Transcript
WEBVTT
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Can we truly transform a once-polluted river into a thriving community asset?
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Join us as we uncover the remarkable journey of the French Broad River's revitalization with Rene Fortner, watershed Resources Manager at RiverLink.
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Rene shares RiverLink's inspiring history, from reclaiming degraded riverfront properties to creating green spaces that enrich the community.
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We'll learn how stormwater runoff has emerged as the primary threat to the river, overshadowing industrial pollution, and the innovative strategies RiverLink employs to tackle this issue head-on.
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We dive deep into the challenges posed by sediment and pollutants, revealing their harmful effects on the French Broad's diverse ecosystem, and we discover the groundbreaking green stormwater infrastructure projects that mimic nature to protect and rejuvenate the river.
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We also learned about exciting community projects like the Woodfin Greenway, blueway, taylor's Wave and the Gateway Park in Asheville's River Arch District.
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Renee's passion and dedication shine through, offering a wealth of insights and inspiration on how you and I can get involved in preserving and revitalizing this vital watershed.
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Tune in and become part of the movement to protect our precious waterways.
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I'll see you on the other side.
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You're listening to Exploration Local, a podcast designed to explore and celebrate the people and places that make the Blue Ridge and Southern Appalachian Mountains special and unique.
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My name is Mike Andrus, the host of Exploration Local.
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Join us on our journey to explore these mountains and discover how they fuel the spirit of adventure.
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We encourage you to wander far, but explore local, let's go.
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My guest today is Renee Fortner.
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But explore local, let's go.
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My guest today is Renee Fortner.
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She is the Watershed Resources Manager at the local environmental nonprofit Riverlink.
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She is an avid river paddler, home gardener and naturalist and is continually reminded how the environment around us and our daily lives are affected by access to clean and abundant water.
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Renee, welcome to the show.
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Thanks, mike, I'm really excited to be here.
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One of the things I love to do right here at the very outset is give sort of a broad picture of River Link for people who don't know what is River Link and what is the really, really important work that you all do.
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Yeah, river Link, as you mentioned, a local environmental non-profit.
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Our office is in Asheville, down in the River Arts District, but we work across the eight-county region that is the French Broad River watershed in western North Carolina and we've been around for a while.
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We were founded in the early 1980s with this vision to revitalize the French Broad Riverfront in Asheville.
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The river had a long industrial past and it had been heavily polluted and neglected.
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The local community was disconnected from the river and so Riverlink set out on this trajectory to clean the river up, engaged the community members in that and eventually ended up purchasing old, derelict properties along the riverfront in Asheville and converting them, cleaning them up and converting them from industry junkyards, old landfills, into riverfront parks where everybody could enjoy the river.
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You know, a big driving factor behind that was this idea that you know.
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If we can foster that connection to the river and help people interact with it and experience it, then that's going to lead to this sense of ownership and love for the river and then that's going to lead to better stewardship of the river.
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And I think we, the community as a whole, and Riverlink has been very successful in that.
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If you're in Asheville, you know you can go down Amboy Road and from Carrier Park French Broad River Park, the new Karen Craig Nolan Park that Riverlink opened this past year is right there along the river, all the way down to Gene Webb Park in the River Arts District.
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You know those were all old derelict properties that are now very popular for recreation for, you know, visitors and residents alike.
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I did not know that so I didn't know the areas right along Riverside Drive that you all had something to do with that as well.
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I know the Karen Craig Nolan Park.
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Yes.
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I know.
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So I was just there yesterday.
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Oh, yay, yeah, yeah, I just rode all up and down it and love seeing all the River Link signs everywhere too, and so, yeah, we sort of did that loop and got a chance to see the new park there, all the improvements right across from Wrong Way Campground and all the beautiful things that you all did there too.
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That's right, and maybe you saw the sign and you read about how it used to be a junkyard.
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I did, I did yes.
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And it took about 15 years to clean the soil up there because it had been contaminated from the car crushing operation.
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Oh, it was a long process of letting nature basically do its thing.
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Basically do its thing.
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Soil, microbes and native plants on that site literally broke down, the oil and gas molecules that were in that soil, contaminating the site, you know.
