Tale of Two Data
Medora Corporation, the manufacturers of the SolarBee technology being tested at Jordan Lake as a substitute for the Division of Water Resource’s clean-up plan, has published an FAQ on their website defending their technology’s performance. Their comments are a hodge-podge of thoughts on the…
Good News on Hoffman
It’s been some time since Hoffman Forest was last mentioned in this blog, but there was news this week resolving a potential wetlands violation on the grounds of Hoffman Forest by activities conducted by NC State. These activities included the draining and ditching of…
Troubling Update
The Division of Environmental Quality (DEQ) was up before the NC legislative Environmental Review Committee last week. These committee meetings can be a harbinger of forthcoming legislation. Agenda items for the meeting included solar panel oversight, stormwater controls, riparian buffer protections, and the State’s…
Approved!!!
This past week was a milestone one at Watershed Investments. The State’s Division of Water Resources approved our first nutrient and buffer bank, Neville Farms, located in the Upper New Hope Watershed of Jordan Lake. After working in different aspects of environmental restoration for…
Floodplains Rule
Floodplains come in lots of shapes and sizes. This was evidenced by the rainstorms that moved through North Carolina at the end of December. Those storms came over a period of two days dropping between 2 and 3 inches of rain across most of…
No Difference
Year 1 results are in and the Solar Bee circulators have made no statistical difference in improving water quality in Jordan Lake. That’s the state’s finding in a report they presented to the legislature in October. The circulators were pitched as a low cost…
Rub a Dub
Faced with challenging requirements to reduce nutrients in Falls Lake by 40 and 77% TN and TP, respectively, the City of Durham is pulling out all the stops. In the effort to find cost effective solutions to reducing their nutrient footprint, they’re testing algal…
2015 Nutrient Epilogue
Midway through fall, the conditions conducive to algal blooms in our state has wound down. These blooms occur during warmer temperatures and benefit from longer daylight, more stagnant waters, and where nutrient concentrations are high. In North Carolina, there were nasty algal blooms in…
Toxic Algae and More
The following are two update to items I recently covered. First, regarding algae in the Chowan River, the State’s newly renamed Department of Environmental Quality (goodbye Natural Resources) monitoring has identified harmful algae in the Chowan River. A Department news release “encourages the public…
Mixer’s Questionable Benefit
In 2013, NC’s legislature ordered an experiment to try and improve water quality impairments in Jordan Lake. Detailed in past posts, the study’s goal is to see whether solar powered mixers are a way of helping improve water quality in the Jordan Lake and…