Elk River: Trout Stream Worth Saving

Elk River: trout stream worth saving

By DAVE PAYNE Sr.

dpayne@newsandsentinel.com

One of America's great treasures will be in the hands of the Pocahontas County Public Service District this week. Anyone who either fishes or has any appreciation for God's creation should consider attending the 7 p.m. Tuesday district meeting at the district's office near Durbin on Back Mountain Road.

Whatás at stage is one of the last, pure, untouched and the most wonderful water that flows in West Virginia, the Elk River headwaters. From its source to Sutton Lake, the Elk River is a world-class trout stream, one of the few waters left in the state where trout still reproduce.

The problem is, the Snowshoe resort's water-treatment system is overburdened and other developers have also expressed an interest in a central facility.

What has anglers in arms is the fact this treatment water has to go somewhere and a location on Big Spring Fork, one of the two streams that come together to form the Elk at Slatyfork has been proposed. This is not like building a treatment plant on the Little Kanawha River. This is the best trout fishery in the state and a fragile ecosystem fed by cold springs.

The district is seeking to construct a new 1.5 million gallon-per-day sewage treatment facility in Slatyfork. The people who live along the river could use some sort of facility, I'm sure. The problem, however, is that the facility would have seven miles of piping to bring in sewage from Snowshoe resort.

There is concern over the discharge. That could have some ill-effects, but what is especially scary to me is this seven miles of piping raw sewage from Snowshoe. This raw sewage will be transported through the streams, springs and sinkholes of Big Spring Fork, one of the headwaters streams that converge to create the Elk River. You can't bury seven miles of pipe without creating a lot of sediment, which covers stream beds and chokes life, but that's not what scares me.

It's hard enough to make a waterproof watch and nearly impossible to make a seven-mile-long pipe completely watertight. Any failure in the line would be dumping raw sewage into unique groundwater structure of numerous caves and springs and do perhaps irreversible harm to both the groundwater system and the river itself.

As it stands now, the upper Elk River water is wonderfully clean. The upper half of the river is virtually free of the fecal coliform bacteria that can be found further down. The report for the DEP's Elk River watershed assessment says that fecal bacteria is "nearly absent from streams above Sutton Lake."

I hope we can still say that ten years from now.