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And then now it's, you know, safer recreation, and we named it in honor of our founding executive director, karen Craig Nolan.
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I love that.
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Yeah, and it also serves to connect.
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It used to be the missing link between Carrier Park and French Broad River Park because we had to keep it fenced off because it was contaminated and so part of the building the park at least the first phase of it was to connect that greenway, so now you don't have to get out onto that narrow sidewalk along.
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Amboy Road.
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You can just cruise on through the greenway.
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That now you don't have to get out onto that narrow sidewalk along Amboy Road.
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You can just cruise on through the greenway.
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That's cool.
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That's exactly what we did.
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We were e-biking.
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It was such a good time.
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Yeah.
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And then did you have anything to do with sort of that river left side too, when you leave French Broad Park, going from there down to New Belgium, or was that anything with y'all?
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Or y'all are on River Wright, on the River Arch District.
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Yeah, mostly River Wright.
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That was primarily the city of Asheville.
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Okay.
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And then New Belgium, of course, as a partner and a landowner along that segment of the Greenway.
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Cool.
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Yeah.
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Very cool.
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Well, one of the things that you focus on in your role with River Link as the watershed resources manager is stormwater runoff.
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That's a really big thing.
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You and I were talking a couple of weeks ago about just driving by the French Broad certain sections of it, depending on, you know, especially after heavy rainfall it sort of turns this brown, murky color, turbidity, I guess, increases, so you're not able to really kind of see and it doesn't seem clear.
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And so the first my comment was well, gosh, I don't know, is it dirty, does it seem dirty?
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And and you really sort of started to open up my eyes to really what's going on.
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And then since then I've just tried to learn as much as I can and that's what we're going to unpack today.
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But I know that's your passion area and so, at high level, I love for us to just kind of talk about stormwater runoff and how it is the number one threat to the health of the French Broad River.
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Yeah, absolutely yeah.
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I mean, the river is much cleaner than it used to be.
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But protecting and restoring the river and all the tributary streams that flow into her?
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And restoring the river and all the tributary streams that flow into her.
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You know it continues today and it will continue.
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And yeah, as you mentioned, stormwater runoff is.
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You know, it used to be industrial pollution.
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That was the biggest threat to the river, and now it's stormwater runoff.
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Yeah, it's basically rainwater that, rather than soak into the ground like it would in a natural area, it flows across hard surfaces like rooftops, parking lots, driveways, and those hard surfaces don't allow the rainwater to soak into the ground.
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Instead, it runs across the landscape.
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This, but the storm drains that you see along our streets and in parking lots, those are piped directly into the nearest stream or the French Broad River, and that water doesn't go to the wastewater treatment plant in Woodfin where it gets filtered out.
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That water goes directly into the stream, untreated, and so you can just picture that water moving across a parking lot and the things that it picks up and then delivers into our streams and into the French Broad River.
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So it's the runoff and what's in it that's impacting the river, but then it's just the sheer amount of water that these hard surfaces shed Many millions, even billions of gallons of runoff annually.
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We ran a calculation recently.
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We looked at all of the rooftop surface area just in Buncombe County using GIS and then we took that number and then we took the average rainfall in a given year.
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And then we took the average rainfall in a given year roughly 42 inches of rain in Asheville and then we calculated the gallons of water that's being shed by rooftops and it was 8 billion gallons of water a year.
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That's insane.
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And then we looked at, okay, well, how many Olympic swimming pools would that amount of water fill up?
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And it was something like 450 Olympic swimming pools and it would stretch across the entire state of North Carolina.
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And so that's not to say that every rooftop is piping its runoff into a creek, but many of them do, and so that just kind of highlights how much water that is and it's being delivered to our streams basically all at once, and so it creates this real flashy stream hydrograph we call it.
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Where you know, during a rain in our urban streams, you'll see the water levels rise really rapidly because of that incoming runoff runoff, and then, as soon as the rain stops, the water recedes really quickly.
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So it's very flashy and that causes all sorts of issues.
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You know definitely makes stream bank erosion worse, and so, yeah, those in a nutshell, that's stormwater runoff and why it negatively impacts the French Broad River.
