Raging Water War Impacts Midlands: The More Our Neighbors to the North Use, the More Pollution and Environmental Woes S.C.
By Joey Holleman, The State, Columbia, S.C.
Jun. 24–The Wateree River churns to life just below the Cedar Creek dam, when the Catawba River merges with Big Wateree Creek.
It ends about 50 miles as the crow flies, and twice that far as the fish swims, downstream when the Wateree makes one last swampy loop through the southern border of Congaree National Park before merging with the Congaree River.
In between, the Wateree provides a home to record-breaking flathead catfish, a playground for recreational boaters and crucial water for thousands of homes and several major industries. It’s an economic engine for a big chunk of the Midlands.
When South Carolina fired the first shot in a water war with North Carolina last month in the U.S. Supreme Court, many Midlands residents yawned at the talk of cubic feet per second, dissolved oxygen and low inflow protocol. But the implications are monumental for the Midlands.
Lake Wateree and the Wateree River are like hungry kids at the end of the table, with the other 10 lakes in the 225-mile Catawba-Wateree system taking their food first. Meanwhile problems — be it drought, flood or pollution — flow downstream.
“Lake Wateree is enormously compounded by being the last impound in the watershed,” said Catawba riverkeeper Donna Lisenby, whose organization advocates for river protection.
STARTING SMALL
As part of its hydropower push throughout the Catawba-Wateree system in the early 1900s, Duke Power built the Lake Wateree dam in 1920, flooding the rolling hills bordering the northern third of the river. That created a 13,710-acre lake with 242 miles of shoreline in Lancaster, Kershaw and Fairfield counties.
In the leisure-time boom after World War II, Duke started leasing lakefront property to locals. Because they didn’t own the property, the families built simple fishing shacks. “It was like a big, one-room tent,” said Becky McSwain, describing her family’s first lake house built in 1948.
Duke began to sell the leased lots in the early 1980s, the first ripple in a wave of change. Two decades later, scattered fishing shacks remain, but they’re often next to opulent lakefront mansions. Some commuters from Columbia and Charlotte live on the lake. Most of the opulent homes, however, are weekend retreats. The number of homes on the lake in Fairfield County taxed as primary residences crept up from 301 in 1997 to 403 in 2007. The appraised value of lake property, including land and second homes, has exploded to $11.4 million from $3.9 million in that same time, according to the county assessor’s office.
Growth is good for the economy but not necessarily for the lake.
“On a Saturday, this is like I-26,” said McSwain as she puttered across a near empty lake in a pontoon boat on a drizzly Wednesday. “I don’t even take the boat out on weekends.”
In her lakekeeper role with the Catawba Riverkeeper organization, McSwain organizes an annual trash sweep that picks up more litter in coves each year.
But it’s the less visible pollution that’s the real concern. High levels of phosphorus show up on half the lake’s water-quality monitors, according to the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control. While Wateree has fewer pollution problems than most state lakes, the agency is studying sources and solutions to the phosphorus problem, said Mihir Mehta, watershed coordinator for the state agency.
The suspects include upstream industries and sewer systems in the fast-growing Charlotte area, but earlier studies also point to the conversion of forests to housing developments on the upstream lakes and their tributaries, Lisenby said.
Lake Wateree advocates look even closer to home, at the well-manicured lawns that allow fertilizer to wash directly into the lake. “We’re trying to get people to leave some of the natural vegetation, try to plant things that will do well without modifying the environment,” McSwain said. “There’s so much development you have the potential to kill the goose that laid the golden egg.”
LOOKING UPSTREAM
Kershaw County has put together a land-use plan that encourages vegetative buffers, and lake leaders will encourage Fairfield County to follow suit.
Preventing development on portions of the shoreline can help. As part of the recent relicensing of the dam permit by the Federal Energy Regulatory Agency, Duke Energy and its land-managing entity, Crescent Resources, agreed 25 percent of the shoreline should be off-limits to development.
But all of the efforts in the immediate lake community won’t alleviate the upstream problems, however.
“Really the problem is sprawl” especially around Charlotte, Lisenby said. “And that’ll be exacerbated when interbasin transfers reduce the amount of water coming out of Lake Wylie and coming downstream.”
North Carolina has given permission to the cities of Kannapolis and Concord to take 10 million gallons of water from the Catawba per day. They plan to use it, then dump it in the Rocky River, which runs into the Pee Dee River basin. Charlotte has permission to move 33 million gallons per day out of the Catawba basin.
ECONOMIC IMPACT
South Carolina sued North Carolina in the U.S. Supreme Court this month, claiming the transfers are illegal. While the lawyers battle, people at the end of the line worry.
When less water pulses through the river system, the remaining water has higher concentrations of harmful substances. And less water in the system could reduce the Wateree River to a trickle in drought times. That can be bad for industries and utilities, and deadly for wildlife.
“Our mill operations are dependent on an ample supply of water,” said Susan McPherson, spokeswoman for International Paper’s Wateree River plant. “Without water or with limited water, our ability to produce paper will be impacted, which in turn would have numerous economic impacts for our mill, our employees and the community.”
