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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 west
of Murphy is a board member and a volunteer for Hiwassee River
Watershed Coalition.
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