When preparing for a trip, the best you can hope for is to not create a situation that makes a bad experience, you know, dangerous conditions, not enough food, bad coffee. You really have no control over what makes a good trip, nice weather, good water level, good group of paddlers that want to paddle together. Our recent camping trip, August 8 - 10, was a GREAT trip!

The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s (NCDEQ) Division of Water Resources (DWR) has issued a Draft National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) stormwater permit for the Alcoa Badin Business Park in Badin, NC. If approved, the permit will allow Alcoa to continue to release stormwater contaminated with fluoride, cyanide, aluminum and other potentially toxic materials leaching from hazardous waste disposed of on the site of Alcoa’s former aluminum smelter into Badin Lake/Yadkin River and Little Mountain Creek.

NCDEQ will hold a public hearing on the draft permit on August 19 at 6:00 PM at the Gene McIntyre Meeting Room at Stanly County Commons located at 1000 N. First Street, Albemarle, N.C. Written comments may be submitted by email before August 20 at 5 PM to  publiccomments@deq.nc.gov.

The Town of Mocksville in Davie County operates a wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) located on Dutchman Creek, a tributary to the Yadkin River. Last January, the plant received toxic chemical discharge from a Significant Industrial User (SIU) that sends their wastewater to be treated at the Dutchman Creek plant. This led to the failure of the plant’s usual biological process of using microorganisms to break down organic material. Specific toxic compounds that may impact the survival of these microorganisms include strong chlorinated-compounds used as disinfectants such as Chlorine, pesticides, and heavy metals which cause enzyme inhibition or DNA damage in bacteria. Any of these compounds discharged to the plant in high concentration or for a prolonged period of time could have caused a major disruption in the biological treatment process.

Over the last 100 years, excessive nutrient and sediment loads have been brought downstream from stormwater, wastewater and agricultural runoff into the Yadkin and South Yadkin Rivers into High Rock Lake (HRL), leading the NC Department of Environmental Quality and the US Environmental Protection Agency to designate HRL as impaired. These conditions also have led to harmful algal blooms (HABs), which may be dangerous to people, pets and wildlife. Elevated chlorophyll-A levels have exceeded the state standard of 40ug/L, indicating high levels of nutrient pollution, resulting in the state setting a site-specific chlorophyll-A standard for HRL at 35ug/L.

Yadkin Riverkeeper Edgar Miller took to the air on June 26 with SouthWings pilot Holliday Obrecht, III to fly over the Yadkin Lakes looking for harmful algal blooms (HABs), checking out the status of the demolition of the Alcoa aluminum smelter buildings on Badin Lake and documenting the growth of the poultry industry in the Uwharrie River watershed in Montgomery and Randolph counties. The flight covered almost 120 linear miles and an area of more than 300 square miles.

A great way to kick off the summer is to celebrate the trails of North Carolina wit a couple hundred of our closest friends on the first weekend in June.  We’ve had a bit of a tradition of leading one of the first events of the weekend, a river cleanup on the Yadkin River State Trail. River cleanups are typically well attended, but it still surprises me how many people burn a personal leave day to hit the river and collect trash out of freshly deposited mud.

Yadkin Riverkeeper Edgar Miller joined students and faculty advisors from the Duke Environmental Law and Policy Clinic (DELPC), for a second round of monitoring stormwater outfalls draining the site of the former Alcoa aluminum smelting plant in Badin, NC on June 12. The sampling project is being funded by a $150,000 grant from the Duke Endowment to the DELPC to address long-standing environmental justice issues faced by Concerned Citizens of West Badin (CCWB), an historically segregated African American community disproportionately impacted by Alcoa’s operation and hazardous waste disposal sites.

As spring brings new life across the Yadkin River Basin and we celebrated Earth Day last month, we are reminded of how much the health of our local waterways impacts everything around us — from the drinking water we rely on, to the land we farm, to the places we gather with family and friends.

Yadkin Riverkeeper has learned Alcoa has received a permit from Stanly County to begin demolishing potentially contaminated smelter buildings at the Badin Business Park. Yadkin Riverkeeper Edgar Miller and the Concerned Citizens for West Badin expressed concern to the NC Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) about the demolition proceeding under the facility’s expired stormwater permit and without a final remedy in place for the cleanup of hazardous waste disposed of at the site. In response to these concerns and others from the West Badin community about the impact on air and water quality, DEQ held a meeting to share their plans for limited oversight of the demolition.

On Earth Day, April 22, seven members of the Waterkeepers Carolina coalition presented oral comments regarding the Department of Environmental Quality’s (DEQ) Triennial Review of the state’s surface water quality standards. Nicole Eastman, Yadkin Riverkeeper’s (YRK) Riverkeeper assistant, presented comments on behalf of the organization to express our support for an E. coli standard in recreational waters and our concerns with the lack of regulation of other contaminants such as cyanotoxins.

