Beaver Watershed Alliance Pushes To Keep Water Clean

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Landowners, builders, hikers and residents can and must do more to keep drinking water clean, officials said Monday.

Members of the Beaver Watershed Alliance and city and county officials installed a sign Monday at Lake Wilson imploring visitors to keep the lake clean. Wilson is a small lake just south of Fayetteville.

“At one time this was the cleanest water in the county,” Herman Jones, an alliance board member who has lived in the area since the 1940s, said as the morning’s fog gave way to the sun. He pointed to the lake’s southern shore, obscured by oak trees, where houses have been built.

“This is getting contaminated now,” Jones said.

Water from Lake Wilson eventually flows up the White River and into Beaver Lake, which is the final destination for dozens of streams that crisscross a 1,200-square-mile swath of Northwest Arkansas. The area, known as the Beaver Watershed, stretches from the Missouri border south to the northern tip of Franklin County, including roughly the eastern third of Washington County and most of Madison County.

Once the water gets to Beaver Lake, it’s treated and pumped to the homes and businesses of more than 400,000 people, according to the watershed alliance. The group brought together experts and local officials in 2010 to preserve the reservoir’s water quality.

“We come in contact with it all of the time and take it for granted,” said Mike Maggi, an alliance board member who works to raise public awareness of water issues. “Any time they get a glass of water at a restaurant or out of their tap,” he said, it comes from Beaver Lake.

Most of Beaver Lake is clear, according to a 2012 alliance report. But incoming water often carries sediment, phosphorus and other pollutants, making it tougher to purify.

Lake Wilson feeds into the West Fork of the White River. The West Fork has 27 miles listed as “impaired” by the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality, meaning the water carries more eroded sediment than the state regulates for this region. The dirt likely came from stream banks, dirt roads and construction sites, said John Pennington, the alliance’s executive director.

Sediment and algae often impact Beaver Lake’s southern end — where the White River flows in. That’s where signs like the one installed Monday come in. Dozens of similar signs are posted around Beaver Lake and other tributaries already, and more are coming.

“We just want to get a good coverage throughout the watershed, at the high-use areas,” Pennington said. “I’d say we’re pretty close to halfway.”

He pointed to a variety of ways people can help. Hikers can hold onto trash and stay off stream banks. Landowners can plant vegetation along the banks. Builders can do their work in phases, or use silt fences. Anyone can volunteer for the alliance’s stream cleanups and tree plantings, which are held throughout the year.

Those suggestions hold for Fayetteville and Springdale residents as well, Pennington said, though most of them live in the Illinois River watershed, which includes the western two-thirds of Washington County.

“The drinking water from the lake still goes to them,” he said. “They can still have an impact.”