International Paper and SCE&G, both in Richland County, and Kawashima Textile, Deroyal Textile, Clariant and Invista in Kershaw County have permits to pull water from the Wateree River. They wouldn’t be located where they are if not for the availability of water crucial to their operations. They use the water, treat it, then return it to the river. Very little is consumed.
Those six river-dependent businesses employ about 2,250 employees and pay millions in county taxes.
Lower water flow can hurt those job-rich companies.
During the 2002 drought, water levels dipped to the point where International Paper had to conserve water, but it never had to cut back operations. Last year, in less severe conditions, Invista had to get a permit from the state to run emergency water pumps to pull water from the low river.
OUT OF THE TAP
For thousands of residents in fast-growing northeastern Richland County and southeastern Kershaw County, the Wateree system also serves as either spigot or toilet, or both.
The Lugoff-Elgin Water Authority and the City of Camden together take about 5 million gallons of water from the Wateree to supply 12,700 homes or businesses. They have permits to take out nearly twice that much water, allowing for the population growth bound to occur.
More than 30,000 people depend on those utilities for their water, and even more people depend on the Wateree River to carry away treated sewage.
Water shortages already have impacted water customers. Near the end of the 2002 drought, low water levels prompted algae blooms that caused foul smelling tap water. Many customers bought bottled water to drink.
Since then, the Lugoff-Elgin Water Authority has spent about $30,000 on an activated charcoal filtration system to help absorb odor when blooms occur, said Michael Hancock, general manager of the water system.
“Whatever’s put into the water upstream, we have to take out so people can drink it,” Hancock said.
GOING WITH THE FLOW
The water’s quantity is more a concern than its quality to Camden fishing guide Michael Williams. He’s been fishing on the lake and river for half a century, and he considers the lake fishery as good as it’s been in 20 years. Catfish, crappie and largemouth bass are plentiful. A 74-pound flathead catfish caught on the lake held the state record for years.
On a recent fishing excursion on the lake, the six rods on Williams’ boat were flapping as large striped bass hit the shad bait within sight of the dam. On the other side of the dam, however, the river fishery is very sick.
“Five years ago, I could have brought you out here and guaranteed you’d catch a striper,” Williams said, standing on the bank of the Wateree River just below the dam. “But I haven’t caught a striped base in the shoals this year.”
Striped bass are in decline elsewhere — on the Congaree, Broad and Saluda rivers and in lakes Murray, Marion and Moultrie — but the situation is worse in the upper reaches of the Wateree. The S.C. Department of Natural Resources blames overfishing and has proposed drastic limits on the number of stripers that can be caught each year.
Williams agrees that might help elsewhere, but the stripers on the Wateree River need more help — mainly more water.
The measure of the Catawba River’s flow near Camden was below 2,000 cubic feet per second 140 days last year, and already has sunk to that level 30 times this year, before the traditionally dry summer period. The river dipped below 2,000 only 13 times in 2003.
At the other end of the spectrum, severe floods have been less frequent.
“The water used to come up all the time,” Williams said. “That was a way of life. You don’t see that anymore. When they cut off that flow, the water’s sitting there, 98 degrees. Where are the fish going to go?”
Williams blames upstream users who are sucking more water out of the system. He worries about what will happen to other fish species if interbasin transfers further deplete the water.
Development on the river as it flows through Kershaw, Richland and Sumter counties isn’t a problem. After seeing a few riverfront homes near U.S. 1, someone paddling down the Wateree wouldn’t see another all the way to the Congaree.
Instead, you would see high, forested bluffs often directly across from white sandbars tucked inside sweeping river curves.
The Richland County side of the river is typical, with only 22 riverfront tracts, averaging 1,125 acres. Most are managed for timber production.
That limited development is thanks to state and federal agencies and conservation groups joining the Wateree with the Congaree and upper Santee rivers to form the Cowasee Basin Focus Area. The group hopes to convince many of the large landowners to put their property under conservation easements, preventing large-scale housing developments.
The Wateree River “is pretty pristine by the standards of a lot of Southeastern rivers, and we want to keep it that way,” said Buddy Baker, who coordinates the Cowasee group for the Department of Natural Resources.
Like the Congaree and the Santee, the Wateree’s flood plain widens when it reaches the coastal plain just south of I-20. The river winds in wide curves through thick bottomland hardwood forests that create ideal wildlife habitat.
The Fork Swamp area, just before the Wateree meets the Congaree, has among the highest density of winter songbirds ever recorded, according to wildlife biologist John Cely.
The most recent expansion of Congaree National Park moved its southern boundary into Fork Swamp, putting the Wateree River in the park and adding the National Park Service to the voices crying to keep Wateree River levels high.
“The vegetation is adapted to flood pulses,” said Bill Hulslander, chief of resources at the park. “It needs a healthy flow of water.”
Reach Holleman at (803) 771-8366
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Copyright (c) 2007, The State, Columbia, S.C.
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