Oldest and youngest...8-year-old Eugenia Marceau plays in the bow of her canoe while 82-year-old Richard Burris crusies by in his kayak.
On March 21, some 40 Coosa River Basin Initiative members, new and old, celebrated the dawn of Spring with a 15-mile paddle trip down the Etowah River through Cherokee County from East Cherokee Drive to Boling Park.
The first of a series of more than a dozen CRBI-sponsored paddle trips this year (visit www.coosa.org for a complete listing), this journey gave members a glimpse of the Etowah and issues impacting it.
The trip began opposite the Pilgrim’s Pride Chicken Rendering Plant, a smelly place which does us the favor of processing the chicken parts we don’t eat (feet, feathers, entrails, etc.) and turning them into dog and cat food.
There was a time, many years ago, say the locals that whole chicken parts floated down the river here. Thankfully, a handy little federal law called the Clean Water Act helped tidy up the river here, making it a most pleasant paddling destination, despite the unsettling smell coming from the plant.
The water was a bit high to get clear views of the Native American fish weirs on this section of river, but rest assured, they are there. We’ll come back and visit them in the late summer when water levels drop.
The paddle into Canton gave us a view of the new water intake for the
This raw water intake on the Etowah River will pump water to Hickory Log Creek reservoir, a "pump storage" reservoir designed to insure water supplies for Canton.
Hickory Log Creek reservoir–a water storage impoundment located north of Canton on this tributary to the Etowah. The reservoir will be partially filled with water pumped from the Etowah River, taken during periods of high flow and sent behind the big dam on Hickory Log. During low river flows, the water will be released from the dam and flow to the Etowah insuring that the city has ample water levels to pump drinking water from the Etowah.
A “pump storage” facility that came with a price tag of more than $100 million, the project is the poster child for the debate over how Metro Atlanta will meet its future water needs. Expected to yield about 40 million gallons of drinking water per day, the project costs about $2500 for every 1000 gallons its yields. By comparison, water conservation measures, like fixing leaking delivery pipes and installing low flow toilets can cost between 50 cents and $250 for every 1000 gallons saved, according to Georgia’s Environmental Protection Division. Other studies show that per gallon, dams cost up to 8500 times more than water efficiency investments (American River’s Hidden Reservoir Report) These figures suggest that as our communities grapple with the water needs of a growing population, we should always look to water efficiency measures as the first option for extending our water supplies.
The alternative (damming creeks and rivers) comes with both financial and environmental costs. The dam on Hickory Log Creek also wiped out habitat for the federally protected Cherokee darter–a fish found no where else in the world except in the Etowah River Basin.
The trip ended at Boling Park in Canton where our paddlers helped one another up a steep embankment. One of the impediments to paddling this section of river is the lack of appropriate launch sites and take outs.
In 2007, CRBI secured $25,000 for the City of Canton to construct a
Alan Crawford drifts down the Etowah.
boat ramp at one of its city parks through a settlement agreement reached with the developer of a 90-acre shopping center in town. Unfortunately, the process of constructing boat ramps is long and involved and government sometimes works at glacial speed.
It is our hope that sometime in the near future, the City of Canton will follow through with plans for a boat ramp and our next Cherokee County paddle trip will not end with a torturous climb up a steep, muddy bank.
The Etowah through Cherokee County is a real gem and opportunities to explore it should be improved.
Joe Cook
March 22, 2009
CRBI Musselhead Blog 