Rain delays aside, Washington Crossing National Cemetery is expected to be open and burial-ready by mid-December.

NOTE from Larry Scott, VA Watchdog dot Org ... To learn more about your veterans' Burial and Memorial benefits ... use the VA's page for the National Cemetery Administration ...  access here ...
http://www.cem.va.gov/

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VA battles tough conditions to build cemetery

By Anthony R. Wood
Inquirer Staff Writer

In getting one of the nation's newest national veterans' cemeteries ready, Dick Kollar was prepared to do battle with nature.

He got ambushed anyway.

"I came to the site with a full mind's eye of having dust-control issues," said Kollar, the Veterans Affairs official overseeing the construction of the Washington Crossing National Cemetery, a few miles from the park of the same name.

But instead of bone-dry conditions, since the digging began back on May 21, again and again the crews have found themselves mired in mud fights set off by a succession of serious rainstorms.

"It's frustrating on everyone's part," Kollar said Friday, when a storm packing tree-bending winds knocked out power to the site. Overall, from May 21 through Friday, this was the 10th-wettest such period in 138 years of record keeping.

"There were points in time when I would have given my right arm for dust," he said.

Nevertheless, rain delays aside, Kollar said last week that he expected the cemetery, long a source of controversy and debate, to be open and burial-ready by mid-December.

Once it is fully developed, it will be "the Cadillac of cemeteries," promised Joseph Cairone, of Cairone & Kaupp, the Fishtown firm awarded a $1.5 million contract to design the site. The serpentine road system winding around emerald-green grass and sparkling white headstones will be aimed at creating "some suspense . . . some adventure," he said.

Added Cairone: "It's like literally a city of the dead above ground."

The main reception building will have a stone facade to match the predominant building style in the area, said David Cooper, the Cairone site manager.

That might take up to two years to finish, however, and when the cemetery opens, visitors will encounter temporary buildings more suited to a trailer park. The cemetery will be a work in progress for the next 60 years, with an ultimate capacity of 124,951 by 2072.

Last week, crews working for eight different contractors were busily preparing for those first burials. A field of 1,789 concrete double vaults - each to accommodate two bodies, one atop the other - had been planted atop rocky soil dating to the age of the dinosaurs.

Before Friday, weather conditions last week were good for vault-planting: cloudy, and on the cool side. The sun off the white vaults can generate brutal, enervating heat, Kollar said.

The assembled vaults gave the appearance of an aircraft-carrier deck, but eventually, they will be covered with fescue, rye, and bluegrass. When it opens, the cemetery will accommodate 5,300 bodies and cremated remains.

The Washington Crossing facility is one of 12 new VA burial grounds under development or in the planning stages. It's not that graveyard space for veterans is wanting, the VA says; the agency is trying to locate burial places in areas with dense veteran populations. About 350,000 veterans live in the eight-county Philadelphia region, according to the VA.

The VA evidently is marching against a trend: New cemeteries these days are rare, industry experts say.

The growing popularity of cremations has lessened the demand for space, they say, and another factor is price.

"They cost a fortune to build," said Greg Stromm, an executive with StoneMor Partners, a national cemetery developer based in Bucks County. The land-acquisition costs alone can be prohibitive. "I can't even think of a place in this area where someone could go and build a cemetery for a reasonable cost," he said.

The government already has committed more than $19 million to the Washington Crossing project, including $10.5 million to buy the land.

And the maintenance costs will never end.

"A cemetery is the only business that has to service what it sells forever," said Robert Fells, of the International Cemetery, Cremation, and Funeral Association.

Graveside visitors do not want to leave their flower arrangements amid weeds. Private operators, he said, are required by law to set up trust funds for ongoing maintenance. "Once you're in the cemetery business," he said, "you can't get out of it."

He added that the VA could find itself in a particularly challenging situation because it has to rely on the largesse of Congress for appropriations year by year.

"Maintenance is a very important issue for the VA," Cooper said. As one cost-control measure, part of the grounds will be covered with a "meadow mix" that won't require constant mowing, he said.

The landscaping is far and away the biggest of the expenses, Kollar said, but there are others. Headstones, for example, have to be constantly cleaned. Maintenance, he said, "just keeps going."

That's another reason that few new cemeteries have opened in the last 25 years, StoneMor's Stromm said. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia does plan to open one - All Souls Cemetery, in Brandywine Township, Chester County - on Nov. 2, but that would be the first since 1983, spokeswoman Donna Farrell said.

The effort to get the Washington Crossing project going was long and arduous, a decadelong battle involving veterans, politicians, and 13 competing sites.

In 2006, the VA bought farmland in Upper Makefield Township for $10.5 million. After the acquisition, U.S. Rep. Jim Gerlach (R., Pa.) called on the VA to reconsider. He wanted the cemetery at the former Pennhurst State School and Hospital in East Vincent Township, Chester County. However, the VA stuck with its decision.

That ended a process that had begun back in 1998, when U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, then a Republican and now a Democrat, and U.S. Rep. Jon Fox, a Montgomery County Republican, introduced legislation calling for a cemetery in the region.

Construction at the site finally began in May, and nature immediately intervened, Kollar said. Heavy rains at the outset impeded work on the stormwater system. It became so muddy that the heavy digging equipment couldn't even get to the retention basin.

Then, in August, the weather became even wetter. It was the third-wettest August on record in Philadelphia.

"We're looking for some of that dust we're trying to control," Kollar said Friday, as rains pounded the site yet again.

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TOPICS: veterans, veterans' benefits, VA, Department of Veterans' Affairs, Washington Crossing National Cemetery