A UNC plan to expand an animal storage and research facility in rural western Orange County is the latest in a wave of projects, real or rumored, to put residents on edge.

UNC is in the early stage of a three-phase plan to add several buildings and some infrastructure to its Research Resources Facility, a decades-old animal storage operation known as "The Farm."

The facility is off Orange Chapel Clover Garden Road in the White Cross area, where residents already fear UNC might build an airport and where county officials plan to build a solid waste transfer station.

The expansion is raising environmental concerns among residents who get their water from wells and are accustomed to a quiet, bucolic lifestyle.

Laura Streitfeld, who lives off Morrow Mill Road, worries about animal waste contaminating the local water supply. She said UNC began its expansion quietly and only started answering questions when neighbors began asking them.

"I feel like we don't know too much about it," she said. "Neighbors found out about it becuse they found surveyer's tape on their property."

UNC has held two information sessions in recent weeks to address concerns and Linda Convissor, UNC's local relations director, said the university is following proper environmental procedures.

She said one widely held belief -- that UNC built a waste lagoon on the property -- is false. A large retention basin is for water that has been filtered, treated and will ultimately be spray-irrigated -- under state rules -- into nearby woods.

"It's not a lagoon; it's a holding pond," she said.

Convissor also knocked back claims that a well UNC built for its expanded facilities will draw water away from local homes.

"There's no reason to expect that to happen," she said.

Expansion of The Farm is under way. A new animal storage building is just about complete, as is the new well and water treatment plant, Convissor said. Three more buildings are planned in the next phase two for animal storage and one for research support and animal treatment but only one is funded so far, she said. Additional facilities are planned for a third phase.

The storage facilities would house hundreds of dogs, pigs, rodents and sheep used in medical research at UNC, but they do not signal a shift in research priorities at the medical school, said John Bradfield, UNC's director of laboratory animal medicine.

"The real reason we have to expand, to put it bluntly, is that UNC has been pretty successful doing research," he said. "Investigators have been successful getting grant funding, so this is the university's attempt to keep that going. These facilities are being conceived and planned to keep up with that growth."

Much of the research involves hemophilia and uses a dog colony UNC breeds and keeps at the facility. At any time, UNC has 80 to 100 of these dogs, which Bradfield said are mixed breeds and useful in research because they have naturally occurring hemophilia -- a blood disorder.

"It's unique and allows for some really important science to be conducted," he said.

A separate colony of similar size is used in muscular dystrophy research because those dogs have a disease that mimicks muscular dystrophy, Bradfield said.

Animals that die there are incinerated on site, he said.

Some residents acknowledge their frustration comes from the seemingly endless parade of projects that are coming or may hit their quiet community. The airport discussion colors all conversation these days, even though there is no plan yet. UNC consultants, in searching for an airport site to replace Horace Williams airport facility in 2005, tagged a patch of land in White Cross as the best of several potential locations other than Raleigh-Durham International Airport.

With the legislature creating an airport authority that would locate, buld and operate an airport in the county, residents have their hackles up.

Wendy Curtis, who lives on MIllikan Road, less than a mile from the UNCaaaresearch facility, said that while she is among those residents worried about the expanded facility's effects on the environment, the airport is her primary concern.

"It's a combo of the two; we're getting hit from all areas," she said. "This is a community that is supposed to be kept pristine."