The NC General Assembly reduces DENR’s ranks, but can’t staunch the agency’s zeal for protection of the endangered streams of the Tarheel state
Here in the far west along the Hiwassee River, a fourth cycle of five-year basin-wide water planning is complete, and this revealing document outlines the work so sorely needed
By Tom Bennett
Special to Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition
Murphy, N.C., Aug. 1, 2012 – Careful planning for the health of the 644-square-mile Hiwassee River basin here at the western tip of North Carolina has not been embraced by the current General Assembly, judging from what it has done with a cudgel during 2011 and 2012.
Yet anglers, campers, hikers, play-boaters and swimmers, and all human beings taking drinks of Hiwassee River freshwater from here to the Gulf of Mexico, surely count on such planning. They’d be confounded to learn that at the heart of N.C. state government, there’s a sweeping drive to cripple environmental regulation.
These parties regard streams here in the Blue Ridge Mountains as essential for their recreation — and for their families downstream, even more essential as a source of life-giving freshwater. They’ll breathe a sigh of relief to know that an agency called N.C. Dept. of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) exists. And among its many tasks, whatever the political climate, are to write basin-wide five-year water quality plans.
These plans for 17 basins from Murphy to Manteo reflect the grim determination of the stressed DENR employees – and those serving under equal or greater duress in local facilitators such as the Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition.
IMPAIRED STREAMS
Here in Cherokee County alone, there are 80 predominant summits of the Blue Ridge ranging up to 5,040 feet. These have cascading from them a lacy and fragile network of hundreds of streams. On reaching the bottomlands, their water quality is severely tested by 18 permitted storm-water discharges, 15 permitted wastewater discharge facilities (whose National Pollution Discharge Elimination Permits are herewith extended by DENR another five years to 2017), and countless other “non-point source” pollutants.
Seven streams earn the dubious honor of being identified by the testing process as impaired.
“Water quality data within a five-year data sampling period is assessed every two years and reported to the Environmental Protection Agency to meet requirements under Section 303(d) of the Clean Water Act of 1972,” according to the DENR basinwide plan.
Now read the following paragraph long after mealtime, and completion of the process of digestion:
Flunking those requirements as of the posting this year of this five-year plan, because they have too much turbidity or too much fecal coliform bacteria or are poor host communities for fish or macro-invertebrates, are these stretches of the following seven streams in this basin:
Valley River, 7.7 miles; Persimmon Creek, 5.9 miles; Martins Creek, 8.8 miles; Peachtree Creek, 5.3 miles; Slow Creek, 5.2 miles; Lamb Branch of Peachtree Creek), 1.7 miles; and Mission Branch, 1.8 miles.
ADVANCES IN RIVER BASIN MANAGEMENT
There now have been four cycles of basin-wide planning out here at the far western tip of the state and that’s remarkable. The fourth also reflects a significant advance in DENR’s work.
“The Division of Water Quality grouped sub-basins to conform to the federal system of river basin management,” according to Heather Patt, basin planner. She brings a lot of experience in this field over the last 15 years. I asked about her background and she e-mailed me from Raleigh:
“I got my bachelor of science from St. Lawrence University (in New York state) and spent a semester in Kenya back in 1995. I also spent a semester in Denmark but Kenya seems more glamorous. I was an AmeriCorps volunteer for two years in Washington state doing watershed restoration work. Then I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Madagascar doing rural community development work.
“Then I went to graduate school at Michigan State University, where I was actually able to do watershed research in western Kenya for my thesis project. Now I live in Raleigh, which isn’t so exciting compared to everything else I’ve done.”
I can surely imagine, Heather, that doing the selfless science of North Carolina river basin planning while the legislature was slashing DENR funding could not have been very much fun.
RESTORATION HOPES ALONG MARTINS CREEK
The insult to the earth called straight-pipe flushing of sewage from rural homes directly into streams has been a way of life along Martins Creek west of the county-seat town of Murphy.
Down in gulches directly squatting upon the stream bank, nether-world renters’ mobile-home camps employ this sanitary solution. Meanwhile, farmers’ livestock trample creek banks. The concept of mid-pasture cisterns to protect water is something to be grasped years from now, if ever. Be in no doubt of the extent of Martins Creek’s impairment.
A sparkling statutory requirement leftover from North Carolina’s golden age of environmental emphasis is DENR’s Ecosystem Enhancement Program and this long has held out hope for at least a modicum of work on Martins Creek. For there to be an EEP somehow at this writing has survived the General Assembly’s axe. Its concept is to do a bit of environmental repairs at selected sites as part of N.C. Dept. of Transportation’s work of building roads and bridges.
In 2008, NCDOT completed the $52 million five-mile relocation of U.S. 64 from the town of Murphy to near Murphy Medical Center, taking ambulances off a winding stretch of river road. This includes the 330-foot-long steel bridge, longest in the state, spanning the Hiwassee River.
Arising out of that was EEP’s October 2007 Peachtree-Martins Creek Watershed Management Plan. This has new life in the current 2012 basinwide plan.
“The Martins Creek project is on a large tract of largely wooded property that drains to Martins Creek, which was identified as the top priority for preservation in EEP’s project atlas.
“The project will protect almost four miles of highly functioning stream and riparian area and restore another mile of degraded stream along Martins Creek itself that flow to it and have been impacted by livestock grazing,” states this basin-wide document. “In addition, almost seven miles of riparian wetland will be restored in the Martins Creek floodplain.”
MISSIONARIES IN A REMOTE AND RUGGED REGION
Callie Moore is executive director of the Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition and her husband Philip Moore is director of the Hiwassee Project of the Land Trust for the Little Tennessee (which works to conserve land in that watershed, and in 2006 extended its purview to the Hiwassee River basin as well).
The Moores are leaders in their United Methodist church, and each weekday, they’re on mission too. It is to a place as forbidding and as remote, I’d say, as the landscape’s severe erosion and neglect for conservation Heather Patt surely saw on the island of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean.
In the case of the Moores, they’re on mission in another seemingly desolate place. It is to the far recesses of the minds of many of the western North Carolina mountain people. They nurture an ingrained opposition to environmental protection. This obduracy is so strong that when you first encounter it, it’s staggering.
I’m happy to report how this Internet posting in 2012 of a five-year river basin plan makes a record of some important history in this field in North Carolina. I mean the work to date of the Moores, their organizations, and the now-gutted N.C. Clean Water Management Trust Fund, all fitfully striving to maintain a foothold for environmental caretaking out here.
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.