Daniel Stoddard, senior vice president for nuclear operations at Dominion, said during a press briefing last week that the company completed thousands of hours of work, hundreds of system and component inspections and other tests. It installed additional seismic-monitoring equipment, upgraded instrumentation and revised response procedures.

The plant, on Lake Anna near Mineral, was about a dozen miles from the epicenter of the magnitude-5.8 tremor.

--Rusty Dennen

CRAFTSMEN REPAIRING CULPEPER'S MASTERPIECE

The towering chimneys of Salubria, a circa-1757 Georgian mansion in Culpeper County, were fractured by last year's quake and had to be removed swiftly to protect its hipped roof.

Now, rebuilt by master mason Jimmy Price, the corbeled chimneys stand again, rising 20 feet above the roof. The chimneys were crafted from carefully salvaged bricks and new, oversized ones made by Old Carolina Brick in Salisbury, N.C., to resemble the Colonial-era ones.

The roof, supported by its original beams and hand-carved king post, is getting a new, weather-tight skin.

Peter Post, whose team re-roofed James Madison's Montpelier and outbuildings at Mount Vernon, is making round-tailed shingles of British Columbia yellow cedar to match originals salvaged from the dusty recesses of Salubria's attic.

"All those bricks cascading busted the rafters in the attic," said Douglas Harnsberger, the architectural historian from Swarthmore, Pa., who is supervising the work. "So we have eight ruptured rafters as well, and we are repairing those, and sistering new rafters in to repair the framing. And then we are putting a new shingled roof on, because the shingle up there is at the end of its life. It's 30 years old."

Virginia Lime Works of Madison Heights, Historic Roofing of Richmond and Hitt Contracting of Falls Church are collaborating on the repairs. The craftsmen aim to complete the job by late September.

A Federal Emergency Management Agency grant will cover about $356,000 of the project's $950,000 cost. Salubria's steward, the Memorial Foundation of the Germanna Colonies in Virginia, is raising the rest "from generous patriots," it said.

--Clint Schemmer and Dan McFarland

GERMANNA BUILDING BEING REPAIRED AND RENOVATED

Germanna Community College students were in the second day of the fall semester when the earthquake rumbled beneath them last August.