On April 8, 2008 Dr. Bates gave a presentation to the Board of Aldermen on the Forest Management Plan. He gave a brief overview of the history of the watershed, the process used to develop the Plan, as well as the recommended treatments and timeline for those treatments.

Click here for the slides Dr. Bates used during the presentation:

The Watershed Advisory Committee operates under specific rules. Click here to see those rules.

Quick Facts about the Watershed

The Waynesville Watershed occupies an area of approximately 8600 acres in the Allen Creek area of Haywood County, North Carolina. The town of Waynesville began acquiring this property around 1913 for the purpose of creating a reservoir that would supply the town with high quality water for residential and commercial needs, and for flood control. Construction on the reservoir began in 1977 and was completed in 1980. The current property boundary includes all of the private land that drains into the reservoir.

There are some public holdings in the very upper reaches of the watershed held by the

Blue Ridge Parkway (US Department of the Interior, National Park Service). In addition, the town owns some areas, such as Rocky Branch Creek, that drain into Allen Creek north of the reservoir (outside the watershed for the reservoir).

The Waynesville Watershed is classified by the NC Department of Environment and Natural Resources Division of Water Quality as a WS-I watershed, meaning that waters are used as sources of water supply for drinking, culinary or food processing by users desiring maximum protection for their water supplies. WS-I waters are those within essentially natural and undeveloped watersheds with no permitted point source (wastewater) discharges.

The total reservoir capacity is approximately 1.1 billion gallons (86 acres), though it is typically maintained at around 600 million gallons (50 acres) for flood control. The water treatment process includes flocculation, sedimentation, and dual media filtration. The water treatment plant can treat 8 million gallons per day. Currently, about 3.6 million gallons of treated water are used per day. The minimum release of water to maintain flow in Allen Creek is about 2.5 million gallons per day (3.5 cubic feet per second). The estimated yield of the watershed is 12.8 million gallons per day (19.8 cubic feet per second).

The lands within the current watershed boundary have been subjected to a variety of land use practices in the past. The most intensive of these were probably concentrated around the former mountain farm community of Quinland. The more gentle slopes commonly found adjacent to streams were cleared and cropped, with adjacent steeper or more rocky areas cleared and used for pasture. There has also been a long history of timber harvesting in the watershed, with the last taking place in 1987.

(the above is from the Introduction in the Strategic Forest Management Plan completed in April 2004.)  The full text is available here.

The Waynesville Watershed Conservation Easement Map with USGS Quads is available here.