A MESSAGE FROM YOUR HAW RIVERKEEPER – Alamance County Sediment Impact Report: This report documents the need for a locally delegated sediment program, how it would benefit the county and how to start the process.
On July 10, we reached out to the Alamance County Commissioners with our findings of sediment violations all over the county. This is the letter we sent along with the impact report. After sending this report, Mike revisited the sites we detailed in the report, and almost all of them had been improved. Read below the letter and get ready to represent for your watershed. We look forward to working with Alamance to reconcile these issues and prevent them from occurring in the future by creating a local Sedimentation Program.
“Hello, Alamance County Commissioners. I’m Emily Sutton, your Haw Riverkeeper with Haw River Assembly.
Over the past 6 months, our team has been documenting and reporting major sedimentation violations in Alamance County. Because the county has no locally delegated program, all construction and development projects in over 250,000 acres of the county, excluding Burlington, fall within the jurisdiction of Division of Energy Mineral and Land Resources’s Winston Salem regional office. The rapid growth of the county has left the regional office with little to no capacity to inspect and enforce sediment issues in Alamance, which has resulted in over 30 complaints from neighboring residents and countless tons of sediment polluting our streams.
The only way to remedy this problem is to initiate a locally delegated sedimentation program. As a member of the NC Sedimentation Control Commission, I work with commissioners to review local programs for effectiveness. I would like to have an opportunity to present to your commission about starting this program for Alamance County.
Please review the attached report, where we have detailed our investigations on 7 of 22 sites in Alamance County with repeat violations.”
We will have more updates soon. Be on the lookout!
Report prepared by:Mike Wallace, Water Quality Specialist & Emily Sutton, Haw Riverkeeper
