Woodlake Dam Unrepaired for Years; Lake's Future Uncertain

Woodlake Dam Unrepaired for Years; Lake's Future Uncertain

Troubles in Concrete Spillway Existed, Went Unaddressed

• By Jaymie Baxley, Staff Writer

Jaymie Baxley

• Oct 15, 2016

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The private owners responsible for the massive lake and dam at Woodlake Country Club have delayed the state-ordered repairs of critical safety flaws there for at least seven years now, much to the consternation of state and local officials and homeowners at Woodlake.

Those officials and engineers are now assessing whether the well-documented flaws led to the serious erosion of the dam’s spillway last week in the wake of Hurricane Matthew. County officials ordered the evacuation of several hundred people downstream of the dam after a large void in the spillway opened up and raised fears the whole dam could fail. Such a failure would send downstream trillions of gallons of water and lead to catastrophic flooding for communities south and east of the dam, like Spring Lake, Raeford, Hope Mills and Fayetteville.

Officials spent all last week at the dam trying to stem the water’s flow and lessen the risk. They say the structure is now mostly stable.

Massive pumps have been brought in to lower the lake’s water level and reduce water pressure on the dam. Those officials are now contemplating their next course of action, which mostly boils down to this: force the owners to repair the dam and spillway within a short time window, or breach the dam themselves in a controlled way and drain the lake to ensure the safety of surrounding communities.

The latter step is extreme to be sure — a last resort but one that has been done previously, including with a much smaller dam a few years ago at Whispering Woods Country Club in Whispering Pines.

Ongoing Challenges

North Carolina has more than 1,000 dams across the state it deems as “high hazard” because their rupture could cause extensive damage downstream. Woodlake has been on that list for years.

Just how important is the dam? Consider that a gallon of water weighs about 8 pounds. Woodlake — at 1,200 acres, it was once touted as the largest manmade lake in North Carolina — holds millions of gallons of water. So the dam is holding back billions of pounds of water pressure. A dam’s weaknesses matter.

But state officials have been challenged getting Woodlake’s owners to comply with mandatory repair orders. So-called “notices of deficiency” go back to 2009. In the late 1980s, the lake needed to be drained because of large holes in the dam to prevent collapse.

Repair isn’t cheap. The price tag for such repairs has ranged from $1 million to $2.5 million and could go higher, especially now that more damage has occurred.

An engineer must design complex plans and submit them to the state for approval before any work can be done. Woodlake has basically been stuck at that engineering stage for several years, according to correspondence between the state and Woodlake owners chronicled in previous stories in The Pilot.

The ownership nature out at Woodlake is complex, to say the least. Individuals own their lots and a property owners association maintains the roads in the development off N.C. 690 just east of Vass. Woodlake CC Corp. owns the lake, dam, two golf courses, the club house, a members’ lounge and a smaller tract of land.

The development was originally developed in the 1960s by A.B. Hardee, the main developer behind the village of Whispering Pines. It was bought in 1980 by a German businessman named Dr. Ingolf Boex.

The ownership group ran into troubles over the years and reorganized with different names — it went from Woodlake Properties Inc. to Woodlake Partners LLC — but declared bankruptcy in September 2014, listing $5.3 million in assets and $8.85 million in liabilities.

The available properties were auctioned off on the Moore County courthouse steps in March 2015 and sold to a single bidder: a German-based company by the name of Steiner + Company. According to an email sent to Woodlake residents by Woodlake Realty, the shareholders in Steiner Consulting Gmbh were named as Dr. Illya Steiner and Frank Magdefessel and J& Partners LLC. Scant records are available for the identities or qualifications of Steiner or Magdefessel. J& Partners LLC has one person listed in its filing with the N.C. Secretary of State’s corporations division: Julie Watson.

Watson is no stranger to Woodlake or its residents. Since 1981, Watson has been listed in the N.C. Secretary of State’s Office as the agent or representative of Woodlake, both for Boex and, now, Steiner. Watson has an address listed in Woodlake and a phone number, but multiple calls placed to the address have gone unanswered this past week. County officials say they saw Watson at the dam site briefly Thursday, but that she quickly left when a Pilot reporter showed up.

