Berkeley Lake homeowner can’t go with the mud flow

His house and private pond — a three-acre tract nestled along the tree-lined streets and winding roads surrounding the city’s 88-acre lake — sits 3 feet from 22,000 dump truck loads of fill dirt piled off Peachtree Industrial Boulevard. That’s enough dirt to fill an eight-story building.

During heavy rains the mountain of dirt, with its 45-degree slope and dearth of vegetation, transforms into a glacier of mud. The mass of watery muck rushes down the hill, spills over the silt fences and empties into the creek leading into Holben’s pond, filling it with sediment and silt.

“It’s like a mudslide,” 61-year-old Holben said. “It moves toward me when it rains.”

The silt, grain-sized soil and rock, robs the pond of oxygen, killing fish and turning the water a murky orange. Worse, his pond feeds into Berkeley Lake across the street. The lake in turn feeds into the Chattahoochee River.

Since 2006, Holben has locked horns with Gwinnett County’s planning department. First, he implored officials not to permit the pile, records show. When that failed, he said he pleaded with the county to force the construction company responsible for the dirt, Auburn-based G.P.’s Enterprises, to stabilize it.

“I couldn’t get the county to do anything,” Holben said.

So Holben, along with Berkeley Lake community and city leaders, stepped up the fight. In March, Holben lodged an official complaint with the Environmental Protection Division. The EPD took over the case in August.

“We just feel we’ve waited and waited and tried and tried, but nothing is getting better, and we had to look to someone else for help,” said Berkeley Lake Mayor Lois Salter, who wrote a letter recently to the EPD on behalf of the City Council.

County officials disagree, saying they responded and intervened at the “appropriate time.”

For Holben, the battle has been costly. In addition to what the 34-year homeowner fears is a huge drop in his property’s value, he has shelled out $38,000 over the past three years in engineering studies, legal fees and pond-dredging costs.

How the dirt got there

Three years ago, G.P.’s Enterprises bought five acres behind Holben’s property. Three of those acres sat in a valley off Peachtree Industrial Boulevard.

The company trucked in the dirt in 2007 to level off the property. All five acres had been rezoned from light industrial to commercial at the request of G.P.’s Enterprises, zoning records show.

G.P.’s Enterprises initially agreed to answer questions via e-mail for this story. A day after the questions were sent, a representative said it was not prepared to comment. The company did not respond after a reporter visited its headquarters on Thursday.

A year before the dirt came in, Holben and community leaders fired off letters to and met with Gwinnett officials warning them that such a massive mound — 220,000 cubic yards of fill, according to county estimates — could crush an old drainage pipe that runs from the west side of Peachtree Industrial to Holben’s pond.

The 54-inch corrugated pipe was 287 feet long, about the length of a football field.

“We understand your concern with ... fill going in behind your house,” Gwinnett County planner Patricia Huguenard wrote to Holben in an Aug. 14, 2006, letter. “As you and I have discussed the County must follow our regulations during the development of the site and we cannot go above and beyond those requirements.”

The project proceeded. Dirt by the truckloads came in between February and October 2007, according to documents obtained from the Berkeley Lake Homeowners Association.

The dirt didn’t pose a problem initially. Metro Atlanta was still in a drought, so runoff wasn’t an issue. The pipe showed signs of collapse when the rains came in October 2007, and the water flowing through the pipe, which in the past had been clear, turned orange, Holben said.

Steve Leo, director of Gwinnett’s stormwater management division, said the pipe was failing because it was old. Whether 50 to 60 feet of dirt piled on top of it contributed to that failure is “conjecture,” he said.

“I didn’t have any problems until the fill came in,” Holben said. “I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but I’d bet you any amount of money that’s what caused the pipe to fail.”

The pipe had to be removed. Otherwise, it had the potential to release sediment into Berkeley Lake and the Chattahoochee River and flood Peachtree Industrial Boulevard, according to county documents.

Dirt piler sets pipe

To dig up and replace the pipe, the county contracted with G.P.’s Enterprises on Dec. 14, 2007. The cost to the county? $651,844.

Since 2005, the county has awarded more than $10 million in road improvement projects to G.P.’s Enterprises, according to county documents.

For Holben, with the shift in the dirt came a bigger heap of trouble, one he says has persisted for two years.

“Now that the pipe has been dug up and it rains, all hell breaks loose because you’ve really disturbed the land,” he said.

In summer 2008, months after the new pipe went in, Holben’s pond was dredged and 55 dumptruck loads of silt were removed. It was the fourth dredging of the pond since 1981. Holben picked up $25,000 of the $50,000-plus tab. G.P.’s Enterprises paid the rest.

David Huetter is a biologist with United Consulting, an environmental and engineering company that’s done work for both G.P.’s Enterprises and Holben. He did a sedimentation study on the pond in February 2008, finding 4 to 6 inches of recently deposited sediment.

Between the time of the pond’s dredging and August of this year Huetter did at least eight visual inspections. On July 24, he collected up to 1 inch of sediment. In letters to Holben from May 2008 until August of this year, Huetter noted the dirt pile needs more silt fencing, vegetation and repair to the slope’s steepness to stabilize the site and keep silt out of the pond.

“If the GP Site is not adequately stabilized, this deposition will continue and could increase substantially,” Huetter wrote after a July 20 site visit.

This isn’t the first time Holben has had problems with land development behind his property.

In 1987, winter and spring rains filled his pond with mud after a developer removed vegetation from a 12-acre tract. At the time, a study by an environmental engineering firm concluded that the estimated runoff had increased about 400 percent after the grading was done.

The county’s side

Bryan Lackey, deputy director of Gwinnett’s planning department, acknowledges county meetings with Holben and others over the past three years, but says the county intervened at the “appropriate time.”

“For the past three months, we’ve been working with all involved to make this better,” he said, noting that the county issued two citations against G.P.’s Enterprises in mid-July.

“We’ve not turned a blind eye to the community and to the site,” he said.

County Commissioner Bert Nasuti said he was contacted about the issue more than two years ago and responded immediately.

“I didn’t wait a week. I didn’t wait an hour. I told my people to investigate and solve the problem and not do anything to harm the lake,” he said, citing numerous e-mail exchanges between county and community leaders. “I think the county has been responsive to jumping into the issue. Has it been solved to everyone concerned? Obviously not.”

But Mayor Salter said what the county has offered amounts to “words and polite attention.”

“You have to wonder why the county would allow thousands of tons of loose fill dirt to be put on a steep hillside with some wobbly silt fences ... and expect that dirt would not move down that slope.”

EPD steps in

Bert Langley, district manager for the EPD, said the agency is proceeding with its own enforcement since “it appears the county is not going to be able to come to a good resolution.”

Because water from Holben’s pond flows into Lake Berkeley and, eventually, the Chattahoochee River, his pond is considered state water, Langley said. That means the amount of stormwater runoff from the construction site is required to comply with state law.

“Our initial investigation suggests [G.P.’s Enterprises is] not in compliance,” Langley said.

But in a meeting last week with company representatives, Langley said G.P.’s Enterprises has made “some progress” over the past few weeks, rerouting stormwater and attempting to stabilize the pile of fill.

Holben said he will wait until the issue is resolved before deciding on any legal action. For him, the solution appears clearer than the water in his pond.

“If you don’t move that dirt from where it came from, God’s going to move it down to my pond and into Berkeley Lake.”