Residents along South Jefferson Street want to shut down the flood project's only active soils dump site, a source of noise and dust for the past two years.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers could be dumping dirt there for another decade, perpetuating a public nuisance that hurts the domestic tranquility of more than 1,000 people, neighbors say.

If the flood project had stayed on schedule, the dumping would have ended this year, said Steve Vartan, president of the Napa Yacht Club Homeowners Association.

Vartan now expects the 58-acre site of a future city park to remain an active dump through 2018, affecting a broad spectrum of residents, including owners of million-dollar homes and 300 elderly residents of the Meadows Napa Valley who take the brunt of the aggravation.

"Now it's more of a permanent land use than a temporary situation," said Vartan, who until now had been tolerant of the dirt disposal.

Representative of Friends of the Napa River, River Park Homeowners, the Meadows and the South Napa Area Coalition met with flood project representatives two weeks ago to voice their laundry list of worries.

On Nov. 6, neighborhood leaders are scheduled to ask the Napa County Flood Control District's board of directors to intervene on their behalf.

Unless political pressure is applied, dirt from the construction of a flood bypass channel, flood terraces along Napa Creek and a large detention pond on South Coombs Street will be hauled to their neighborhood for years to come, said Bernhard Krevet, president of Friends of the Napa River and a Napa Yacht Club resident.

"The Corps -- they're engineers. They'll do what they're told to do," Krevet said. The solution is to find a more isolated dump, he said.

At the Oct. 15 meeting, local and federal flood officials acknowledged that the disposal had been poorly managed for the past two years. Local flood district staff agreed to again review alternative disposal sites.

The district spent "months and months" looking at potential sites in the late 1990s before settling on South Jefferson Street for excavations from the west side of the river and Gasser Foundation land, said Heather Stanton, local flood manager.

South Jefferson neighbors have suggested hauling dirt to nearby Syar Industries quarries south of Napa State Hospital, but this site was nixed by the Regional Water Quality Control Board, Stanton said.

River dirt is too salty for the site. Any seepage could harm fish and wildlife away from the river, Stanton said.

South Jefferson was identified as the closest and most economical site, Stanton said. The district is under contract with the Corps to make it available, she said.

While the district looks at other locations, flood officials are promising to run South Jefferson so it is less of a nuisance. "It should have been better monitored and controlled," Stanton said.

'Keep it wet'

Dirt from flood defenses along Main Street and Veteran's Memorial Park was dumped at improper times with insufficient dust control this summer, Stanton said.

Adding to the noise, steel and concrete debris was dumped there, then sorted for removal. "That's not what the site is for," she said. "It is a soil disposal area."

While dumping is essentially over for this year, the Corps has promised that future work contracts will tightly regulate the disposal site, Stanton said.

There will be no on-site sorting of debris, Stanton said. Trucks delivering dirt will be tarped to prevent dust and a supervisor will be present at all times to make sure that water trucks keep dust down.

"They didn't have enough water trucks out there," Stanton said of this year's operation. "You've got to keep it wet."

Neighborhood opposition erupted after Tony Nargi and Lauri Deits, who moved into the Napa Yacht Club in early 2005, launched a Web site, www.no-more-dumping.com, this fall.

Their investigation revealed that as bad as conditions were the past two construction seasons, they would get worse when the bypass channel and Napa Creek improvements are constructed.

To date, the project has dumped 140,000 cubic yards of dirt on the South Jefferson parcel, said Julie Lucido, local project engineer. That's about 14,000 dump truck loads.

Yet to come from the bypass, Napa Creek and the Coombs detention basin are another 183,000 cubic yards, or over 18,000 dump truck loads.

The approved capacity of the site is 400,000 cubic yards, but the project will likely not achieve it, Lucido said.

Deits uncovered that the district, without informing the public, amended the flood project's environmental impact report in 2005 to allow more dumping at South Jefferson. The original limit of 230,000 cubic yards was increased to 400,000 cubic yards, said.

Portions of the 58 acres will ultimately have as much as seven feet of fill before they are released to the city for a park.

"It undermines our willingness to tolerate this when they make changes without letting us know," Krevet said. Even if the law allowed this modification without a hearing, flood officials owed it to the public to be more up front, he said.

Because the flood project continues to fall behind schedule due to inadequate federal funding, Deits said she and her neighbors now face a decade or more of dumping.

"This was our dream house," Deits said. "They've turned it into a nightmare."

Ron Greenslate, a resident of the Meadows, said elderly residents, many with serious health problems, are subjected to dust storms. "The prevailing wind brings absolutely Sahara dust storms across the Meadows," he said. "The dust is so thick you can taste it and feel it."

"It's government's job to make sure the job is done right," Greenslate said. "They're failing in their job."