Yadkin Riverkeeper Edgar Miller and YRK Board President Steve Ilderton recently attended a ribbon cutting ceremony at Reynolds American’s Operation Center (ROC) in Tobaccoville for its first of a kind WaterHub recycling facility. The new modular “micro” water reclamation facility will recycle more than 60 million gallons of wastewater produced at the ROC annually, reducing its wastewater discharge my nearly 90 percent and its demand for potable water by nearly 40 percent. While the water is considered clean enough to drink, it will initially only be used in cooling towers, boilers and landscape irrigation systems at the manufacturing site. According to company officials, 60 million gallons a year of water could supply on average 550 households.

Forsyth County Creek Week is a county-wide celebration of fresh water, one of the world’s most important and limited resources. The week-long extravaganza is sponsored by many local businesses and organizations, including Yadkin Riverkeeper. Events are organized and hosted by non-profit organizations, townships, local churches and community programs, Forsyth County utilities, Stormwater Smart and conservation groups, like YRK.

On March 18, Yadkin Riverkeeper Edgar Miller and Riverkeeper assistant Nicole Eastman joined SouthWings pilot Holliday Obrecht, III for a flight from the Davidson County Airport up the South Yadkin River and across the Yadkin at the historic village of Rockford into Surry County. It continued to Pilot Mountain and the Ararat River back down the Yadkin to the airport. The flight covered 120 miles and more than 600 square miles of the South Yadkin, Ararat and Yadkin watersheds. The primary purpose of the flight was to assess potential threats and restoration opportunities on the South Yadkin River as part of YRK’s work to develop a watershed restoration plan for the South Yadkin.

On Wednesday, March 19th five local groups including Yadkin Riverkeeper (YRK) volunteered to lead an activity for Winston-Salem high school students. Piedmont Environmental Alliance (PEA) coordinated this event for almost 100 high school students from Carver High School, Winston-Salem Preparatory Academy, and Kennedy High School. We set up stations at Winston Lake focused on a variety of environmental topics. For example, the Audubon Society led a birding activity, other groups conducted water and macroinvertebrate sampling, and Yadkin Riverkeeper led a discussion on environmental justice and watershed protection.

Beginning in January 2025, Yadkin Riverkeeper established a new part-time position dedicated to promoting YRK’s advocacy agenda. By definition, the word advocacy is the act or process of supporting a cause or proposal; as an organization whose mission is to protect and enhance the Yadkin Pee-Dee River Basin, we have many important causes to advocate for! Former Water Quality Specialist, Stephanie Stephens has taken on this role, as it is a natural transition from monitoring and analyzing data collected from High Rock Lake, working with the Concerned Citizens of West Badin, Duke University and North Carolina Environmental Justice Network (NCEJN) in their fight to remove legacy pollution from Alcoa’s site on Badin Lake and last year’s nonpartisan Get Out the Vote effort.

We are so excited to get back on the water with you. Thanks to cooperative efforts with Piedmont Land Conservancy who is providing boat storage for our kayak trailer and boats, Yadkin Riverkeeper will be able to be more responsive and capable of the demands of a paddling program. Below is a list of scheduled paddle trips for the year. There are some old favorites, some newer trail segments, and some that are just completely exploratory as to whether they will work or not. Pick a trip and join the YRK community on the water. Check our website in the near future for more details and registration information.

The recent meeting of Waterkeepers Carolina (our network of NC & SC waterkeepers) in Conway, SC, afforded me the opportunity to visit Georgetown, SC, where the Yadkin Pee Dee and Waccamaw Rivers join to form Winyah Bay before meetings the Atlantic Ocean. I had never been to Georgetown or the mouth of the Rivers at Winyah Bay, despite many years of traveling with my family to nearby Myrtle Beach as a kid. Who knew we were just following the general route of the Yadkin Pee Dee River from central NC to the SC coast.

At our Annual Membership Meeting on January 29th, Yadkin Riverkeeper members voted in six new board members for 2025. Please read more about them below! To view our full list of board members, please click HERE.

The new year used to be celebrated with the old man hobbling to the end of the year and the precocious baby emerging from the start of the new year. I just don’t see many references to those icons as much anymore. To make up for that, I present you with a tale of two hats. Knowing that paddle hats get abused, I kept one hat for more “formal” occasions. Yes, when you are the Yadkin River State Trail (YRST) Coordinator, you have a formal river hat and a work river hat. Where one hat was protected and kept new as the day it came in the box and only used for special occasions, the “work hat” came to the end of the year looking like the old man with a cane. I present this as a visual representation of how much was accomplished on the Yadkin River State Trail in 2024. This past year, Yadkin Riverkeeper:

Staff from Yadkin Riverkeeper attended a meeting held on January 23rd to support the Concerned Citizens of West Badin as they shared with the NC Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) the years of injustice they have experienced due to Alcoa’s toxic operations. Alcoa is an industrial producer of aluminum that operated an aluminum smelting plant in Badin, NC until 2007. The operations resulted in the dumping of hazardous waste in Badin Lake and the placement of an unlined landfill in the town. The Concerned Citizens of West Badin (CCWB) explained the environmental injustices their community has faced while working in the dangerous potrooms and being exposed to the hazardous spent potliner and contaminants they dumped in the landfill.