Here is the kerosene in Hardin creek and the industrial strength paper towles being used to clean it up. The red stuff is the kerosene, it is died red so that it can be identified in situations like this.

On July 21, 2010 an oil spill occurred at Mountain Oil Company in Boone, NC. The spill happened at the Mountain Oil facility on King Street.

The day before the spill, one of the workers Mountain Oil left a maintenance door open on one of the storage tanks. Early the next a different person began filling that tank with kerosene. The kerosene spilled straight onto the ground, it soaked into the soil and eventually reached the water table, and then it began seeping out into Hardin Creek.

Kerosene in Hardin Creek

Hardin Creek flows behind the Toyota Dealership, underneath the Regal Cinema, and then it goes under King Street and flows next to the new high school, before reaching the South Fork of the New River.

Cleanup efforts continue at the Mountain Oil facility, and on Hardin Creek. Mountain Oil is paying for cleanup costs.

Clean up efforts continue in Hardin Creek

Much of the aquatic life in Hardin Creek has been killed by this event. However, there are still some fish and other things living. Since the kerosene floats on top of the water, rather than mixing with it, the ecological effects of this spill have not been as bad as the one on Hodges Creek earlier in the week. On the other hand this spill is longer lasting. Since the oil soaked into the ground it has been leaching out slowly into the creek.

Here is a short video that Kara Made explaining the spill and the clean up.

Check back here for more updates and check out this short story from the Watauga Democrat.

Dead fish found in Hodges Creek, Boone NC

Over the weekend of July 17, polluted runoff from the BB&T parking lot on Highway 105 in Boone, NC killed all life in a 1.5 mile long stretch of Hodge’s Creek. Watuaga Riverkeeper, Donna Lisenby investigated the incident on Saturday evening. NC Department of Water Quality officials did not arrive to investigate the site until Monday morning, two day and two more rain storms later.

Here is the video Donna made, documenting her investigation, and surveying the damage.

The cause of the fish kill was determined to be a coal-tar based asphalt sealant applied by Sunshine Striping Asphalt and Seal Coat of Pine Hall NC. We could find no record of this company being licensed or bonded in North Carolina, or being licensed as a general contractor.  Eye witnesses report seeing the sealant being applied in the rain. This asphalt sealant is water soluble, so in the rain it just washed off the parking lot and straight into the creek, killing everything in it.

The material data safety sheet (MSDS) for Asphalt Based Pavement Sealer reads:

SECTION VII—SPILL OR LEAK PROCEDURES SARA TITLE III: #302: No #304 CERCLA: No #313: No Steps to be Taken in Case Material is Released or Spilled: Ventilate the area. Wear approved respiratory protection. Wear suitable protective clothing, gloves, and eye/face protection. Coal Tar Driveway Sealer is a marine pollutant and should be placarded as such when transported in bulk over sea or large bodies of water. Coal Tar Driveway Sealer will harm waterlife and should be prevented from entering any body of water. Dispose of in accordance with federal, state and local regulations.

Coal tar, which would be listed as a ‘hazardous waste,’ were it not for a special federal exemption, contains benzo[a]pyrene.  Benzo[a]pyrene is dangerous chemical that made EPA’s list of 12 priority “persistent bioaccumulative toxins.” Still, coal tar is being applied to asphalt across the country, and concerns are growing that toxins from the product are being tracked into homes, schools, hospitals and other buildings.

Check out the following presentation from Austin that more fully explains how coal tar sealants harm our environment.

The city of Austin, TX banned the product almost 5 years ago, when it was recognized to be damaging the local ecosystem. More recently a few other cities, including Washington, D.C., have followed suit.  Overwhelmingly, though, the product remains unregulated, exacting unmeasured costs on cities and ecosystems (like Boone and Hodge’s creek) across the country. Not only is this stuff toxic, but there are cheap, far less toxic petroleum based alternatives, so there is really no reason to use this stuff at all.

Now that the toxic effects of coal-tar based sealants has been made abundantly clear to the people of Boone, we are working to promote a ban of coal-tar based asphalt sealants in the town of Boone, with the hope that other surrounding towns and counties will follow suit.

Click here to check out a story in the Watauga Democrat’s about Hodge’s Creek accident.

Click here to see photos of the Riverkeeper Team doing an aquatic life assessment on Hodge’s Creek with the Division of Water Quality.

On Saturday July 24, The Watuaga Riverkeeper and Appalachian Voices showed the high country a great time at the first ever Watauga Riverkeeper Festival. Held at the Valle Crucis Community Park, the event brought out kids and adults to have fun and celebrate the Watauga River. The purpose of the festival was to promote environmental stewardship through outdoor recreation. Getting out and enjoying natural treasures like the Watauga River helps us appreciate them and see the need for their protection.

Some of the festivities included fly fishing clinics, a watermelon eating contest,  nature walks, field games for the kids, a bouncy hut, local vendors and food. Great music was provided by The Alberta Boys and Melissa Reeves.

A special thanks goes out to all our sponsors:

Pearls and body paint at the WRK festival. Check out the mountains and the river. Now thats our kind of art!

Tsuga Canopies

River And Earth Adventures

Earth Fair

Mast General Store

Foscoe Fishing

Footsloggers

The Town of Banner Elk

Dot Griffith and Jamie Goodman took these pictures that do the event more justice than my description.

More Pictures from Jamie Goodman can be found here.

