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Mountain rivers are beautiful, but dangerous
Anyone who has ever gotten distracted while filling a sink or bathtub and come back to find the water overflowing onto the floor has experienced what happens when the liquid flowing in exceeds a container’s holding capacity.
Duke Power’s Jackson County lakes are like very large bowls. If the water flowing in continues after they fill up, then that water will travel on down the river, but it will exit via the lake’s flood gate rather than over the dam.
Sometimes rain falls hard enough and long enough that it produces more run-off than the lakes can hold. That is especially true of Duke’s East Fork (Canada community) lakes, which are small in size and incapable of holding all the water that sometimes flows into them. It rains more up there, too. Rain from Tropical Storm Arlene was measured at more than 7 inches on Wolf Creek as compared to 3 inches in Sylva during the same period. Rainfall on Tanassee Creek was measured at more than 12 inches during course of the storm.
Riverbend residents say that recent heavy floods were caused by Duke Power’s poor management of the lakes by not lowering lake levels enough to hold all the water that fell from the skies.
May we remind them that the Tuckaseigee’s greatest flood – in August, 1940 – happened before any of the dams upstream of them were built.
Perhaps they could talk to 95-year-old Jane Chastain, who grew up on Shook Cove and remembers the flood of 1940 and the river before the dams.
“Every time the Tuckaseigee got up, it would wash the bridges away,” she said. “The Tuckaseigee River – before the dams – was something you’d better be afraid of. You didn’t fool with it when it was up – it’d get you,” Chastain said last October.
While we can’t go as far back as Jane, many of us remember the river flooding in Cullowhee in 1973 and in 1994, when high water delayed the opening of school for a day.
We sympathize with the Riverbend residents. We understand the fear that comes when your scenic stream turns into an angry, muddy torrent.
But Duke Power doesn’t cause the rain, and there is anecdotal evidence that the company’s dams do help lessen the severity of flooding.
Haywood County suffered a devastating flood in 1940, just as Jackson did. And Haywood County was ravaged by Frances and Ivan, too. In Canton and Clyde last September, residents saw almost equivalent damage during the floods of ‘40 and ‘04, according to published reports. We didn’t make those kinds of comparisons here in Jackson County because they simply didn’t apply.
“If we hadn’t had (Duke’s) dams, we would have had flooding last fall like Haywood County did,” said Mike Ensley, Jackson County’s emergency management coordinator.
Mother Nature is one of those double-edged swords, creating both beauty and destruction, depending on her mood.
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