Town of Black Mountain receives grant to fund Swannanoa River restoration

Project will focus on approximately 2,000 feet of the waterway along Veterans Park

Fred McCormick
The Valley Echo
October 2, 2020

Erosion causes trees along the banks of the Swannanoa River on the north side of Veterans Park to fall into the waterway. The Town of Black Mountain received three grants to fund a restoration project for approximately 2,000 linear feet of the river, which is listed as impaired by the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality. Photo by Fred McCormick

A stretch of the Swannanoa River spanning approximately 2,000 feet through Veterans Park, north of I-40, will be the focus of a substantial enhancement project that will stabilize and restore collapsing banks, remove sediment from the bed and add native vegetation to the riparian buffer. 

The work, primarily funded by grants from the N.C. Department of Water Resources, the Duke Energy Fund and Pigeon River Fund, will improve the water quality in the section of the river, which is listed on the Department of Environmental Quality’s 303(d) impaired waters list. 

The Town of Black Mountain was notified Sept. 25 that it would receive $74,000 from the NCDWR to support the enhancement, which is projected to cost $156,000. Those funds will be used in conjunction with a $28,000 grant awarded by the Pigeon River Fund in 2018, and a $50,000 contribution from the Duke Energy Fund. The town has committed $5,000 of its own funding to the project. 

A seven-mile section of the river, upstream of its confluence with the North Fork Swannanoa River, was added to the impaired waterways list in 2006 due to degraded benthic macroinvertebrate activity attributed to stormwater runoff. Benthic macroinvertebrate, or benthos, are small organisms that live in the sediment and vegetation in the bottom of the river. 

“That section of the river has a lot of erosion, instability of the banks and in the river bed itself,” said planning director Jessica Trotman. “It really starts at the (I-40) bridge where you have the big cobble deposit. Just west of that, we have some pretty severe bends and the velocity of the water is cutting into the banks. We’re actually going to straighten out a section and speed up nature’s course and try to get the river where it wants to be.”

Plans for the Swannanoa River restoration project on the north side of Veterans Park highlight the section of the waterway that will be impacted by the work. The project will include re-routing segments of the river, bank stabilization and the planting of native vegetation. Courtesy of the Town of Black Mountain

While restoration of the targeted section of the Swannanoa River is not likely to remove the waterway from the impaired list, it is a significant step in the process, according to Trotman. 

Andrew Bick of Headwaters Engineering developed the plans for the project, which will also include in-kind support from Montreat College, which owns the property on the other side of the river from Veterans Park. 

“There are a few aspects to this project,” Bick said. “Number one is to stabilize the eroding banks. The river makes a hard bend to the left and water is flowing hard and causing active erosion, which is why there are trees falling into the river. There are other spots upstream from that where erosion has been a problem for years.”

Stabilizing the banks will help improve water quality in that section of the river, he continued. 

“Every time we lose bank material it sends fine sediment into the river,” Bick said. “That causes the water to turn turbid and negatively impacts the fish habitat downriver.”

Crews will reshape the first river bend north of I-40 and reestablish slopes along the bank. The next bend, which abuts the disc golf course, will also be rerouted. 

“The bend there has evolved over time, but it’s tighter than what the river would naturally create on its own,” Bick said. “We’ll work with the normal river process and anticipate what it wanted to do before there was a sewer line and other work done along that section.”

Native plants, including deep-rooted trees and shrubs, will be added to the vegetated area along the river known as the riparian buffer. The measure is intended to help mitigate future erosion by filtering harmful sediment and other by-products of storm water before they reach the water. The design also calls for natural materials, including stone and wood, to be incorporated into the river bed.  

A large tree rests in the river bed of the Swannanoa River in Veterans Park in Black Mountain. Fred McCormick

“Another feature of this particular project is that it’s a public park, so we can do a lot of environmental education with signage and kiosks that explain why it’s important to stabilize creek banks and how it helps improve water quality,” Bick said. 

The fall trout spawning season will likely prevent work from beginning this year, according to Trotman, but the restoration project could begin in spring of 2021. Staging of construction equipment will likely impact usage of the front 9 of the disc golf course and the trails that snake along the river. 

Once underway, designers expect the work will take approximately three months to complete.