River Waterway so that the grain barges would have faster transit. Beause of the seven locks that Hansen built, the grain barges won’t use it! Too slow. Now Hansen is in the process of removing valuable sediment from the entire Lynnhaven Basin Watershed! And just like the Red River, Hansen is in the process of destroying the remaining marshes of our once wonderful watershed!
George Meredith MD
Virginia Beach