U.S. Water News Online
GREENSBORO, N.C. -- Kathy Welch awaits the debut of North Carolina's newest lake, Randleman Reservoir, after officials start closing floodgates and filling it sometime next year.
The Randolph County resident has only one big complaint about the project that has been a source of sometimes-heated debate for decades.
"I don't understand why they won't allow horseback riding around the lake," said Welch, who operates a western and English riding-supply store near the new lake. "We're horse people, and everybody in this area is horse people."
After years of battling skeptics who doubted the reservoir ever would or should be built, project backers are only too happy to be tackling issues such as Welch's that look ahead to the lake's completion, replete with a regional park, a buffer of 2,975 undeveloped acres and miles of navigable water.
The $140 million project is important to residents of the Piedmont Triad because of its future role as a primary source of drinking water for the region.
Many communities, including Greensboro and High Point, do not have direct access to a major water source sufficient to support their continued growth.
That leaves them too vulnerable to shortages during extended droughts.
Greensboro leaders say the current drought would have put the city in deep trouble had it not been for their cobbling together water purchases from neighboring communities, particularly Reidsville.
The new lake in southern Guilford and northern Randolph counties could be lapping the upper reaches of its dam within a matter of months.
Supporters sense a change in public attitude as months of fast-paced land clearing, bridge work and other lake-related construction near an end. They had so many doubters because of environmental obstacles that beset the project before it won state and federal approval, most caused by the urban and industrial areas traversed by its major source, the Deep River.
"I think we have more believers today than we did even last year," said Darrell Frye, a member of the Randolph County Board of Commissioners and a veteran representative on the Piedmont Triad Regional Water Authority.
Although completion of the reservoir is imminent, there's no way to hold its last leg to a precise timetable, said John Kime, executive director of the authority formed nearly 20 years ago to build the lake.
"Everybody thinks that once the dam is built, the project's done," Kime said. "But that's not the way it works."
In part, that's because filling the lake depends entirely on next year's rainfall, specifically how much comes down within periods short enough to produce lots of runoff.
Runoff is the key to whether it takes six to eight months or a year or longer to fill the reservoir, said Tom Phillips, a member of the Greensboro City Council and one of the city's three representatives on the nine-member regional water authority.
"What we need is a good tropical storm to come through, not a hurricane," Phillips said.
It doesn't help that the region has been caught in a drought this year that lowered water levels in the Deep River, say Phillips and others. Recent rain helped but didn't overcome the region's rain deficit.
Meanwhile, crews are finishing work on the last of 13 bridge, road-raising and culvert projects in southern Guilford and northern Randolph counties at a cost of more than $13.5 million.
Virtually all land clearing is complete in the new lake's basin.
And other workers are preparing new wetlands near the fledgling lake. Wetlands are natural and man-made drainage areas with special plants that filter pollutants from runoff before it enters the new lake.
When the lake is filled, the only major part of the project remaining will be building a plant to treat its water, something that will take several years and has not been started yet.
But the lake itself is so far along that the water authority recently approved rules on boating, fishing and other recreational activities at the lake once it is filled.
Horseback riding is one of several activities banned because of concerns about water quality. Officials worry about manure getting into a lake that already faces environmental challenges.
Guilford County is doing its part to shield crucial parts of the lake from urban development by building the new Southwest Park, a project that could get under way next year.
Planners want to open the new park on the lake's northwestern finger in mid-2008. It will have hiking trails, camping, ball fields, a launch area for canoes and kayaks, and a variety of other recreational opportunities.
The lake's completion is eagerly awaited by owners of curb markets and other small businesses near the fledgling lake.
"The people seem very happy for it," said Mahmood Ghazanfar, owner of the Hilltop Store on N.C. 62 several miles from the new park. "They are telling us, 'You better get ready for a lot more business.' "
Residents of Randolph County express a variety of views. Some, such as Welch, welcome it but want more or different recreational opportunities.
Others mourn the loss of good farmland.
"They took a lot of our friends' lands, but progress has to go on," said James Cockman, a volunteer at the Guil-Rand Fire Department.
Randolph County will have limited recreational opportunities.
Voters there turned down a proposal last year to use tax money to pay for park land.
Recreation on the southern, larger part of the lake will include fishing and motorboating at the only place where gas-operated boats can enter the lake, a bare-bones control facility to be run by the water authority near Level Cross.
Frye said county residents may decide to do something more elaborate once the lake is filled and they get a better sense of its possibilities.
Guilford's 513-acre Southwest Park will be geared toward "passive" activities that are more nature-oriented, such as hiking and bird-watching, and less toward organized sports, Guilford planner Roger Bardsley said.
The county also might buy land to help buffer the lake or its tributaries with some of the $10 million in "open-space" money that Guilford voters approved in late 2004, said Jack Jezorek, chairman of the committee that's deciding how to spend the money.
Environmental questions still remain about the lake. On the lake's northern edge, the Deep River passes the defunct Seaboard Chemical Co. and the former High Point landfill, which release residue of hazardous waste into the stream.
High Point's Eastside Wastewater Plant also will release large volumes of treated sewage into northern sections of the lake.
Steps will be taken to eliminate or blunt the impact of these intrusions, but experts will only know how successful they have been after the lake is filled.
The last phase of the project will be building a $60 million water plant to treat the water, expected to open in about five years.
Treatment would be more costly, experts say, if the quality of the lake's "raw water" is lower than desirable.
But that's an issue to be tackled after the lake has been complete for a while and its chemical profile is established through testing.
For now, a lot of people are just looking forward to the birth of a lake that is rewriting the landscape in parts of two counties.
"We've gone through all the destruction and road closings," said Tony Denny, owner of Cedar Square Grocery and Grill in northern Randolph. "I think everybody is just anticipating the thing actually getting here."
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