Members of the United Methodist Church on East Main Street, a Civil War-era landmark, are calling on Riverhead Town officials to halt construction of an apartment building across the street from the church.
“The amount of damage we’re incurring on a daily basis is unbelievable,” member and former trustee Larry Scudder told the town board last night.
“The church organ is being destroyed. Stained glass windows which have been in place for over 100 years are now bowing. There’s a possibility that the steeple might come down,” Scudder said.
“The stone foundation’s mortar is turning into baby powder,” he said.
“And they’re not halfway through.”
Construction plans for “Riverview Lofts,” a five-story building with 116 workforce rental apartments and ground-floor retail and restaurant uses, call for driving 550 long steel pipe piles into the ground to support the weight of the building, which is located in a flood zone. The piles are being driven into the ground by a large pile-driver machine.
The pounding is causing vibrations that are damaging the historic church, its parsonage and at least one adjacent century-old home, according to church members and the homeowner.
Church members and staff say they began to notice cracks in the plaster walls inside the church shortly after the pile-driving started in March. The cracks grew in scope and number, affecting not just walls, but ceilings, interior pillars, wainscoting and pews, they say. A portion of the ceiling has come down in the “bride’s room” — an anteroom just outside the sanctuary in the front of the building. Mortar between the stones of the church’s foundation has been cascading out of the joints and onto the cellar floor. The church’s stained glass windows have bowed and two of them now have cracks in some panes.
“None of these conditions existed before the construction,” said Barbara Damm, president of the board of trustees at the church said in an interview last month.
The pile-driving began on the southern portion of the site and is advancing northward toward Main Street — closer to the historic structures.
Church members are fearful that, as the pile-driving moves closer to the church, the vibrations will grow worse and the damage will become more severe — perhaps irreversible.
“We’re going to have a disaster,” Scudder told town board members during last night’s regular meeting. “If that steeple comes down, we’ve got big problems. We’ve got a two-ton bell on top of that tower.”
Town officials, with the cooperation of the developer, have stepped up vibration monitoring inside the church and in the home of Arlene Doroszka, just east of the church. The developer initially installed one vibration monitor in the church basement and has now added two others. Monitors are in place in Doroszka’s home as well. The monitors generate reports that are emailed daily to the town building inspector. The daily reports are now being emailed directly to the church as well. Crack monitors have also been installed in the church and in Doroszka’s home to keep tabs on the size of existing cracks.
“We’ve been following the situation very closely,” Supervisor Laura Jens-Smith said last night. “We understand your concern.”
Jens-Smith said the damage so far is “not structural” but “it will have to be mitigated.”
“It is of grave concern to us,” Jens-Smith said.
The vibration monitors, in addition to generating a daily report, will signal an alarm if vibrations exceed a threshold set by the monitoring company. The monitoring company will then call the construction contractor to tell it to cease activity. The threshold was originally set at .3 — which represents .3 inch per second. That threshold was already lower than the .5 inch per second level at which it is believed damage could occur. The town has directed the builder to lower the threshold to .2, Jens-Smith said.
To date, the monitoring reports have not indicated the the vibrations have even reached .1 inch per second, Riverhead chief building inspector Brad Hammond said in an interview.
If vibrations reach the threshold set by the town, the builder will be required to switch to a different process for driving support piles, officials said. The alternative is a helical pile, which is essentially screwed into the ground, rather than pounded in.
‘The installation of pipe piles should not be problematic’
In a site plan memo last year, the Riverhead planning department noted that a “geotechnical evaluation submitted to the building department” by the applicant’s engineering consultant “recommends hollow shaft helical piles due to the subsurface conditions, instead of the driven pules proposed as per the SEAF [Supplemental Environmental Assessment Form]. As per the Chief Building Inspector’s original memo dated December 28, 2016, helical piles cause less noise and vibration.”
But the applicant sought instead to use the driven-pile method, the planning department memo stated.
In a response letter to planning department comments, the developer wrote: “The installation of pipe piles should not be problematic as stated. The first 80 ft. of material will pose minimal resistance to pile installation. As for the clay layers below 85 ft. where resistance can be expected, the energy expended will be dissipated underground and will minimize local vibrations. There are no occupants to the west or south and just several houses to the east. The church across E. Main St. to the north will be protected by distance and elevation differential.”