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Yeah, so I would imagine there are certain areas that are probably a little bit more susceptible to the urban runoff.
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Obviously, you've got the headwater starting, you know, way up near Rosman and then it sort of creeps its way down and then, obviously you know, out into Tennessee or up into Tennessee.
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Are there certain areas that are worse than others?
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Are there certain just I don't know if it may be worse is the right way or just different contaminants that are being introduced into the watershed at certain places?
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Yeah, absolutely.
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You know, I've paddled the French Broad Paddle Trail from the headwaters in Rosman to Asheville over a spring break trip a few years ago with my family and you could visibly see the difference in the clarity of the river as you moved downstream.
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And there was a noticeable difference in water quality once you got to Brevard, which was the first really big urbanized area on that stretch of the river.
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Yeah, the clarity went way down.
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And so you can visibly see it.
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And then we know from water quality testing that's been done that water quality degrades when you get close to these urban centers where there are a lot of hard or impervious surfaces that generate more storm water runoff.
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It's not to say that runoff doesn't occur in rural areas, you know there's certainly their own challenges I mean to that type of area in terms of, you know, agricultural lands can be a source of runoff too if they're not managed well.
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But yeah, what happens on the land affects what's happening in the water.
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All right.
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So we understand what the problem is.
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We understand that rain runoff is a real thing.
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We understand that the impact that these heavy rains make, sometimes especially in the urban areas, but, as you said, even in some of the other areas of farmlands they have their own set of unique challenges as well.
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Let's talk a little bit about just this area and its increase in population, because in the 11 years I've lived here it's increased significantly.
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Downtown, here, you know all over.
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But how is the increase in the population and the economic development in Western North Carolina affecting this rain runoff, affecting all that we're talking about?
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Well, you know, with development comes more hard or impervious surfaces that don't allow the rainwater to soak into the ground.
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We need economic development.
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We need more housing.
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You know we have a shortage in housing stock here and that's driving up the cost of housing in housing stock here and that's driving up the cost of housing, so which in this region we're actually a climate refuge for folks that are moving from other parts of the country, like California and South Florida.
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But you know we experience our own impacts from climate change, extreme weather events being one of them, and you know, significantly heavier, more intense rain events, and so that's also going to exacerbate the runoff issue.
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You know, one thing I'm realizing that we really haven't talked about is what are those negative impacts?
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Like we talked about the water changing and we talked about some of the contaminants and things that get in the river, but it really does affect it.
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And yesterday when I was riding, I met a gentleman who gosh, I think he said he's lived here for like 30 years and we rode basically at the end of that greenway downtown and we were right there at Hominy Creek and he was talking about this sand and dredge area that it used to be.
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And then when I looked at it last night on Google Earth, I was like, yeah, this is where they were having to dredge and a lot of the silt and everything that gets in.
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But this really does affect the marine life, it affects the biodiversity, it affects a lot of things, and that's the part that I think we need to connect to is really kind of what's happening, because we see the water changing colors or the river changing colors, we see all the rain, we see it running down our streets and in gutters and so forth, but what's really happening in the river?
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Yeah, yeah, you know, the French Broad River watershed is one of the most biodiverse freshwater systems in North America.
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So when you think about aquatic biodiversity, you usually think about tropical life in oceans right, you know, reefs and all the fish that live in and among coral reefs, but in terms of freshwater, so, like river systems, the French Broad River watershed is part of the Tennessee River Basin and it just happens to have really high rates of biodiversity in terms of freshwater fish, freshwater mussels, among other animals, and so, yeah, it's a really special place.
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But the biodiversity in the French Broad River has suffered over the years, first from the industrial pollution that was being piped into the river and now from the stormwater runoff.
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And stormwater affects life in the river in a number of ways Sediment we talk about how muddy the river looks after a rain and that's because of the sediment that is getting into the river.
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And you know we think of sediment.
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It's natural, it's a naturally occurring thing and rivers naturally have sediment in them.
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But there is a point at which there's too much sediment and it negatively impacts what's living in the river.
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And so that sediment is coming from the stormwater runoff and it's originating from construction sites where you have exposed soil, construction sites.
