Make sure the water’s clean before taking a swim using the Swim Guide app, a resource offering a weekly update on E. coli levels in water recreation areas across the region.

A new study from researchers focusing on the forest-water connection in the Southern U.S. found that, over the coming decades, many forested watersheds could be lost to development, lowering water quality and raising water treatment costs.

A coalition working to remove the aged Ela Dam in Swain County has raised $8 million of an estimated $10 million needed to complete the project.

Sept. 27, 2021, was a day of constant phone calls and email notifications for Brendan Davey, regional supervisor at the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality office in Asheville.

Complaints by a neighbor about sediment in a creek have resulted in two notices of violation being issued to the new owners of the Waynesville Inn and Golf Club by the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality. 

Nearly two decades ago, Eric Romaniszyn joined the nonprofit world as the new project manager for Haywood Waterways Association .

Work to remediate a leaky, gassy mound just northeast of Waynesville that has been nothing but an expensive headache for generations of Haywood County elected officials has finally reached substantial completion. 

It was around 1 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 4, when Ken Brown’s phone started lighting up with photo texts depicting a massive sediment load dropping into the Oconaluftee River below Ela Dam, also known as the Bryson Hydroelectric Project. Within half an hour, he was standing on the riverbank. 

Nearly four decades ago, vast swathes of the 8,600-acre Waynesville watershed were laid bare, the trees timbered for profit and the soil harvested to build the earth-filled dam now holding back the reservoir.

Fast forward to 2019, and the landscape has changed dramatically. There is no more bare soil, and no more open canopy. It’s a full-grown forest, sunlight filtering through a green canopy below which the only sounds are those produced by the birds, insects and wind. The white pines planted to stabilize the stripped soil have thrived, perhaps too much. In 2014, a good many of them were cut down during a thinning conducted on a 50-acre portion of the property, as the seedlings were planted too close together to serve them well as they grew larger. But white pine is still a common species in the 8,600-acre watershed.

A month of rain capped off by the arrival of Tropical Storm Alberto has caused massive flooding, landslides and loss of life in North Carolina’s western region, but the mountains west of Asheville were mostly able to escape the devastation experienced in Polk, McDowell, Avery and Buncombe counties. 

“I think everyone’s optimistic that we dodged a bullet to have got 20 inches of rain in two weeks and not gotten any more extensive flooding than what we had,” said Joe Deal, agriculture extension agent for Macon County Cooperative Extension.