LOUDOUN COUNTY’S COMMUNITY-OWNED NEWS SOURCE
LoudounNow
[ Vol. 4, No. 33 ]
■ PUBLIC AND LEGAL NOTICES - PAGE 28 ■ EMPLOYMENT PAGE 32
■ RESOURCE DIRECTORY PAGE 33 [ July 4, 2019 ]
[ loudounnow.com ]
Painting the Sky Kids watch the fireworks in Hillsboro on Sunday from the monkey bars in the playground. Thousands of people packed into the fields around the Old Stone School for one of Loudoun’s most popular Independence Day celebrations. The evening included musical performances, clogging, a reading of the Declaration of Independence, and the National Anthem performed by Malcolm Fuller. It also had food, drinks, wine and beer, and a huge play area for kids. The evening culminated with a fireworks show so big and close, afterward ash drifted down onto the crowd. — Renss Greene
Reservoir Refilling, Park Plans Proceeding BY RENSS GREENE With a little help from Mother Nature, the Beaverdam Creek Reservoir on the western edge of Ashburn will soon return to its role as Loudoun’s largest body of water. As it slowly refills, plans are advancing to transform it into the county’s largest park. When full, it looks like a peaceful lake, with wooded trails, birds and insects circling, and fishers and high school crew teams cutting across the water. But Beaverdam Reservoir is an artificial lake, storing 1.5 billion gallons of water for Loudoun Water, and in 2016 it was
drained to complete repairs to its dam. Today it’s a broad, grassy, muddy depression with a creek trickling through it, surrounded by woods. Those repairs are now almost finished, and this month the valve at the dam that had let all the water out was closed. Now, said Loudoun Water Deputy General Manager Mark Peterson, to wait for rain. After a record-setting rainfall had delayed work on the dam, now that the utility is ready to refill the reservoir, the rain has slowed considerably. “The good news is, it’s in refill,” Peterson said. “The hard part is guessing when that is going to be at a level where
it feels safe enough for people to get back on.” He joked that after a year of record rain, “around the time, of course, that we started, it’s been so hot and dry.” When it refills, fishing, boating, paddling and other activities on the 622-acre reservoir will open up again. Loudoun Water purchased the reservoir from the City of Fairfax in 2014 and initially closed it to public assess, citing liability concerns. But after partnering with NOVA Parks, Loudoun Water reopened the reservoir to public access in May 2015. On sunny weekends, the small parking lot off Mt. Hope Road is packed with visitors.
“It’s such a special place in Loudoun County, and people had been around it, and it can work well if you do it right to allow the public access,” Peterson said. But, he said, as a water authority, managing public access to a park was never part of their expertise: “It’s not part of what we do, so we knew going in that if we were going to commit long-term to continuing to allow the public to access it, it made a lot of sense” to partner with the parks authority. And sometime next year, it is expected, construction on new park facilities BEAVERDAM >> 38
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