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Where you have, you know, exposed soil, it's coming from stream bank erosion and that's all made worse by stormwater runoff.
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And then stormwater runoff is the carrier of the sediment that brings it to the river.
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But sediment destroys aquatic habitat.
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It covers the rocks in the bottom of the river and fish rely on those rocks for laying their eggs.
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So it disrupts the fish ability to breed in the river.
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It clogs their gills, it can affect their immune system and make them more susceptible to parasites and disease, to parasites and disease.
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Freshwater mussels are filter feeders and so they siphon water and pull out small particles that they feed on from that water.
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And when the water's laden with sediment they're unable to feed.
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And that's a big reason why our freshwater mussel populations are suffering in the French Broad River.
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And then sediment also.
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It poses a human health concern in that sediment can bind to other pollutants like heavy metals, fecal coliform bacteria, and then it can transport those pollutants throughout the watershed can transport those pollutants throughout the watershed.
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Is there any data or anything that kind of tracks the improvement or is it getting worse in terms of the marine life and the biodiversity?
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Is that something that you all, I mean?
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I know, like there's the French Broad River Keepers, for example, and they're constantly measuring and so that's kind of seeing what the result is.
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But is there any data that just kind of says is it cleaning up, is it getting better?
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Is it getting better, is it getting worse?
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Where are we today?
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Yeah, that's a good question.
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I'm not aware of any long-term data sets out there tracking the water quality in the French Broad River.
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There is data on the sediment, the turbidity of the river.
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There's, as you mentioned, the River Keepers Tracking fecal coliform bacteria.
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There's another organization in Black Mountain called the Environmental Quality Institute that does water quality sampling really much throughout western North Carolina on different tributary streams of the French Broad River, and it can vary from year to year based on how much rainfall we've had.
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So if we're in a relatively dry year, maybe even a drought period, water quality is going to be pretty darn good because the river's not receiving that stormwater runoff and so I think it can be a difficult thing to track long term.
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But we do have some promising sort of data coming from Fish and Wildlife Service.
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So they track endangered species and they go out and they do freshwater mussel surveys, fish surveys, looking and tracking populations of endangered fish and mussels, and they have seen some of the freshwater mussels in particular kind of making a comeback in the French Broad River, and so that's really encouraging, I think.
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But I think, as you mentioned earlier, as development continues to increase, that we can't kind of let our guard down and be like, okay, it's all good Things are coming back, because there's certainly the potential to backslide and to lose some of the progress that we've made.
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What are some other things that are kind of being done to help stop it, mitigate it, if it's awareness to contractors or just the work that y'all are doing?
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So because stormwater runoff is a major source of pollution for our waterways, it is regulated by the federal government through the Clean Water Act.
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So there are regulations around development and a certain size development might trigger the requirement to manage the stormwater and keep more of it on site.
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Stormwater and keep more of it on site.
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And so you know we have local ordinances.
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Buncombe County, henderson County, city of Asheville, all have their own unique development ordinance that requires certain size developments to manage their stormwater runoff.
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But for the most part single family homes don't trigger any requirement to treat your stormwater runoff, it's just voluntary.
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And so there's local government plays a role in that and you know, I think from Riverlink's perspective, we would certainly love for those requirements to apply to sort of a broader scope of businesses and, you know, residences.
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But there are some incentives out there cost share programs that can help encourage people to voluntarily, businesses to voluntarily do more to manage their stormwater runoff.
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There's grant funding that's available, that nonprofit organizations like Riverlink have access to, grant funds that are from state and federal government that can help promote and kind of offset the cost of managing stormwater runoff on commercial sites.
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We actually have a really exciting project that's about to go under construction.
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It's a collaboration with Riverlink and AB Tech Community College in Asheville.
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Oh cool.
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And we got funding through the EPA's 319 grant program to help AB Tech replace this large parking lot that they don't use and it generates a lot of stormwater runoff that then gets piped directly into the small stream on their campus, which then feeds into the French Broad River, and so we're going to work with them to replace this parking lot with a constructed stormwater wetland and it's going to be a really beautiful amenity for the campus.