The planning department highlighted this response in its memo to the town board, which was responsible for approving both a special permit and a site plan for the project.
“The Town Board should determine whether this response is satisfactory in regard to the 550 piles proposed,” the planning department memo said.
In its Sept. 6 resolution approving the Georgica Green Ventures site plan, the town board, voting 3-1 with Councilwoman Jodi Giglio abstaining, granted permission to use a hammer-driving system for pile installation. The resolution requires the “appropriate selection of hammer and pile driving system to minimize vibrations to the maximum extent possible” as well as daily “onsite vibration monitoring.” It also limits piling installation to weekdays between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m.
Developer: Distance to church ‘much too far to create any damage’
The developer maintains that the construction activity is not causing vibrations strong enough to damage the buildings across the street. Georgica Green Ventures says it has had an independent analysis done by a structural engineer who was not part of the original design team.
“He too agreed that no data indicated any vibrations of concern and that the distance from the piles to the Church, almost 400 feet, was much too far to create any damage,” Ally Giorgos of Georgica Green Ventures wrote in an email to RiverheadLOCAL May 15.
“Before we started moving north on the property, our design and construction team put together a plan to complete test piles at varying distances from the northern property line to ensure that no vibration concerns arose,” she wrote.
“The test piles were completed 45 feet, 23 feet, and 11 feet from the Northern end of the site with the oversight of the town. Out of an abundance of caution, GGV requested that a representative from the the vibration monitoring company be on site ready to stop work if any significant readings were activated. GGV also requested that remote monitoring be performed across the street directly in front of the church. Again, the vibration reports did not indicate any vibrations and were also provided to the town,” Giorgos wrote.
“We certainly want to be good neighbors and want to protect the town’s historic resources. If at any point the vibration monitors show a significant reading, we would immediately stop construction. We are working with the church and their team with full cooperation to address all concerns moving forward,” she said.
Members of the Methodist Church said they were taken by surprise by the pile-driving — and its impacts.
“We don’t know what to do,” said church secretary Jeanine Zeltmann. “We’re just a church. We didn’t ask for this. But we don’t have the resources to fight it.”
Zeltmann said after the cracks began to appear in the walls, she started taking photos and video, hoping to be able to document the damage.
The church trustees had a meeting for parishioners May 8 to discuss what’s been happening, what the trustees have been doing about it and to offer church members tours to inspect the conditions.
Many of the 20 or so people who attended the meeting were long-time or even lifelong members of the congregation.
Shirley G.S. Simon is a lifelong member who was baptized in the church as a child.
“I’m a direct descendent of people buried in that cemetery,” Simon said, referring to the Revolutionary War-era cemetery on the east side of the church property, where several men who fought in the American Revolution are among those buried there.
“I hope towns and communities would take note,” Simon said. “All in the name of progress? We didn’t know it was coming.”
The environmental review process for the Riverview Lofts project followed a somewhat unusual — and truncated — course.
The application, filed in February 2017, was classified by the town board on May 2, 2017 as a Type I action under the State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA). The Type I classification means that, based upon the information in the applicant’s Environmental Assessment Form (EAF), the reviewing agency finds that the action is likely to have significant adverse environmental impacts. The classification requires “coordinated review” by involved agencies, meaning the EAF is circulated to various reviewing agencies, including the State Department of Environmental Conservation, the county planning commission, the health department, and other bodies within town, county and state government.
Typically, a Type I classification results in the reviewing agency requiring the applicant to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement. But that’s not always the case. The reviewing agency may determine that a Type I action will not have any significant adverse environmental impacts and issue a “negative declaration,” ending the SEQRA process.
Georgica Green “pre-filed” a “voluntary” environmental impact statement in June 2017, which was circulated to involved agencies. Based on its review of that document, the town board on Aug. 15 determined that the project “will result in no significant adverse environmental impacts” and issued a “negative declaration” under SEQRA. That decision allowed the project to move forward without any additional environmental review. The board on Sept. 6 approved the final site plan.
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