Home Care In Paeonian Springs, VA

After decades of concern and years of study, county leaders are eyeing a $60 million project to address public health concerns in two western Loudoun villages.

Paeonian Springs has no public water distribution system or sanitary sewer system. Homes rely on private wells for potable water and individual onsite sewage disposal systems for wastewater treatment, including, for some residents, outhouses.

Waterford residents are served by a public sewer system but rely on private wells for water, which has led to quantity concerns when the wells don’t yield as much water as is needed. That creates safety concerns when dealing with fires within the area.

As a result, village residents rely on water storage tanks, dry well timers, conservation measures and hand dug wells that are sometimes contaminated with heavy metals and bacteria.

County leaders are hoping to address both problems simultaneously by creating a joint water and wastewater system serving both villages. The Board of Supervisors last week approved a proposal by county staff to continue working on the design of such a system, authorizing $4 million for land acquisitions, land use approvals and design plans.

A feasibility study of the project was conducted this year and showed that the proposal is both possible and financially beneficial, Director of General Services Ernie Brown told the board during a Nov. 19 briefing.

“A key factor of this is the development of separate systems, meaning if we forward with a Paeonian Springs separate system and a Waterford separate system it would require the construction of three new treatment plants in rural Loudoun, as opposed to just one plant, which would be a new water plant,” he said.

The wastewater system would serve all connections in an approved Paeonian Springs service boundary with a pumping station located in the village and would require a sewage force main to convey flows from Paeonian Springs to the Waterford sanitary collection system. The plan also would require an expansion at the Waterford wastewater treatment plant, which is operated by Loudoun Water.

The water system would require new groundwater wells, a treatment facility and storage and pumping facility to be located somewhere along Clarkes Gap Road between the villages; a watermain conveying treated water from the facility to the villages and a water distribution system within each village to serve all the individual connections.

Challenges identified during the feasibility study include roadway impacts along Clarkes Gap Road for the estimated construction time of eight months, required approval from the Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority for a crossing along the W&OD Trail, impacts to archaeological resources, and easement and property acquisitions.

Building the interconnected system, rather than two village systems, is estimated to save $6 million to $8 million dollars in capital costs and 20-30% of overall life cycle costs.

“The majority of those [life cycle] savings will come from operation and maintenance,” Environmental Program Specialist Scott Fincham said.

The entire project is estimated to cost $60.2 million, if approved.

The proposal is met by support, opposition, and uncertainty by residents from both villages.

Waterford resident Carl Scheider said everyone has a right to clean water and cited concerns with the impact failing septic systems have on the water quality.

“Runoff from our traffic-clogged roads and local fields lead to frequent contamination of our wells, including E. Coli contamination” he said.

As a volunteer with the Potomac River Keeper Network, Scheider said he has trained hundreds of community scientists to track water quality along the Potomac watershed to make sure that the rivers are safe.

“In Waterford, we have a whole lot of wells put together in a very small footprint,” he said. “Villagers who have resources install complex filtration systems, but these systems require constant maintenance and if the power goes out, these systems go out. This new system will bring security and ensure everyone in Waterford and Paeonian Springs has the option to choose to connect to clean, safe drinking water.”

Paeonian Springs resident Lana Rohrmeier said the system could help solve an issue that the community has been working to address for 50 years and that it’s long overdue for the small village.

“People have been hospitalized and houses on the National Historic Register torn down that do not have indoor facilities,” she said. “… Some properties have failed septic fields and are now on pump and hauls, which includes our historic post office.”

However, Rohrmeier said she was also concerned that a combined system would bring unwanted development in the village.

“I do not want to cause a majority of the approximately 80 vacant parcels in the village to be developed in a full buildout scenario. Most residents want to preserve the quiet, historic community as it is which includes giving existing residents and structures the services that they need,” she said.

The community is tightly knit, Rohrmeier said, and bringing an influx of development would erode that.

“We all know and love our neighbors. We will have little village get-togethers and things like that occasionally. And so having someone take advantage of this erodes at the collective community feeling. So that’s what I’m cautious of,” she said.

