GRUNDY MOVES ON
Town Relocates To Avoid Floods

by Jennifer Sparger

Some communities have given up the fight to control the rivers on which they were built. They’ve sought refuge from
severe and repeated flooding by making a permanent move to higher ground.

Grundy, a former coal mining boom town in Southwest Virginia, will soon be one of those communities. After enduring
damaging floods almost every 20 years, from 1937 to 1993, Grundy is moving its business district across the Levisa
River to a 13-acre site donated by Norfolk Southern Corp.

Relocating Grundy is tough because of the lack of flat land. “Most communities that have flooded have acres of level
land to go back a couple of miles from the river,” says Grundy’s town manager Chuck Crabtree. “The way we were
nestled between mountains, railroad tracks, the river, and U.S. Route 460, we had no level land. So floodproofing
Grundy is very unique in itself.”

The move is paving the way for a long-awaited highway project too. At one time, Grundy, the seat of Buchanan
County, stood in the way of the Virginia Department of Transportation’s (VDOT) plan to continue Route 460 to the
Kentucky state line. But bypassing Grundy would have cost VDOT $150 million to $160 million, Crabtree says, and
building the roadway through Grundy would have destroyed its downtown. And, there was little space for existing
businesses to relocate in the mountainous terrain.

Thanks to a partnership with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) and VDOT, relocating Grundy and extending
Route 460, once financial impossibilities, are becoming realities. VDOT’s routing U.S. 460 through the old downtown
will cost $77 million — $73 million to $83 million less than the original proposed cost. And USACE’s cost in preparing
the relocation site for development fell from somewhere between $200 million to $300 million to about $110 million as a
result of the partnership, according to Crabtree.

Moving a town may seem like a radical measure. But for Grundy — with its dwindling population and an economy that
never rebounded from the flood of 1977 — relocating may be its only chance. Many buildings were abandoned after
the ’77 flood, causing property values to fall. Federal laws have also changed, requiring that no more than half of a
building’s appraised value be spent on repairing it. In most cases, the amount allotted was insufficient to do the
necessary work.

“People started going outside of Grundy for business,” Crabtree said. “We had an outflow of people on the weekends,
and when people started going out, they liked the community they were going to, and they started moving.” Although
Grundy’s citizens gave up on the town a long time ago, the proposed new Grundy is attracting new commerce already.
A new Comfort Inn has almost quadrupled the taxes paid by previous downtown businesses, paying out about $50,000
annually, and has created jobs as well. Verizon has chosen Grundy as a pilot project for creating a wireless
community. Groundbreaking on the relocation site is slated for fall 2006, and retail businesses have already spoken
for the future buildings, according to Crabtree.

Grundy has now given the river back to itself and reopened the river channel, transforming the Levisa into an asset
instead of a liability, Crabtree noted.

“It’s not one big fix. It is a puzzle,” Crabtree said. “No one would believe the benefits that have come out of this. I think
we’ll have the most unique small town in the country.”