By Will Atwater
Protecting water systems was on his mind as Rick Savage stepped to the podium at the McKimmon Conference and Training Center on N.C. State’s campus Friday to make a point about wetlands.
“One thing to realize […] is that what has been happening has not changed the definition of wetland—a wetland is still a wetland,” Savage said. “What is changing is the definition of a jurisdictional wetland; the Clean Water Act protects jurisdictional wetlands.”
Savage, executive director of Carolina Wetlands, an organization that advocates for protecting wetlands in North and South Carolina, spoke in response to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last year that changed the definition of what constituted the “Waters of the United States.”
The 5 to 4 ruling in the case, Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, held that the Sackett family was not in violation of the Clean Water Act when they began storing soil in preparation to build a home near Priest Lake, Idaho, on a portion of their property that the EPA argued interfered with area wetlands.
The result: intermittent wetlands adjacent to a waterway with Waters of the U.S. status are no longer protected by the Clean Water Act. The Supreme Court altered the previous criteria, ruling that to receive jurisdictional protections, wetlands must have a continuous surface connection to a federally protected waterbody to receive Clean Water Act protection.
With the Supreme Court weighing in, Savage and others say this means that a law passed last year by the North Carolina General Assembly in anticipation of the conservative high court’s decision has the potential to affect surface water quality, increase flooding risks brought by more frequent and severe storms, and boost flood insurance costs.
More questions, few answers
North Carolina’s recently passed Farm Act, which aligns with the Supreme Court’s definition of Waters of the U.S., alarmed environmentalist and advocacy groups, so they started analyzing how much of the state’s wetland area could be affected.
Currently, what’s out there are best estimates.
Julie Youngman, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, spoke after Savage, making the point that a significant amount of wetlands are vulnerable to losing protections under the new definition of jurisdictional wetlands, according to estimates provided by groups that are trying to determine the environmental effect of the Sackett ruling. That could include isolated wetlands, such as Carolina bays, swampy ponds that appear and disappear in coastal plains after rains, and ephemeral streams that flow during or shortly after a rainstorm.
“All the different Clean Water Act permits and regulations won’t apply to possibly 63 percent of the acres of wetlands,” Youngman said, calling the change in status for these areas “a big deal.”
John Dorney, from the environmental restoration firm Axiom Environmental, told the audience that based on his calculations using criteria established in the Sackett ruling, as much as three-quarters of the state’s wetlands could lose protections.
Dorney did emphasize that the actual number hasn’t been determined.
“Nobody in this panel, nobody in this room, nobody in this state or at the [EPA] knows” the actual amount of wetlands that will lose federal protection, Dorney said.
Savage, Dorney and Youngman were speaking as part of the 26th annual N.C. Water Resources Research Institute’s 26th conference, which took place Wednesday and Thursday of last week. During the two-day conference, nearly 300 people listened to experts discuss research and address water-related issues pertinent to North Carolina, such as stormwater management and coastal flooding.
Rising waters, rising insurance concerns
The lack of flood insurance in coastal communities is something that concerns University of North Carolina graduate student Kieran Fitzmaurice, who talked about the increasing numbers of homeowners in coastal communities who lack flood insurance.
“A recent study looked at a sample of North Carolina mortgages and found that less than half of borrowers located inside the 100-year floodplain actually carried flood insurance,” Fitzmaurice said during his presentation at the WRRI Conference.
Wetlands are one of nature’s key flood mitigation tools, and the potential loss of them in North Carolina could make hurricane season flooding worse, which has implications for public health and economic devastation. Flood insurance can be a vital tool in helping people in coastal communities recover from natural disasters.
As she was completing her presentation, attorney Youngman referenced Chapel Hill’s Eastgate Shopping Center that “was built in the 1950s in the wetlands around Booker Creek.”
Youngman recounted how the shopping center flooded during Hurricanes Fran and Florence — and on other occasions as well.
“This is what happens when you build in a wetland, regardless of what the law says,” she said.
Celebrating World Water Day
More than 50 people gathered on Saturday in Chapel Hill to think about water and its importance to communities. The timing wasn’t coincidental: Friday was World Water Day, a global event started by the United Nations to bring awareness to the importance of freshwater and how losing access for any reason — climate change, war, poverty — can be devastating.
The EPA released its 2023 Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act annual report on World Water Day and announced it is contributing $3 billion for water infrastructure investments.
“This World Water Day, EPA is celebrating historic investments we’re making in the nation’s water infrastructure to secure the health and well-being of millions of Americans,” said EPA Acting Assistant Administrator for Water Bruno Pigott. “These federal dollars are at work in your neighborhood, making drinking water safer and wastewater systems more effective while creating thousands of good-paying jobs.”
“I think we can all agree that [water] sustains life here on earth, not just for us but all life forms,” said Coda Cavalier, a representative of 7 Directions of Service, a North Carolina-based Indigenous-led environmental justice group.
Cavalier added that she wanted people to “challenge these ideas that may seem normal in society like buying bottled water; that should be something that we should be able to get. We shouldn’t have to be worried about our rivers being polluted and filled with trash and all these different chemicals.”
The event brought attention to Bolin Creek, an estuary of the waterway that flooded the Eastgate mall, which has been plagued by runoff from lawns of homes that border the creek. The creek, upstream from Jordan Lake, is threatened by a coal ash deposit that borders it.
Barbara Foushee, mayor of Carrboro, posed a rhetorical question before delivering a proclamation from the town: “Mother Earth and water. What would we do without either one?”
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