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Chattanooga: Washed away

By: Pam Sohn
(Contact)

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Bo Watson

In recent years, Donna Carlisle has lost land, trees and even a car to a creek she didn’t even know ran near her home when she moved in 14 years ago.

North Chickamauga Creek at that time was about 200 yards away from her new house, hidden by woods and land contours. Now all that separates her deck from the drought-dried rocks of the streambed is 23 feet of spongy and sinking grass.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” Mrs. Carlisle said of the next heavy rain event that likely will take the house, located in the Soddy-Daisy area.

To address the concerns of Mrs. Carlisle and other homeowners, state lawmakers want a task force to form a regional plan for creek and watershed management of northern Hamilton and southern Rhea counties.

“Clearly we’re never going to win the battle against nature. It’s stronger than all of us,” Sen. Bo Watson, R-Hixson, told a roomful of state lawmakers, state and federal officials, Mrs. Carlisle and other concerned homeowners who gathered Monday at the Soddy-Daisy Town Hall. “But hopefully we can come out with some good ideas and possibly even some solutions for the problems.”

In recent years, Donna Carlisle has lost land, flowers and even a car to the creek that once made her small home in Soddy-Daisy seem ideal.

However, discussions in the two-hour meeting made it clear such a plan will not be easy, even with a task force created by state lawmakers including Sen. Watson and Reps. Richard Floyd, R-Chattanooga, and Jim Cobb, R-Spring City.

Not only will planners have to battle the forces of nature that continue to send Cumberland Plateau boulders down the mountainsides to the creek, they also will have to fight turf battles over development, authority and even property rights.

Rhea County Executive Billy Ray Patton offered an example.

After extreme flooding in Graysville that caused a creek to break its banks and flood the city, a property owner wouldn’t allow the county access to repair the break. So the county bought the flooded property.

Then the county waited 14 months for three agencies — the state, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — to grant the proper permits to change the course of the creek bed.

When the work nearly was completed, state regulators determined the county and contractor had gone further in changing the creek’s course than the permit allowed. A notice of violation was issued and a moratorium placed on more work. The county is awaiting a decision, and possibly a fine, for the alleged violation, Mr. Patton said.

“I believe we did an excellent job,” he said. “That work allowed the folks living in Graysville to have a little more peaceful night.”

Soddy-Daisy Mayor Bob Privett said encounters with water pollution regulators left him and other government officials wondering what authority they do and do not have even when it comes to routine maintenance on creeks.

“The problem is all this dirt and rock that gets built up in the (North Chickamauga) creek year after year,” he said. “You can see that the creeks are not as deep as they used to be. Trees even grow in it. But we’re told we can’t get in there and pull that stuff out.”

Paul Sloan, deputy commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, nodded when a barrage of similar local comments began.

“We would like to help expedite permitting processes where we can,” he told the group.

Dr. Richard Urban, head of TDEC’s Water Pollution Control Division in the Chattanooga field office, told local officials that development, fallen pines devastated by pine beetles, even some work by the cities, counties, towns and state had joined with eons of natural mountain breakdown to create the changing flows of water.

“If you just dredge and straighten a stream, you’re only making the water flow faster,” he said. “That won’t solve your problem. Work like that in one place just moves the water to the neighbor downstream.”

Some members of the group wondered aloud if that’s what happened to Mrs. Carlisle. Just upstream from her home, state officials allowed contractors to pile new rocks into the creek to support water-ravaged supports beneath a U.S. 27 bridge. Nearby, riprap was piled around an edge of the Soddy-Daisy Industrial Park.

Both changes moved the flow of North Chickamauga Creek, hydrology experts in the group said.

Mr. Sloan said he supported the idea of a task force to study the problems, “but we’ve got to use good science.”

“What seems intuitive is not always the solution, and we don’t need to be building new things in the way of the water,” he said.

Finding help

In the two or three years after Hurricane Ivan’s drenching rains in 2004, state, local and federal officials spent about $3.5 million trying to shore up bridge abutments, save properties and stave off eroding storm waters in the eight major creeks of Hamilton and Rhea counties.

“We did what we had funding to do,” Dr. Urban said of the eight projects that TDEC and the Corps of Engineers worked on together.

But it wasn’t nearly enough, he said, and some landowners spent thousands in their own money because state and federal governments can allocate funds only to save public properties, not private ones.

Sen. Watson said a task force could help bring clarity to both regulatory questions and funding concerns.

“It gets very complicated,” he said. “And, of course, at the end of the day, citizens just want their land protected. They don’t care about all this complicated stuff.”

Mrs. Carlisle said she doesn’t understand the complicated science, but she is happy that Sen. Watson’s group ended its meeting this week with a visit to her yard.

For years, she said, the small home was ideal, with an inviting back deck that opened onto a large back yard with three big trees and a nice fence. As time passed, her grandchildren made trails through the woods to swim in the creek with neighbor youngsters.

Other new homes and businesses — even an industrial park — popped up in Soddy-Daisy and along Waldens Ridge, the escarpment of the Cumberland Plateau towering to the west.

But each change moved the flow of storm water off the plateau and through the valley, and the new millennium brought a 15-month period with three major floods — the last in September 2004 when the remains of Hurricane Ivan passed over the region. Each flood or substantial rain has brought the creek’s edge nearer to the Carlisle home, she said.

“I hope they can get it stopped,” Mrs. Carlisle said.

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