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Group Tours River It's Charged With Protecting

Posted on: Thursday, 4 August 2005, 21:00 CDT

Aug. 4--SUNSET HARBOR, N.C. - Larry Lockwood looks over the Lockwood Folly River every day and thinks about the quality of the water flowing past his property.

On Wednesday, he traveled upstream to the N.C. 211 bridge and was impressed by the amount of undeveloped land still abutting the water. That will quickly change when Brunswick County's new sewer system starts operation early next year, opening the area to more growth.

Lockwood is in a group tapped by the county to design a watershed-wide plan to protect the river from increased stormwater runoff, the first time such an approach has been taken in North Carolina.

"Yeah, I think we can do it," said Lockwood, no relation to the river's namesake, after a meeting that followed the group's tour of the river.

It will be tough, though, said Ed Jackson of the state's Shellfish Sanitation Division, to make rules that will restore the river as a place where fishermen can harvest the shellfish that grow there.

Each development, such as Winding River and River Run Plantation where Lockwood lives, puts more pressure on water quality. Each boat ramp, marina, landscaped yard and boat dock has helped enlarge the area of the river closed to shellfishing because of pollution.

Steve Stone, Brunswick's assistant county manager and the staff liaison to the Lockwood Folly River Watershed Roundtable, said the best the group may be able to do within its allotted year is to recommend rules to allow for increased development while stopping further degradation.

The next step could be to require those already adjoining the river to retrofit controls that would help improve the water's quality and possibly reopen areas now closed to shellfishing.

The image presented by the tanin-stained river water belies the threat it faces.

Herons and egrets prowl the oyster beds near the shrimp boats at Varnamtown, feasting on the bounty that's now denied to humans.

The river snakes through wide areas of marsh just inland from there and beyond; osprey nests and kingfish perches frame scenes that people don't want to disappear.

A little farther upriver, Jackson tells those in his boat to watch the low-lying, wooded banks for the 9-foot alligator he knows to live in the area. White and purple flowers bloom on water-loving plants along the shoreline.

Alan Lewis, a civil engineer and, like Lockwood, a member of the group, said at the post-river-trip meeting that the group shouldn't look at maps of the entire area and think that broad rules will be their best solution.

Each piece of property is different, he said, and developers have become much more sophisticated in being able to keep runoff from waterways.

Rather, Lewis said, Brunswick should develop a system of "flags" that county planning staff and developers could resolve, one at a time, in putting houses on property.

"There's going to have to be some common-sense approach to this," he said after Bill Farris, the group's facilitator, explained the development of a risk-assessment model for land suitability.

The maps that went with the explanation outlined much of the 88,000-acre watershed as areas where special caution needs to determine development.

What the Lockwood Folly River Watershed Roundtable does is something Todd Miller, executive director of the N.C. Coastal Federation, hopes can be a model for other watersheds in North Carolina.

It is intended as a way to educate residents and the state, with public forums planned before recommendations are made next year.

What the group's members have seen so far, Lockwood says, is just the beginning.

"It's a start," he said. "That's all it is."

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Source: The Sun News (Myrtle Beach, S.C.)

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