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It's going to have trails that go around it and it's going to be planted with native plants and trees and there's going to be educational signage and it's also going to serve as an outdoor classroom for.
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AB Tech students.
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They're going to be collecting long-term data on the impact of that wetland and the benefits that it's going to provide to Haith Branch and the French Broad River.
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Oh, that's great.
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Let's stay with that stream of thought, because now we're talking about solutions and we're talking about things that are reducing or mitigating, if you will, the runoff.
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What are some of the other things that you've done?
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What are some of the other projects that you've been directly involved with or that you all are really sort of pushing to really fight this?
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Yeah, I don't think I've used this term yet, but I want to introduce this term green stormwater infrastructure.
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Oh, I like it.
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And that is really what we're preaching, that we need more of.
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So historically we've managed our stormwater runoff with what we call gray infrastructure, so that series of gutters and downspouts and storm drains and outfalls.
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And the goal of the gray infrastructure, the way it is designed to function, it just moves water off-site as quickly as possible.
00:23:29.691 --> 00:23:36.011
And the alternative to that is something that we call green stormwater infrastructure.
00:23:36.011 --> 00:23:56.069
And these, the goal of green stormwater infrastructure, is to kind of mimic nature before development occurred and you keep the runoff on site whenever possible and you give it an opportunity to soak into the ground, where soil microbes and the plant roots can filter pollutants out of the water.
00:23:56.069 --> 00:24:07.362
They take up some of that water and then what doesn't get soaked up by the plants is goes into the groundwater table and actually recharges our groundwater.
00:24:07.362 --> 00:24:12.971
And so green stormwater infrastructure is really the path forward.
00:24:12.971 --> 00:24:23.769
And there are quite a few really great examples of green infrastructure, you know, in our community the town of Hendersonville comes to mind.
00:24:23.934 --> 00:24:24.496
Yeah, yeah.
00:24:24.757 --> 00:24:25.077
Okay.
00:24:25.077 --> 00:24:28.866
So they actually have done some green infrastructure there.
00:24:28.866 --> 00:24:48.349
They have large cisterns that harvest the roof runoff from maybe a facilities management building where they have mowers and trucks stored there, and so they're harvesting the roof runoff, keeping it on site and then they're using that to actually wash their equipment on that site.
00:24:48.349 --> 00:24:57.547
There's also some rain gardens there that capture runoff from a parking lot and soak it into the ground and keeping it out of the creek that flows through the park.
00:24:57.547 --> 00:25:08.446
So that's a really great example and they actually have what they call a stormwater walk with some educational signage and you can walk through the park and you can read about the different green infrastructure features there.
00:25:08.446 --> 00:25:12.826
Another one Town of Black Mountain we just partnered with them last year.
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They have Lake Tomahawk Park really beautiful lake.
00:25:18.067 --> 00:25:21.403
The backdrop is, you know, the mountains out there the.
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Black Mountains.
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It's really lovely Walk-in trails.
00:25:24.738 --> 00:25:26.903
A lot of ducks hang out in the lake.
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They had a parking lot that was just discharging stormwater runoff directly into the lake, and they have sedimentation issues in the lake.
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They have to dredge it periodically, and so we worked with them to construct what's called a bioswell, and it's this feature between the parking lot and the lake, and now the runoff goes into this depressed area that's planted with native plants and it gets filtered there and it's keeping it out of Lake Tomahawk, and so it's become a beautiful amenity for the park, but then it's also helping protect the lake.
00:26:03.021 --> 00:26:09.474
That's so cool the lake.
00:26:09.494 --> 00:26:09.776
That's so cool.
00:26:09.776 --> 00:26:24.619
And then another project that comes to mind that's very dear to my heart is the Southside Community Stormwater Project and this was a Riverlink partnership with the Asheville Housing Authority and we addressed runoff in this public housing community in the Southside neighborhood of Asheville.
00:26:24.619 --> 00:26:40.768
Residents were being negatively impacted by this runoff that was getting onto a residential parking lot and it was so just constant and frequent that the parking lot was covered in this really slippery algae and then in the wintertime the water would freeze.