This has all been an endless source of frustration for residents at Woodlake, many of whom are retired military and moved there for the quiet waterfront properties and two championship golf courses. Residents have pontoon boats and docks on the lake and have largely been unable to use them because of the ongoing lake and dam troubles.

Lou Mason, a longtime resident of the Woodlake community, says the ongoing uncertainties have caused property values to plummet.

“I’d like to see a new owner come in with money to invest in the place,” he said. “It was never run like a business. If it was, then there wouldn’t be an issue.”

Mason says he and his fellow residents have had no communication from Woodlake CC Inc. He only learned the dam was in danger of a breach after seeing a news report on TV.

“I hope they’re held accountable,” he said. “They’re liable for this, as far as I’m concerned.”

Watson has been the main contact person for the N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources, which regulates dam safety. Watson has been sent letters over the years regarding the dam’s deficiencies. She is the one who has received two “dam safety orders” from the state ordering repair of Woodlake’s dam.

Repairs Ordered

A dam safety order is much more serious than the prior “notice of deficiency” letters Woodlake had received previously. A dam safety order, or DSO, requires the owners of private dams to repair their structures within 90 days — or at least start the process — or face daily fines ranging from $100 to $500. In an extreme situation of non-compliance, the state Attorney General’s office can go to court and get an order allowing the state to breach the dam.

Woodlake was deemed a high hazard dam in August 2014. In September, Boex’s ownership group, known as Woodlake Partners LLC, filed for bankruptcy.

The state’s first dam safety order was issued in December 2014. Woodlake was ordered to begin planning “for repairing or breaching” the dam. But since the property was going through bankruptcy and would have new owners, the state’s enforcement was limited.

When Woodlake was auctioned off several months later in March 2015, Steiner + Company paid $705,000. That price was heavily discounted because it factored in the multi million-dollar dam repair the new owners — incorporated as Woodlake CC Inc. — would have to make.

Indeed, the state issued the new owners a notice of deficiency for the dam in May and then, in late July, a second dam safety order. Again, the state gave a 90-day requirement to repair the dam.

The order required the company to submit a plan to repair “cracks in the principal spillway of the dam, a void of unknown size at the bottom of that spillway, voids along the sides of the dam’s wing wall and seepage at various locations on the downstream slope of the dam.”

Woodlake’s owners have contracted for at least the past five years with a highly qualified engineer, B. Dan Marks, to design a fix for the dam. He has submitted plans in the past to the state for review, and state engineers sent them back with questions. A lot of that back-and-forth occurred in 2014. In March 2015, the state approved plans for repairing the dam.

But for an undisclosed and unknown reason, Woodlake’s management hired a new dam engineering company, Geosyntec Consultants out of Raleigh.

Indeed, Bridget Munger, public information officer for the state Department of Environmental Quality, said Woodlake CC Inc. withdrew the original plan submitted by its engineering consulting firm — and approved by the state — in March.

“The dam owner later had concerns about the repair plans and decided (…) to hire a different consulting firm to move forward with the repair project,” Munger said in an email. “The department has not yet received the plans.”

Worst-Case Scenario

Part and parcel to the dam repair is the water level in the lake. That has been an ongoing concern for those who live along the lake and spent a lot of money on waterfront property. If the lake is too shallow — or drained completely — those residents are, literally, left high and dry.

In addition to addressing the dam’s deterioration, the state’s safety order required Woodlake CC to maintain a maximum water level of 218 feet above mean sea level, or MSL. The normal level — the term is “full pool” — is 223.5 feet MSL. That 218 feet MSL is believed by engineers to be a safe level for the dam.

Gene Frazelle, a Woodlake resident, reported that the water level was “almost a foot over normal pool” a week before the hurricane pummeled Moore County with 10 inches of rain. That would have put the water at almost 225 feet MSL, a level quite achievable after getting about nine inches of rain in that part of the county before Hurricane Matthew.

