N.C. Water Rights Committee Thanks Yes! Weekly For Superb "Whose Water Is It Anyway!?" Article

By N.C. Water Rights Committee

A recent article titled "Whose water is it anyway!?" ran in the Greensboro-High Point-Winston-Salem publication Yes! Weekly (http://www.yesweekly.com/article-8358-whose-water-is-it-anyway_.html). It was a fine piece by reporter Keith Barber that exposed exactly how Alcoa is exploiting the Yadkin Hydroelectric Project to benefit its bottom line over the health, safety and welfare needs of North Carolinians

Barber interviewed several experts on the issue, including state Sens. Fletcher J. Hartsell Jr. and Stan Bingham, and Dean Naujoks, the Yadkin Riverkeeper. Their comments brought out the facts of just how much has been lost environmentally and economically by having Alcoa retain its monopoly of the dams and powerhouses, and how it needs to change rather than allow Alcoa another 50-year license to continue its poor stewardship. There were two key points revealed by the article:

1) Alcoa Gets Rich From The Project While Surrounding Communities Suffer

Recounting the Project's history, Barber noted how Alcoa won the license to oversee it 50 years ago by claiming it would create jobs in Stanly County. He wrote: "The Badin Works aluminum smelting plant did bring 1,000 jobs to the area after Alcoa applied for its water rights license in 1958. But Alcoa, a multi-billion dollar corporation and the world's largest producer of aluminum, ceased operations at the plant in 2007. The plant employed only 377 people when it shut down, said Alcoa spokesman Gene Ellis."

The smelter is gone now, and so are the jobs, and the benefits for Stanly County as a result of Alcoa continuing to operate the Project have died. In fact, many of the counties which are part of the Project are among the state's poorest, while Alcoa makes tens of millions annually selling hydroelectricity generated by the dams on the power grid, mostly outside the state

Sen. Bingham noticed this inequity for North Carolinians in the article. "As far as I'm concerned, Alcoa got the gold mine and we got the shaft," he said.

2) The Water Is Being Poorly Managed

The article recounted numerous contamination incidents associated with Alcoa on the water, including a discovery last year of PCBs in Badin Lake, a reservoir for the Project. That prompted the state to issue a fish consumption advisory, and Alcoa objected to having to post signs in public about it. The PCBs are believed to have stemmed from Alcoa's dumping sites for its smelting operations near the lake. The number of those sites and the contamination involved in each remain unknown to outsiders.

"Alcoa knows they can't hide these dumping sites," Naujoks told Barber. "They're going around pointing out the buried bodies that they want us to find. They're not showing us where all the buried bodies are found. As we start digging down through the layers, we're going to find much more."

"They fought the fish-advisory signs; they say we're taking their property and we have no rights to the water," Bingham noted. "We're stuck with the bastards, at least for the moment, but I feel good about the direction of the fight we're taking on in the future."

Sen. Hartsell told Barber that "[Alcoa] signed an agreement. We're just asking them to live up to their own word. The state of North Carolina intervened 50 years ago on Alcoa's behalf to assist them to get a 50-year license and operate the plant at Badin, but conditions have changed dramatically. If they're going to use it, what is the return to the people of the state on the state's investment in the raw material, which is the water? That water is owned by the people."

We at the N.C. Water Rights Committee are pleased with the strong arguments made by the senators and the Yadkin Riverkeeper in this article, and we urge all state legislators to keep their words in mind when the General Assembly reconvenes this May and considers this issue. The time is now for us to recapture that water - let's do it for our economic and environmental future.

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