Only a River in Tennessee: The Nolichucky

Only a River in Tennessee: The Nolichucky 

January 22, 2017 

Stan Olmstead

The Nolichucky River, pristine and beautiful for millenniums but with white settlement; agriculture, development and industry it changed. Don’t get me wrong; it’s still pretty and to an extent wild. Not a long river, 115 miles, 150 miles if you extend up the Toe and Cane Rivers to North Carolina’s Mount Mitchell. The named portion of the Nolichucky originates near Popular North Carolina and ends near White Pine Tennessee. A watershed of 1762 square miles (64% in TN and 36% in N.C.), cascading through the deep Nolichucky Gorge and into the Valley and Ridge province of East Tennessee’s Appalachian’s finally discharging into the French Broad River. Did I say French Broad, I should have said Douglas Lake, two reservoirs impact the Nolichucky; Davy Crockett Lake (built in 1913, now silted) near Greeneville, the other Douglas Lake (built in 1943) near Morristown extensively used for recreation. These reservoirs are but two of more than 30 reservoirs in Tennessee built early last century for flood control and hydropower not bad for flood control and electricity but not naturalness of the river.  

The Nolichucky is representative of many waterways in our nation and our impacts to the natural system most of us don’t give thought. When talking of water pollution we refer to point source pollution and non-point source pollution. Nearly every major river of the U.S. is negatively impacted by our development, storm water, agricultural, municipal wastewaters and industry discharges. This occurs on the watershed of the Nolichucky as the water flows from the mountain to the sea.

 We may all agree that water is pretty important but wanting clean water and having clean water is different as the requirement gets in the way of our business, activity and behavior. The United States has done pretty well caring for water quality but not well enough. The Federal Water Pollution Control Act  (Clean Water Act) CWA, was signed in 1972 by Richard Nixon and is administered by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), one of Nixon’s new governmental agencies. The time that rivers caught fire or caused direct mortality doesn’t seem to be occurring but the waters remain fouled and species are declining.

Another aspect of the CWA is the National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) which the EPA or State provide authority for point source discharge approval. It is these authorizations that are based on the “solution to pollution is dilution”. In Tennessee there are many beautiful waterways but nearly all of the larger streams and rivers have been impounded, laden with sediments, polluted by chemicals, agriculture nutrients, storm water, municipal waste and point source discharges by industry.

  

State government in combination with the federal government is the caretakers of our waters and they work pretty hard. Some would even say they do a “damn” good job. However, state and federal legislators have applied caveats to water quality law, and have written rules and regulation that assure a means to pollute. They exempt agriculture in the CWA, standardize pollution quantities in milligrams pre-liter of discharge as well as many other exemptions that pollute our national waters.

Besides the CWA and EPA each of the states have instituted their own state water agencies for control of their specific waters. In Tennessee it is the Department of Conservation and Environment and the Water Quality Division. Tennessee enacted the Tennessee Water Quality Control Act (1979).  The Water Quality Division works in unison with EPA to assure waters are not being polluted. The EPA has “primacy” but the state is the normal administrator of the waters, it’s understood that a state can have cleaner waters than EPA requires but must abide at a minimum the standards set by EPA.

The “rub” comes to water quality over-sight in the allowances of pollutions. In Tennessee the rule is refer to it as “de minimis”. This has been the standard for a long time, dilute it enough and the pollution isn’t a problem. There are reasons for this approach but convenience and business is most important. Our federal and state legislators and our federal and state executives do not want to imped business and public activities so they limit the burden of cleaner waters being placed on the offending polluter. To do so would possibly make the activity or business not cost effective.  Instead they have the citizen pay in a multitude of ways this cost by placing numerous caveats to the law.  Agriculture is exempt, storm water is managed differently, municipalities manage their wastewaters different than other point source activities and point source discharges of pollution are authorized with levels of pollution they refer to as de minimus. It is said in Tennessee, “if the water is polluted you can’t pollute (Section 303(d) of the CWA) but if it is unpolluted you can pollute”.

Pollution accumulates in the water and as the user removes water for use and discharges waste waters, it continues to accumulate.  Over time the impacts to the river cause the aquatic habitat to be compromised. Agriculture with it’s high load of sediment and nutrients, industry with it’s mining and land disturbance combined with waste waters, infrastructure development and storm water run off with all of our trash (motor oil, antifreeze, cigarette butts, development, road construction), city or home waste processing in the form of waste treatment plants or home septic tanks, and large water impoundments for flood control and electricity. These accumulated chemicals and solids enter the river and damage it’s life and along with the water impounding reservoirs, altering stream flow, changing water temperatures and depth. This negative process continues in each and every waterway until it at last is discharged into the sea. For the Nolichucky it is the French Broad, Tennessee, Ohio and Mississippi River and then finally the Gulf of Mexico resulting in a large dead zone incapable of normal biological life due to oxygen depletion, sediments and chemicals.

So in an effort to make a change, to stand up to the death of rivers like the Nolichucky, to reverse our behavior, we should challenge each and every polluting source. For me and at this moment, it is an explosive factory near Greeneville Tennessee, U.S. Nitrogen LLC.  Their processing of ammonia, nitric acid and aqueous ammonium nitrate has just begun this past November and they are but a long list of polluters that are damaging rivers that for millenniums were pristine. Our aquatic systems are impaired, species of life are being lost and altered, drinking water is compromised and recreation activities change. For the Nolichucky the process starts on the slopes of Mount Mitchell and ends in the Gulf of Mexico. We all pay a price for this pollution and a small number of individuals make a profit. Our legislators and administrators accept this process as just normal business but we citizens have a vast amount of expense for this accepted process and it should be changed for environmental justice, economic justice and social justice; I argue it is a civil right, the species of life in each and every river of our nation depend on healthy streams and rivers.