VAN BUREN COUNTY -- About $7 million, most of it from a former Fayetteville Shale drilling company, will go toward conservation efforts in a part of north-central Arkansas where oil and gas drillers once were prevalent.
Australian energy company BHP Billiton will provide $6 million to be used by the Nature Conservancy for the creation of recreational opportunities near Clinton and improvements around one of the state's largest sources of drinking water.
The project has emerged as natural-gas drilling has left the area and local leaders tout tourism as the next economic opportunity.
The Nature Conservancy has spent $3.5 million purchasing land for nature preserves in Van Buren County. The group also has placed $500,000 in a endowment fund for the protection of the watershed at Greers Ferry Lake, is spending $1 million on designing and implementing watershed protection for the lake, and will spend another $1 million on amenities at the two nature preserves and community outreach.
The U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service provided $816,000 in addition to the $6 million from BHP, and another $92,500 is from other partners, such as counties that provide matching funds for road work.
The efforts are designed to improve the lake and its four tributaries that are all forks of the Little Red River.
"The sedimentation in the lake and rivers is a really big problem," said Scott Simon, director of the Nature Conservancy in Little Rock. "There are many landowners that are really struggling with erosion and many towns and water districts that have increased drinking-water costs from increased sediment in the rivers.
"What this donation provides is ... the opportunity to bring funding to address these challenges, for people to work together to address these problems."
Simon said cleaning up the sediment would cost two to four times as much money as the Nature Conservancy has now for such work.
The Clinton Water Department recently installed a $4.5 million clarifier in Greers Ferry Lake to clean sediment from the water as mandated by the Arkansas Department of Health. Mayor Richard McCormac said he expects to have to raise water rates to pay for it.
McCormac also is concerned about the quality of drinking water and the water in the South and Archey forks of the Little Red River that flow through town.
"Tourism is big," he said. "These two creeks that come through Clinton are certainly assets, and we want to promote that."
The partnership between the Nature Conservancy and BHP in Arkansas was one of two announced Thursday in what the two are calling the Sustainable Rivers and Forests Initiative.
The other project announced is an $8 million effort to establish two new nature preserves near Houston, Texas, and improve the conditions of the Columbia Bottomlands near Houston.
BHP approached the Nature Conservancy in 2013 about projects in Texas and Arkansas, selected specifically because of the company's oil and gas production in the two states. BHP and the Nature Conservancy had worked together previously on projects in Australia and Chile.
BHP, which purchased Chesapeake Energy's assets in the Fayetteville Shale in 2011, no longer has any active drilling rigs in north-central Arkansas, but some support workers remain to maintain wells that are still producing natural gas.
Kara McCulloch, a spokesman for BHP, said the company wants to ensure the region's sustainability. It also wants to leave something that will enhance quality of life and natural resources, she said.
Greers Ferry Lake is key for drinking water and recreational activities, Simon said.
The lake, which supplies the drinking water for 150,000, receives water from four forks of the Little Red River that could use some cleaning and is surrounded by roads that are too rugged, Nature Conservancy officials said.
The conservation measures focus on the area around Greers Ferry Lake and its tributaries where materials drain into the water bodies, also known as a watershed.
One of the biggest problems is the amount of sediment entering the lake, Nature Conservancy officials said. Too much dirt harms the quality of water for fish, they said. The dirt is from the erosion of unpaved roads and from the chopping down of trees that otherwise would help stop the dirt from traveling into nearby water.
The conservation efforts undertaken by the Nature Conservancy will include:
• Repairing unpaved roads that have eroded and led to sediment flowing into streams. This work will be done using 50-50 matching funds from Van Buren, Searcy, Stone and Cleburne counties.
• Restoration of eroded stream banks.
• Planting at least 100,000 trees near streams and in flood plains to reduce sediment entering the river and to help capture sediment during flooding.
• Creation of a 973-acre nature preserve -- called Bluffton Preserve -- along the Archey Fork of the Little Red River for public recreation.
• Creation of an 867-acre nature preserve, called South Fork Preserve, near the South Fork of the Little Red River. It will be used to test some of the stream-bank restoration and erosion work, and will be open to the public
Bluffton Preserve north of Clinton already is open to the public. It is a grassy area in a bowl surrounded by trees and bluffs and provides lower access to the Archey Fork for canoeists as well as several swimming holes.
Local Nature Conservancy river conservation program director Joy DeClerk also noted that 80 fish species live in the watershed of Greers Ferry Lake, including two endangered species that can't be found anywhere else in the world: the yellowcheek darter and the speckled pocketbook mussel.
Fixing a low river crossing for cars along the South Fork should help with water flow and the movement of fish under and around the concrete plank that suppresses flow and sends water off to the side of the river, DeClerk said.
Additionally, unpaved roads -- particularly steep ones -- have posed a problem in the watershed, DeClerk said. An example is Watergate Road, north of Clinton, where cuts have been made in the road's dirt and gravel, allowing water to pool and then drain, taking dirt down the steep slope.
The Conservancy can install culverts or smooth covers to keep the water from pooling in the road and flowing down it, Simon said. The water would instead move to the side of the road and flow into woods that can capture the sediment and keep it from the rivers and lake.
"The counties have been great to work with," Simon said, adding that many county officials are eager to repair roads and reduce the cost and frequency of grading.
Greers Ferry Lake also has had problems with turbidity in recent years, which led the Clinton Water Department to install the clarifier. "Turbidity" refers to the murkiness of the water, but not necessarily to the existence of pollutants.
Todd Burgess, manager of the Clinton Water Department, has said the turbidity was largely from deforestation and erosion but that those problems weren't specifically related to oil and gas production.
Oil and gas companies have been accused of contributing to environmental harm in the Fayetteville Shale.
Some of the trees cleared from the watershed were removed by gas companies for drilling infrastructure. Gas companies were cited for hundreds of violations of water and environmental regulations during the height of drilling, including for sediment erosion and runoff from drilling pads.
In 2011, one company went to federal criminal court on charges related to an "illegal take" of the speckled pocketbook mussel. A "take" means to "harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect, or to attempt to engage in any such conduct," according to the Endangered Species Act.
Hawk Field Services, a subsidiary of Petrohawk Energy Corp. of Houston, pleaded guilty to the charges, which were filed after the installation of a pipeline led to erosion and sediment flows into three forks of the Little Red River, according to U.S. Department of Justice.
In 2009, the Nature Conservancy, Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, the federal Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service created guidelines for the gas companies for constructing and maintaining pipelines in the shale.
Metro on 09/30/2016