During the Nov. 19 meeting, Rohrmeier asked supervisors to establish a community commission allowing residents within the service area to be involved in the design process and help mitigate some of the residents’ concerns.

Because, despite their fears, a wastewater system is needed, she said.

“Some of them have running water, but they don’t have indoor toilets,” she said, adding that some of the drainfield septic systems are decades old and didn’t work well even when they were first installed.

“They’re called bed systems where it’s just a fan of pipes over a bed of gravel and it’s not a real drainage field really and that was approved in the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s even. It’s 30 years old now – this is not sustainable, and these systems are not going to work for much longer,” Rohrmeier said.

But addressing them on their own is expensive for residents.

“What it takes on a smaller acreage to replace something like that is an alternative septic system, so it requires less physical area, but usually they are like $40,000 to $50,000 to start,” she said.

Lack of running water also contributed to the recent demolition of an old home in the village, which fell within Paeonian Spring’s National Historic Landmark designation.

Rohrmeier said without action by county, the situation will continue to deteriorate.

“It’s kind of like this recipe for disaster, where these systems have been aging and this has been put off for decades,” she said. “Here we are over 50 years later.”

There are some residents who oppose the plan saying there are other methods to address the concerns.

“Waterfordians have yet to be informed that there is a $15,000 hookup fee, a $5,000 well abatement fee, plus monthly water usage fee for the proposed county combined solution. They have not been made aware that they will get a mere 1.2 gallons per minute. Nor have they been told that there could be mandatory water restrictions as surrounding towns have suffered,” Waterford resident Laura Shaw said.

Instead, the board should look further into who has water issues, what the issues are, what kind of attempts have been made to resolve them, if additional wells have been drilled, whether low-yield management solutions have been considered and how many residents want the system built at all, she said.

“Our group is not at all about denying water to anybody. Quite the opposite,” Shaw’s husband Jeff Bean said. “We believe and have found that there are much simpler, much lower cost, more immediately attainable methods of getting water to those in need.”

The availability of water in the village is not the problem, he said. It’s the method of extracting it.

“A processor-controlled, low-yield well management system is needed and is successful in harvesting, storing and pressurizing virtually as much water as the homeowner or institution requires, even if the well yields as little as one quarter of a gallon per minute,” he said.

While $15,000 is the average Loudoun Water hookup cost, Brown said it is within the board’s purview to set that fee.

“In no form or fashion in the feasibility study or the representation that the staff has made during the public meetings or the water wastewater process has made any representations of cost for hookup, or expenses associated with being part of the system,” he said.

The combined system is looked at with cautious optimism by the Waterford Foundation, President Susan Manch said, with the organization’s main concern focusing on the impact to the historical nature of the village. The design phase needs to be completed to understand what that will look like, she said.

“What’s clear to us is that none of the potential threats can be fully understood until we move from the concept phase, where we are today, to the design phase. Only when we can see the proposed design, can we know exactly with certainty how this project will affect our area and whether the promised protections against harm, such as limiting the connections and the service area, will be upheld,” she said.

Supervisors voted unanimously to move forward with the design, allocating the $4 million.

Inertial Labs Releases U-Blox Based, Low-Cost GPS-Aided Inertial Navigation System, INS-DU with Accurate Positioning and Dual Antenna Heading.

The new INS-DU delivers high accuracy RTK position for Air, Land, and Marine Applications.

Paeonian Springs, VA: The new INS-DU is a high performance strapdown system that determines position, velocity, and absolute orientation to any platform that it is mounted to. It utilizes a cost-effective, dual antenna U-Blox GNSS receiver that provides 1 cm RTK position from RTCM3 RTK corrections and supports a wide range of GNSS constellations. Designed for UAVs, Land Vehicles, and Marine Vessels, the INS-DU is an effective, low-cost solution that uses a range of aiding data for different applications. With highly accurate navigation in GNSS-denied environments, the INS-DU delivers a comprehensive GNSS-denied solution at a significantly lower price point.