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Kids in the Watauga river at the festival. Yes, thankfully the Watauga is still a wild mountain river where kids can play till their hearts content, er well at least until their parents haul them out. No concrete, no docks, no boats. Just kids, rocks and the river, the way it ought to be.

Boys playing in the Watauga River. Ok, so raise your hand if you have fond memories from your childhood of swimming in a clean cold mountain river with your friends?

People enjoying the shade and the food under the pavilion

Hula hooping to the live music

“Water is a right, not a commodity.” What is the real price of ‘liquid gold?’ “There is enough water for human need but not for human greed,” Gandhi.

Powerful statements have inundated the popular perception of water-rights activism. In a time where water wars divide nations and the struggle to survive can be defined by a 5-gallon bucket, the political and social repercussions of water ownership can destroy or unify communities.

But in Boone, NC we aren’t faced with rapidly falling water tables or toxic sludge lurking within the sources of our drinking water. Paddle (or tube or wade) down the Watauga River and you can still witness nature’s pristine beauty. Worn rock faces testify to the ancient history of the Appalachian Mountains. Cows and horses munch on thriving grasses, a testament to the region’s agricultural reliance on the Watauga. The deceiving simplicity of the Watauga River rests in its murmuring rapids and meandering path. The complexity of maintaining this reliability rests in nature’s filters (plants), flood plains, and cyclical processes. Within a 2 hour kayak trip my eyes adjusted from the computer screen to lush trees and clear skies; my body relaxed from the stiff office chair to the smooth rock and toss of my boat. I am continually amazed at the rejuvenating power of enjoying nature. Playing in a river is like returning home—my fondest childhood memories were skipping rocks, splashing friends and scavenging for crawdads.

As we ‘grow up’ we are faced with the reality that water is not always clean nor always abundant. News headlines flash stories of water abuses and environmental injustices from Appalachia to the Amazon, Nile and Mekong. Cherishing and protecting our local watershed ensures that our community won’t be another catastrophic headline. Water rights activism is not restrained to smart slogans or dramatic campaigns. Teaching a child how to fish, reporting sediment erosion to local officials, or conserving water use at home are all ways to guard the community’s water security. To the Watauga River we are all advocates, protectors, messengers—in a sense, Waterkeepers.

In hopes of encouraging the EPA to come out with overdue regulations on the handling of coal ash, EIP and Earth Justice with help from the Appalachian Voices Watauga Riverkeeper team released a report today illustrating the damages caused by 31 coal ash disposal sites across the country.

The report details 31 sites where major damage to surface water or groundwater has been documented. The pollution present in this waste is among the earth’s most harmful to aquatic life and humans – arsenic, lead, selenium, cadmium and other heavy metals, which cause cancer and crippling neurological damage. If these poisons can be kept out of the fish we eat, the water we drink, bathe in, and need to survive, simply through regulation, than we must take that long overdue step, not only for the sake of our public waters but for humanity’s sake as well.

Asheville Ash Pond and Nearby Homes

Coal Ash Moonscape at Belews Creek Steam Station

The sites highlighted in the report are by no means the only sites where damage has occurred surrounding coal ash ponds, these are only 31 of the sites that have the most available information showing clear environmental effects. In fact as reported last year by the Appalachian Voices Riverkeeper Team- in North Carolina all of the 13 coal ash ponds have been found to be leaching heavy metals into groundwater, but only the worst five are listed in today’s national report on coal ash contamination to waterways. The report is meant to supplement an EPA list of about 70 proven and potential damage cases from coal ash disposal facilities.

Six of the 31 damage cases listed in this report are in North Carolina. They include Progress Energy’s Asheville, Cape Fear, Lee and Sutton power plants, Duke Energy’s Belews Creek plant, and the Swift Creek Landfill “beneficial use site” operated by ReUse Technology, Inc. and Full Circle Solutions Inc..

Currently there is no federal regulation regarding the disposal of coal ash and coal combustion waste. It is often stored in huge, wet unlined open ponds adjacent to rivers and streams. In North Carolina these ponds are up to 500 acres in size making them larger than the Carolina Panthers stadium. The EPA is considering classifying coal ash as a hazardous waste, which would mean many more safeguards to protect rivers, streams, wetlands and groundwater.

Based on our research that tested water, sediment and fish at the massive TVA Ash Spill in Harriman, TN, we believe that coal ash is hazardous, and this report graphically underscores that point. Regulation of coal ash is long overdue and the EPA and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) need to quit delaying the release of a hazardous ruling for coal ash.

This video is a short profile of Watauga Riverkeeper Donna Lisenby. It is part of an “Environmental Heroes” series created by students at UNC-Chapel Hill. Good job Donna!

Please join us for a planning meeting to discuss this situation and create a community action plan at the next Watauga River Conservation Partners meeting on Monday November 2, 2009 at 5:00 pm at the Ag Conference Center on 252 Poplar Grove Road in Boone, NC.

In September 2009 the Watauga Riverkeeper received a report on our pollution hotline about a huge water withdrawal and diversion occurring in the headwaters reach of the Watauga River just below Grandfather Mountain. On October 20, 2009-more than thirty days after the appropriate regulatory agencies were notified we went out to investigate what corrective action had been required and this is what we found:

We need your help protecting the pristine trout waters and habitat of the Upper Watauga River.  We cordially invite you to be a part of the team that gets this problem fixed. Please send a link to this video and blog post to anyone you think may be interested in learning more about this situation. Encourage them to join us at the next Watauga River Conservation Partners meeting on Monday November 2 at 5:00 pm at the Ag Conference Center in Boone. The meeting is free and open to the public.