“Would you be concerned if you lived downstream?” he asked in an email on Sept. 29.

As it so happened, everyone should have been.

The worst fears of many began coming true last Monday, Oct. 10, when officials noticed a growing void in the spillway. Normally, a dam spillway allows for the controlled release of water from a lake. After a massive rain event like last weekend, that water release is essential to prevent the lake from overflowing or collapsing the dam itself.

Last Monday, that gap went from being the size of a small car to the width of two ambulances over a few days. Planes and helicopters flew over assessing the damage. Officials piloted a drone over the spillway to get a close look at the massive chunks of broken concrete, rock and sand.

Officials grew very worried that an uncontrollable breach could occur, a worst-case scenario that no one thought could ever really happen. Faced with that prospect, Moore County Public Safety ordered an evacuation of about 200 people downstream. That included homes along major roads like McPherson, Marks and McGill Road, along with homes along small lanes likes Eddie, Fernandez and Lothian.

Unlike towns like Southern Pines or Aberdeen, that part of Moore County — on a map, it’s the finger that juts out, like it’s pointing at Fort Bragg — is not heavily developed. Still, there are a few hundred homes out there. And that area is threaded with creeks that feed Little River and points further east. In fact, several of those neighborhoods were already flooded when the Little River and local streams and creeks overflowed.

Mandatory evacuation orders were issued. Fire fighters, Moore County Sheriff’s deputies and National Guardsmen went door-to-door to get people out of their homes. Emergency shelters were set up in Carthage.

In the meantime, emergency workers and National Guardsmen worked furiously to load sand bags into the hole to shore it up and reduce the water flow. Massive pumps were brought in to pump down the water level and reduce pressure on the dam and spillway. Workers stayed out there around the clock all week monitoring the dam.

Residents praised the workers manning the dam. Even Congressman Richard Hudson stopped in Moore County on Thursday afternoon to see the operation firsthand. Moore County public safety officials took him out on the Woodlake dam.

“It is unbelievable to see what happens when Mother Nature is at its worse,”he said surveying the damaged spillway, where a large section of concrete eroded away and collapsed. “I am really struck by Moore County’s quick response and how it is dealing with this crisis. This could have been a lot worst.”

Hudson offered to assist the county once it makes an application to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for disaster assistance.

The county is still in the process of gathering information on damage assessments, according to Public Safety Director Bryan Phillips.

Nick Picerno, chairman of the Moore County Board of Commissioners who had been out at the dam most of the week, thanked Hudson for coming.

“These guys are going a great job,” he said of Phillips and all of the staff in handling the situation.

Breach or Babysit?

With Woodlake’s management still silent on the matter, it is not known what steps the company will take with the dam in coming days. Residents on the lake are frustrated the situation has dragged on this long and just want an answer. A number of them have been trying for years to get accountability, but to little avail.

Charlie Jones, a former U.S. Air Force pilot who has lived in the Woodlake community for many years, said it was only a matter of time before the dam put lives at risk.

“It’s like driving around with a flat tire,” he said. “How long can known shortcomings go un-remediated without something bad happening?”

Privately, county and state officials have said they’re angry at getting stonewalled and obtaining no answers from Woodlake’s ownership. In frustration, they’ve talked about trying to tag the company with paying for all of the expense and overtime from this past week. They’re also figuring out how forcefully they can move to get the dam situation resolved without prompting another bankruptcy.

In the end, as drastic as it might be, the state could just drain the lake. It has threatened to in the past, though it knows the stakes involved and the competing interests. Although the dam was a risk when the first dam safety order was issued in August 2014, state officials were confident danger did not loom back then.

“We don’t feel it is going to fail anytime soon,” said Brad Cole, a regional dam safety engineer with the state, said back then in an interview with The Pilot. “But it needs some serious repairs and we want to make sure those repairs are made before it gets too late, before we get to the point where we have to sit on the top of the dam and babysit it.”

Last week, that is exactly what officials did.

Managing Editor David Sinclair and editor John Nagy contributed to this report.