Fontana Dam – An overhaul to one local municipality’s aging water system cannot come soon enough.
Temporary repairs made to Fontana Dam’s pipelines are no longer a sustainable solution. The council is fully aware and has worked for years to find a way to put a permanent cap on the major amount of loss.
Recently, the town has sought the services of WithersRavenel – an Asheville-based engineering firm – to completely replace the water lines.
But in the meantime, Fontana Dam’s ORC (Operator in Responsible Charge) Carrie Stewart has found problematic areas and dispatched crews to perform repairs – only for the 1940s-era, clay water lines to simply implode elsewhere.
The daily water loss for the town hovered around 74 percent when Stewart gave her monthly update to the council at its April 17 meeting. By that point in the month, Stewart said the plant had produced 3.929 million gallons of water – including 308,000 in a single day. The workload had employees averaging 18 hours a day operating the facility.
In April 2023, the highest production was 212,000 and the plant averaged 11 hours of operation.
“Our pumps aren’t strong enough to produce half a million gallons a day,” Stewart said. “At best, we could produce 400,000 – but when the pool starts back up, we could easily go over that.”
Once all the red tape has been torn away, WithersRavenel estimates the project could take four months.
But time is of the essence, as Fontana Village Resort – the town’s lone business – stands to suffer greatly if the losses continue to mount: the resort’s “peak” season has arrived.
“We’ve got an emergency, essentially,” mayor Rob Hardy astutely observed.
On a positive note, the town’s Annual Drinking Water Quality Report from the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality received high praise, as no violations were found amid the yearly samples.