The Hiwassee River is ‘doing pretty good,’ and is ‘in front of most of the development’
By Tom Bennett
Special to Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition, Inc.
Murphy, N.C., October 15, 2007 – The Hiwassee is a 968-mile necklace of rivers, creeks and lakes in and among the mountains where North Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee join in the Blue Ridge. I drove today to my favorite places along the Hiwassee’s length and watched the leaves of red maple, poplar and birch dapple the surface of the water through the late-afternoon sunlight.
Everything on the earth is fragile. All can be altered by human manipulation and mischief in what, in the life of the earth, is an instant. So as you walk along the bank of a river that is an irreplaceable visual element of western North Carolina and a key to its continued good economic health, you wonder, is anyone keeping a record of how well the river is doing? Is there a set of standards for measuring whether it is being steadily polluted? Can it stay essentially the same as it is now, to awe Americans not yet born?
Well, there is such a river report card. David Toms is the principal author of it. He is a basin planner in the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources’ Division of Water Quality. His department’s latest five-year “Hiwassee River Basinwide Water Quality Plan” has just been released, and Toms spoke at a meeting in nearby Hayesville, N.C., tonight to go over his plan in depth. The meeting was arranged by the Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition.
The watershed is “doing pretty good,” David Toms said. “You’ve got a lot of good water, and you’re in front of most of the development.”
He is a 32-year-old scientist with a degree in ecology who does a lot of fishing and recently began raising chickens. Those attributes certainly qualify him to (a) study water quality and (b) feel at home out here in the state’s rural far west.
I’ve watched with some awe the engineering projects here, and suspected that the cost of river restoration and other steps in returning streams to good health is exorbitant. However, I had no idea of the cost estimate that Dave Toms would give.
“The cost of protecting a stream can go well over $1 million a mile,” Toms said. (Callie Moore of the Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition added that the cost for projects managed locally here in this watershed is closer to $450,000 a mile.)
For any development of more than an acre, the landowner is supposed to send a sedimentation and erosion control plan to the Division of Land Resources, according to Toms. “If the Department of Environment & Natural Resources sees a violation, then it will send a Notice Of Violation.” The involved parties then usually have 30-60 calendar days to fix the problems at the site before another inspection is made. For Clay and Cherokee counties, the inspectors come from a state office in Swannanoa, NC, a two and half hour drive away.
A bill that would have regulated North Carolina hazardous artificial slope development slid down to defeat in the 2007 General Assembly. However, there are many local governments in western North Carolina lying to the north and east of this watershed that are taking on this responsibility themselves and passing their own ordinances, according to Toms.
“That’s my recommendation,” Toms said, “that you do it at the local level.”
On his list of major threats to this watershed, “limited or no land-use planning” scores a rueful first-place. At church Saturday, a dear fellow member supervising our work on the flower beds had me dig up, using shovel and mattock, a mature hosta plant measuring at least a yard across. Then after I had it out of the ground, she had someone else put it right back where it was. Cherokee and Clay countians seem to prefer to start the work and figure it out as they go.
These are my words, and not David Toms’: If Cherokee and Clay ever come to realize that the river and its continued beauty are keys to the tourism and homebuilding industries here, the keys to future economic prosperity for the region, they will elect a commission that will make modest general plans.
Now back to David Toms, who suggested that the community should decide what types of steep-slope and floodplain development it wants, and work that into a long-range plan.
During the four decades that I have attended workshops like this in Georgia, California and now North Carolina, there always has been at least one thing that startled me, and here is the one by Dave Toms from this event in Hayesville:
“The state of North Carolina has only monitored 24 percent of the 968.7 miles of freshwater streams in this watershed.” (It was suggested at the meeting that Georgia monitors less than that.)
So there is a greater need than ever for the Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition to find grants to teach about water quality and do the needs assessments and start the repairs.
David Toms succeeded Callie Moore in the planning role in Raleigh for this watershed after she moved here – a fortunate day. I asked David Toms for the following biographical material, so you can know him better:
“I’m 32 years old and graduated from North Carolina State University in 1999 with a Bachelor of Science in Ecology. I have been a planner for the Division of Water Quality since 2003. I am a Raleigh native. My mother’s family is from Wake County, and my father’s family is in Rutherford and Cleveland counties (North Carolina). My wife’s name is Rebecca and we have been married for four years with no children. I am an avid fisherman, backpacker, and canoeist. I also enjoy gardening and have just recently begun to raise a small flock of chickens.”
Tom Bennett of the Martins Creek community near Murphy, N.C., was a retired newsman, Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition member/volunteer/donor and recipient of the 2015 Holman Water Quality Stewardship Award. Tom died on December 28, 2020.