Fontana Dam – After years of searching, the source of a substantial water leak in one county municipality may have finally been discovered.
At the Feb. 21 Town of Fontana Dam council meeting, the water plant’s ORC (Operator-in-Responsible-Charge) Carrie Stewart briefed the panel on the discovery. Citing the recent closure – and condemnation – of the town’s former administrative offices off of N.C. 28, Stewart said the building’s vacancy gave the water department a chance to cutoff the supply going to the facility.
“When we had these two sections valved off, we went from losing two feet (9,500 gallons) an hour to 0.4 feet an hour,” Stewart said. “We get these problems under control, we’ll be in really good shape.”
The discovery would net the town around 40,000 gallons of water a day, and the loss averages 236,000 gallons each day. Stewart also estimated that the reduction in loss could drop the amount of time the town’s water plant has to be operational from 15-16 hours per day to a much more efficient 3-6 hours.
In a recent span of 12 months, Stewart told the council water loss has increased by more than 2 million gallons – which points to the evasive leaks progressively worsening.
“Three operators can’t handle that workload,” Stewart said. “We can’t work 24/7 with just three operators.”
The areas valved off included the parallel line that ran from the main entrance for Fontana Village Resort (Woods Road) and south on N.C. 28 to the previous administration building; as well as a section in front of the Wildwood Grill at the resort.
Exactly where in the lines are leaks is the next dilemma to resolve. Fontana Village Resort General Manager Jason Caughron said in the past, sonar was used to try and trace the source – but to no avail. He presented an alternative.
“We have somebody that can come in and do an infrared scan of the whole line,” Caughron said. “It would behoove us because it’s primetime for us (the resort’s busy season stretches roughly from March through October).
“There’s two things the resort has to have before it gets busy: labor and water.”
Town Administrator Zelerie Rogers put the entire predicament into perspective.
“I don’t even know how to make a budget, if we are able to correct this problem,” she said. “As long as I’ve worked here, we’ve had such great loss that I don’t even know how to plan a water budget for that.”
Rogers has served as Fontana Dam’s administrator since February 2015.
Stewart later said she received permission from the state to only run the plant every other day – if usage drops below 40,000 gallons a day, which could potentially occur during the winter months.
“If the tank is full, we could come in and run the plant for 4-5 hours every other day, versus coming in every day to run it for two,” Stewart said.
“It just sounds like a ‘pipe dream,’" Rogers quipped.
Stewart also read an email received on the day of the meeting congratulating the plant on receiving the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality/Environmental Protection Agency’s Area Wide Optimization Program Award for 2023, given to plants who average a high amount of turbidity removal.
In addition to the cost savings eradicating the water loss could offer, the financial woes mapped out at January’s council meeting are well on their way to working themselves out.
The resort is the town’s only source of revenue – and in a positive step forward, a check for $20,000 in unpaid user fees was recently given to Fontana Dam.