What constitutes rubble?

Differing interpretations of the Albemarle County code have caused work at a construction site on Garth Road to fall weeks behind, costing developer Charles Hurt time and money.

Hurt said he didn’t know he was violating the county code when he used hundreds of tons of broken concrete and rebar — metal used to reinforce concrete — to level out a hillside on his 6-acre lot, which is approximately a mile west of the Barracks Road Shopping Center.

Now he is tearing it up to comply with the zoning ordinance.

The ordinance permits waste areas to be filled with “inert materials,” defined as “physically, chemically and biologically stable from further degradation and considered to be nonreactive, including rubble, concrete, bricks, broken bricks and blocks, and asphalt pavement.”

Because iron alloys rust, the county does not consider them stable ground fill materials. “To us the definitions and the guidelines seemed pretty self-explanatory,” county spokeswoman Lee Catlin said.

Hurt disagrees on the basis that the zoning ordinance does not explicitly rule out metals. He believes that any debris from a demolition site should qualify as “rubble,” including rebar.

“If I can believe the wording of the ordinance and the definition in the dictionary, why somebody has the right to change the definition is beyond me,” he said.

Hurt estimates he moved 800 truckloads of rubble from the demolished University of Virginia hospital parking garage to his construction site, where his employees used bulldozers to pack and level the debris.

The county’s Department of Community Development did a routine inspection of the site and, finding it in violation of a water-protection ordinance, issued a stop-work order May 22.

County officials, along with the Department of Environmental Quality, investigated the site further and found rebar in the ground and cited Hurt for violating county code and state law.

Hurt sent a letter to the Board of Supervisors in late May saying the rebar would not harm the environment or the watershed any more than brick, one of the allowed materials.

“Since iron and iron mixtures decompose into a compound found also in the byproducts produced by the decomposition of brick, one should infer that the zoning ordinance includes materials made of iron or iron mixtures, such as steel, as ‘solid materials that are physically, chemically and biologically stable.’”

Hurt said the rebar makes up 2 percent of the total debris and half the rebar is sealed in concrete.

Jed Pascarella, an environmental program planner with the DEQ, said iron in high concentrations has the potential to degrade water quality and harm aquatic life, whereas the iron content of brick is too low to cause damage.

Pascarella said human safety is also a concern. “The potential for puncture wounds both to people and vehicles is pretty severe. That’s first and foremost the concern with rebar and metal material like that,” he said.

In early June the county gave Hurt one month to remove the rebar from the ground.

Hurt said the process has taken weeks and cost up to $50,000, and it’s not over yet. Instead of preparing the ground for construction, his employees are undoing their work and using a special machine to separate the concrete and rebar.

The machine can sort 25 tons to 50 tons of rubble a day, according to John Thomas, one of Hurt’s employees, but dump trucks are still bringing in debris from the demolition site. A large pile can be seen from Garth Road.

Hurt plans to eventually turn the site into a high-end property with a house, horse stables and a tennis court.