00:26:41.055 --> 00:27:00.800
And so it made slippery, unsafe conditions for people trying to get to their cars, and so we designed and installed a whole series of green infrastructure features that now collects the roof runoff and the parking lot runoff and soaks it into the ground.
00:27:00.840 --> 00:27:08.968
So there's a series of rain gardens, there's this feature excuse me, that looks like a natural stream bed that goes down slope.
00:27:08.968 --> 00:27:18.202
That slows the stormwater down, gives it a chance to soak into the ground, and then there's a stormwater wetland with a trail around it.
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And so you know, in addition to the water quality benefits of green infrastructure, there's many co-benefits to it as well.
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They can be amenities for a community or for a residential property.
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They're, you know, they can be very attractive landscape features, but they can also help provide recreation opportunities.
00:27:39.384 --> 00:27:49.627
So you know, as I've mentioned, walking trails a couple of times, associated with these projects, and they can help provide, especially in our urban areas.
00:27:49.627 --> 00:28:05.648
You know you're removing hard surfaces and you're replacing them with natural vegetation, and that can help with the urban heat island effect, and so you know you're building climate resiliency at the same time as you know you're protecting water quality.
00:28:05.894 --> 00:28:09.400
So, if you can't tell, I'm a big fan of green infrastructure.
00:28:09.440 --> 00:28:10.143
Yeah, yeah.
00:28:10.143 --> 00:28:13.056
Well, you know it's interesting because it's been several years.
00:28:13.056 --> 00:28:18.478
But a good friend of mine was the facilities director at the University of Tennessee, Memphis, and this is years ago.
00:28:18.478 --> 00:28:23.816
But even back then he was a very big proponent of these types of catching.
00:28:23.816 --> 00:28:34.279
You know catch areas Back then I don't know if he had a name for it, but it was like this catch basin and I remember looking at him going the first time and thinking well, it looks so beautifully landscaped.
00:28:34.279 --> 00:28:36.598
And then all of a sudden it got flooded and I'm like, is this going to kill it?
00:28:36.598 --> 00:28:40.675
And you're like, no, mike, this is by design and this is exactly why we do this.
00:28:40.675 --> 00:28:50.231
And it's so cool to sort of have this come full circle almost 20 plus years later and to see the work that you all are doing and see some of the examples and hear some of the examples that you're talking about right now.
00:28:50.492 --> 00:28:51.694
Yeah, yeah, that's so good.
00:28:51.694 --> 00:29:08.188
I think some people refer to it as low impact development and I think it can be under that umbrella of low impact development and I think the term green stormwater infrastructure is kind of new over the past few years, but it's been around for a while, okay For sure.
00:29:08.836 --> 00:29:17.846
So let's turn our focus to homeowners on the residential side and maybe some of the things that they can do, because those were like big, really important projects affecting a community.
00:29:17.846 --> 00:29:19.521
But what about the individual homeowners?
00:29:19.521 --> 00:29:21.301
Because there are some things that we can do.
00:29:21.742 --> 00:29:30.722
Yeah, riverlink has a program called Water Rich and you can access it through our website, but it is focused just on residential stormwater management.
00:29:30.722 --> 00:29:48.515
And I would say you know, if you're a property owner, you start by observing your site, walking around during a rain event, look at where the water's going, where do your downspouts drain to, and look for opportunities.
00:29:48.515 --> 00:30:01.316
If that water is leaving your site, look for opportunities to keep it on site where it can soak into the ground, and the good news is that there are a lot of opportunities and lots of options for how you could do that.
00:30:01.316 --> 00:30:04.676
So we promote in our Water Rich Guide things like rain gardens.
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We promote in our Water Rich Guide things like rain gardens.
00:30:06.557 --> 00:30:15.643
So these are just small bowl-shaped landscaped areas that typically you're routing a roof downspout into it.
00:30:15.643 --> 00:30:21.105
And because it's like bowl-shaped, it's filled with native plants that are beautiful.
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And because it's bowl-shaped, it's designed to hold water for a short period of time and give it a chance to soak into the ground.
00:30:28.989 --> 00:30:37.873
And there are native plants that are adapted to having their roots wet for a period of time and then dry for a period of time.