One of the key elements to the success of the INS-DU is its use of the miniAHRS, which utilizes 3-axes each of precision magnetometers, accelerometers, and gyroscopes to provide orientation of the device under measure. It contains cutting-edge algorithms for the motion of robots, unmanned and autonomous vehicles, and antennas. MiniAHRS mini fluxgate magnetometers have a distinct advantage over commonly used magneto-inductive or magneto-resistive alternatives and have been a trusted North reference for over 70 years.

The INS-DU provides a full navigation solution for both GNSS and GNSS-denied environments at an unparalleled value. With custom interfaces and a power consumption of two and a half of a Watts, the INS-DU is a versatile solution fit for a wide variety of users with power consumption restrictions. In addition, the INS-DU contains our on-board sensor fusion filter, state of the art navigation, and guidance algorithms and calibration software.

Inertial Labs, already the leader in position and orientation sensor technologies, is growing its catalog of innovative solutions at the best value, smallest size, and lowest power consumption in their class. From commerce and industry to government, defense, and aerospace, Inertial Labs is at the forefront of developing and customizing products for exciting technologies, solving today’s problems, and unraveling those of tomorrow.

About Inertial Labs

Established in 2001, Inertial Labs is the leader in position and orientation technologies for both commercial/industrial and aerospace/defense applications. With a worldwide distributor & representative network covering 20+ countries across 6 continents, a standard product offering that spans from Inertial Measurement Units (IMU) up to full GPS-Aided Inertial Navigation Systems (INS), and an application breadth that covers Land, Air, and Sea; Inertial Labs covers the gambit of inertial technologies.

www.inertiallabs.com

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We are delighted to announce that the Fujitsu Future Support Challenge Competition has been re-opened. The competition will be running to an adjusted timeline and format taking into account limitations on face to face events.

Now in its 11th year the Fujitsu Future Support Challenge Competition seeks to encourage innovative thought from across the Logistics community.

We were delighted to host the winning team from the 2019 Competition in November. Their solution addressed the lack of automated tools to analyse inventory usage and forecasting future consumption requirements. The key stakeholders and winning team took part and after their DTC co-creation workshop the solution, involving the use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, is now being progressed towards a pilot phase.

The 2020/2021 Challenge:

This year we have provided a choice of questions that we hope will generate interesting, innovative and achievable responses:

a. How would you generate Defence Support Network (DSN) survivability* set against likely future challenges to maintain the advantage over our adversaries? Describe your idea, what it might cost, the resources it would require and when it could be operationalised?* including any potential forms of resilience measure.

b. What steps can Defence take now to deliver early wins regarding the Government-led Green Energy and Net Zero 50 Agendas. Describe a DSN-focussed initiative that you would implement, how it would work, what associated benefits it would deliver, what it would cost, how quickly it could be implemented and the challenges that you would need to overcome to ensure success?

Please send your proposal to the email address below. You may use but are not limited to the Project Initiation Document and/or short Business Case proforma (copies can be downloaded below),noting that both provide a useful indication of the elements that the submission will be assessed against, with a view to developing your idea further through Fujitsu’s Digital Technology Centre. Your proposal can be tactical to strategic in nature, but should include consideration of how it would mesh with a digitally-enabled, more automated DSN. In order to generate useful efficiencies, reduce risk and error rates whilst also assuring improving support agility, velocity and resilience.

Send your submission via email to [email protected] by 5pm on 26th February 2021. Teams are limited to 5 people. Open to all Armed Forces Personnel and MOD Civil Servants.

Cash prizes will be allocated as stated below.

1st place team – £5,0002nd place team – £10003rd place team – £500

Rear Admiral Andy Kyte, ACDS (Log Ops)

“This is a great opportunity to seek your ideas on how you think we could address some of our near and longer-term Defence Support Challenges. Today, we are already operating in a contested environment where the difficulty of assuring support to current and future operations continues to grow, both in terms of the threats that we must overcome and the pressing need to create a resilient and sustainable future Defence Support Network. Your experience, expertise and ideas are an essential resource that we must exploit and the Fujitsu Support Challenge competition offers an ideal platform to achieve this. With the recent appointment of the Chief of Defence Logistics and Support we have an opportunity to further leverage your inputs and effect real change. I encourage all personnel to embrace this initiative and the potential rewards that it offers.”

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