Augusta County: Residents raise issue with dangerous stormwater channel

Two residents of the Ridgeview subdivision in Stuarts Draft are raising concerns about a stormwater channel that they say has become a serious threat to public safety.

“The stormwater channel – now more than three feet deep and seven feet wide in sections – continues to grow, sending stormwater and debris into residential areas and creating hazards far outside the county’s designated drainage corridor,” Josh and Tiffany Law wrote to us by email, in which they said the problem is “no longer a stormwater issue, it is a county-created danger.”

The Laws tell us that residents have been trying to get the county to take action since 2018, and provided us with before-and-after photos – the one on the left from 2018, the second, on the right, from 2026 – that do demonstrate the growth of the stormwater channel, from what looks like edging work that you can do in your backyard to a gulf big enough for full-sized adults to stand in and have trouble seeing over the top of.

“The county has been repeatedly informed of the worsening conditions since 2018, consistently acknowledged the severity of the problem, and has chosen inaction, allowing a known hazard to escalate into a public‑safety threat, a property‑rights concern, and a potential inverse‑condemnation issue,” the Laws wrote to me in their email.

We reached out to the county government for information on what is going on, and got this statement back from Doug Wolfe, the director of the county community development department:

Section One of the Ridgeview Acres subdivision was built around an intermittent stream. The original developer dedicated a drainage easement over the stream, which does permit the county to enter the property. The county has performed work within several different areas of the subdivision over the past several decades to address areas of severe erosion adjacent to road crossings in the subdivision. 

County staff met onsite with a stream biologist from the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources to examine the health of the stream in the vicinity of 65-101 Ridgeview Drive in July 2025. The biologist stated the stream is healthy. From a stream morphology perspective, there is not excessive head cutting, incision, deposition or other issues that are often seen with urban or suburban streams. The channel is eroding in a manner consistent with a flowing stream. 

With the help of the DWR biologist, we did identify a tree on a downstream property (87 Ridgeview Drive) whose roots were potentially impacting stream capacity and causing upstream deposition. 

Staff removed the roots in the fall of 2025, but there has not been substantial rainfall to see if the root removal will have the intended effect of lowering the stream profile in this segment.

We continue to assess stream health and take appropriate action when required.