One of the top concerns cited by opponents of timber management in the Waynesville watershed is erosion.

Even with helicopter logging — which doesn’t carve new roads or plow up dirt with dozers — the mat of roots woven over the soil will die where a tree is removed.

“It is just the same as pulling a nail from two boards,” said Charles Miller of Waynesville. It spells erosion, he said.

“I can just see all this erosion when they cut them trees heading right down to that lake,” said Alderman Kenneth Moore, who is against the plan. That lake — the drinking water reservoir at the bottom of the watershed — could get polluted with sediment, he said.

Miller said a 1990 soil survey of Haywood County shows only 5 percent of the watershed is suitable to logging, and that’s the flat places along the streams. The rest is too steep. But flat low-lying areas along streams aren’t any better.

“They can put the best silt fences up they can, but there is still going to be silt in the streams,” said Garrett Smathers, a Haywood County resident who was a former ecologist with the National Park Service and professor at UNC-Asheville.

Alderman Gary Caldwell, who is also against the plan, said erosion is his main reason.

“When you take the canopy down, that rain’s going hit the soils and it’s going to wash it,” Caldwell said. “Look at the erosion that is filling Lake Junaluska up, for example.”