THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, September 17, 1996 TAG: 9609170319
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY MASON PETERS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 71 lines
All across the waters of Albemarle Sound, a silent, invisible killer left by Hurricane Fran is moving east toward the sea, already leaving thousands of fish dead and many thousands more doomed to die.
The fish are suffocating.
``Extremely heavy rains and storm surges that accompanied Hurricane Fran saturated the land around rivers and swamps that feed Albemarle Sound,'' said Harrel B. Johnson, district manager of the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries in Elizabeth City.
``The runoff water is now mixed with stagnant swamp water, and when it reaches Albemarle Sound there is little or no oxygen left in it,'' said Johnson.
At one point as Fran's rains poured into one upstate reservoir lake over the weekend, the Army Corps of Engineers reported nearly a million gallons of water a second flowing through spillways on the way to the sea.
On the south shore of Albemarle Sound at Columbia a new fish kill of catfish and striped bass was reported in the Scuppernong River on Monday. Over the weekend as riverine watersheds drained eastward other fish kills were evident.
``Unfortunately in these cases you just have to let nature take its course,'' said Lt. Doug Sawyer, an officer with the North Carolina Marine Fisheries division in Columbia. ``Eventually the water is stirred around enough to take up more oxygen.''
The astonishing amount of water that has soaked thousands of inland acres of North Carolina and is spilling over dams is to a considerable extent controlled by the Corps of Engineers. Headquarters for the Corps in North Carolina is at Wilmington where a network of instruments keeps track of upstate river levels.
For the past week, the engineers have been opening sluice gates to send millions of gallons of impounded water downstream to lower river levels. The huge amount of stagnant water flowing down river has in some cases killed shoals of fish and will continue to do so in the process, game protectors said.
Ralph ``Duck'' Duckson, a program manager for the Army engineers at Jordan Lake west of Raleigh, has typically controlled an astounding rush of water out of the lake in an effort to keep upstream rivers below flood levels.
Under orders from the Army engineers, Duckson directly controls water from rivers that eventually join to feed the Cape Fear River that reaches the sea near Wilmington. Other rivers whose waters eventually reach Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds include the Neuse, the Tar, the Pamlico and the New River.
``Last Friday, when the storm waters started to build up, we had about 925,000 gallons a second flowing out of Lake Jordan through the spillways,'' Duckson said.
Overflowing rivers have caused millions of gallons of raw sewage to mix into the watersheds, state health officials said in Raleigh, and health agencies warned about drinking or swimming in polluted waters.
The size of Lake Jordan grew from a normal 14,000 acres to 27,000 acres as Fran's waters piled up, Duckson said.
``At that time we were measuring the water level in the lake as 233.59 feet above mean sea level,'' he said, ``This upset some people until we explained the lake itself is only about 65 feet deep below the water surface but that surface was normally about 215 feet above sea level.''
The Wilmington Corps of Engineers also began controlling water flowing over the dams at Roanoke Rapids as soon as Hurricane Fran moved across North Carolina and into Virginia. The Roanoke River, with the Chowan River, is one of the main sources of water pouring into Albemarle Sound.
Scattered fish kills have already been reported in smaller tributary rivers in the western end of Albemarle Sound.
``What we need now is more cool weather,'' said Johnson, of the state Division of Marine Fisheries.
``Cool weather lets the water hold more dissolved oxygen, and that's what the fish need now,'' he said.
KEYWORDS: HURRICANE FRAN by CNB