Va. projects take their toll on homeowners' nerves and trees

If there's anything as sacred to suburban families as the calm of their cul-de-sacs and their schools, it's their trees. And as Jeff and Marybeth Ocean discovered last week when a backhoe began digging behind their Vienna home, trees and subway construction do not mix well.

The couple awoke at 7:30 a.m. Wednesday to the growling of the backhoe clearing brush and small trees behind their Colonial house in Wolf Trap Meadows, where a storm-water pond filters runoff from the development of 156 homes.

The day before, there had been a knock on the door from Dulles Transit Partners, the contractor building the first leg of the Metrorail extension to Dulles International Airport. A crew would be clearing land so the pond could expand for more runoff from the right of way for the Silver Line trains, which will run along the Toll Road just over the sound wall at the edge of the Oceans' back yard.

When they saw the backhoe, Jeff Ocean rushed to the phone, left a message with the rail project and e-mailed the governor: "You asked for my help when you were running and I was there for you! Now I need your help!" Marybeth, a 56-year-old real estate agent, ran outside and body-blocked the backhoe as it rolled toward her, the tree-hugger's time-tested tactic.

The clearing stopped while engineers, communications experts, surveyors and other higher-ups from the rail project arrived at the scene, where they told the Oceans that a stand of 80-foot pines they planted in front of the pond 20 years ago was not in danger. Not even their roots, which Jeff Ocean said he was told would be perilously close to the bulldozer.

"After 20 years, finally, the trees people planted are growing," said Ocean, 62. "Just out of common courtesy, they should talk to the homeowners and show them exactly what's going on."

Officials with the rail project say they did exactly that, through multiple hearings, meetings and letters, although the scope of the work appears to have been conveyed in more detail to the couple's homeowners association. In between rounds of finger-pointing, though, the parties agreed that communication broke down somewhere, leaving two homeowners to believe that the nature they enjoy viewing from their dining room window was under threat.

"We hold public meetings where we say what we're going to do," said Howard N. Menaker, spokesman for Dulles Transit Partners. "But when we get to the field, it becomes more of an issue."

Similar scenes are playing out elsewhere in Northern Virginia, where thousands of trees are disappearing to make way for the rail extension, high-occupancy toll lanes along the Capital Beltway and three other big road projects. The path to a better transportation network is a complex retrofit of neighborhoods settled long before the subway or 14 miles of HOT lanes were envisioned. It can make for some delicate politics.

"It's incumbent on us to contact people before the bulldozers come," said Steve Titunik, Virginia Department of Transportation spokesman for the megaprojects. "That said, it doesn't always make for friendly relations."

Titunik and his colleagues learned this the hard way in 2008, when hundreds of trees were cut down next to the Beltway to make room for construction trailers for the toll lanes. The denuding of a wooded area at Georgetown Pike used by a school took parents and neighbors by surprise. Angry community meetings followed. The contractor agreed to build an eight-foot wooden privacy fence around the site.

Titunik said the school was notified far in advance of the work. But because the property was the state's, nearby homeowners apparently weren't in the loop. Similarly, the Oceans' beloved pine trees in Vienna stand just outside their property line, so the rail project negotiated with the homeowners association, not them, for an easement for the storm-water work. But regardless of what the plat says, "people have physically and emotionally taken possession of that land," Menaker said.