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Beltway project to eliminate Northern Virginia green spaces

ANNANDALE—Along Americana Drive in Annandale, well-maintained apartment complexes are nestled in lush, dense woods. Swimming pools and tennis courts are connected by a network of paved footpaths. Depending on the spot, the roar of the Capital Beltway can sound like little more than a faint whisper.

The feeling of solitude could change dramatically with an enormous widening project recently begun along the Beltway, which is a stone’s throw from such Annandale complexes as Heritage Court, Heritage Woods, Ivy Mount and Lafayette Forest. Like neighborhoods all along the 14-mile stretch of Beltway where two lanes will be added in each direction, these communities are about to lose virtually all the vegetative buffer that has grown between them and the highway for 40 years. And they’re not happy about it.

“This is a catastrophe for this neighborhood,” said Amy R. Gould, 52, a 13-year resident of Lafayette Forest. “We’re going to have beautiful views of retaining walls with no buffers and no trees.”  

Gould said she considers herself lucky: Her 1980s-era condominium complex sits in its own woodland, providing more insulation from the Beltway than dozens of apartments, condominium buildings and townhouses that line Americana Drive. But she is furious that state highway officials and county leaders allowed a $1.4 billion project that calls for forest destruction that, she said, will leave the Beltway looking like the Springfield interchange: a sea of concrete, asphalt and steel, with little green in view.

“They keep telling us we have a great quality of life here, but what makes it is the greenery and the wildlife,” she said.

Gould is not alone. Across northern Virginia, commuters from McLean, Alexandria and Arlington and Fairfax counties have been waking up in recent weeks to the reality of the Beltway widening project. Road crews with the Virginia Department of Transportation and its contractor, Fluor-Transurban, have been working quickly to clear massive staging areas and station heavy equipment and office trailers near the highway’s interchanges with Braddock Road, Interstate 66 and Georgetown Pike.

Susan Deyampert and her parents, who live just off Braddock Road and the Beltway in the Ravensworth neighborhood, have collected signatures in support of a sound wall to absorb the anticipated noise.

“The traffic never dies down,” Deyampert said. “Even during the night, it’s still very loud.”

State officials said much of the tree buffer along the Beltway will be lost. The alternative, they said, was to take hundreds of homes and businesses, an option that drew hundreds of residents to protest at public meetings earlier this decade.

“A lot of the existing right of way is heavily forested,” said Virginia Transportation Secretary Pierce R. Homer. “And, you know, it’s going to come down. But it’s a whole lot better than 2002, when hundreds of homes and businesses were in jeopardy.”

Homer said the department intends to be as responsive as possible when it comes to sound wall construction. He also said that VDOT is incorporating reforestation into its plans wherever possible, something it did not do as well during the Springfield reconstruction. The department is working closely with environmentalists to “rescue” plants and trees from clear-cut areas.

Elaine Franklin, a naturalist with the Audubon Society of Northern Virginia, said VDOT has been providing advance notice when clearing is to begin. Franklin and other preservationists have drawn out dozens of volunteers to save such specimens as arrowwood viburnum, pinxter azalea, milkweed, trout lily and seedlings of such hardwood canopy trees as oak, hickory and maple. A small, Northern Virginia-based preservation group called Lands and Waters has led the effort, Franklin said.

The plants are going to schools, churches, community centers and private homes – anywhere with spare land for planting, she said.

The project has been a top priority of local and state officials for years to ease congestion on the eight-lane Beltway.

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