Marina Dock Age

From the 1950s until about 1992, houseboats dumped sewage into Fontana Lake in Swain County, N.C., because the lake didn’t have any pumpouts. This practice of dumping sewage into the lake or “straight piping” led to very high fecal coliform numbers and dozens of illnesses every year.

“Some of the fecal coliform numbers were about 1,200 parts per million, and the state requires levels to be below 200 parts per million to be safe,” said Tony Sherrill, owner of Alarka Boat Docks, a facility with 150 floating slips.

Fixing the problem

By 1992, Sherrill decided to do something to fix the problem by working with Steve Akers from the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Together they shared the cost to retrofit a boat into a mobile pumpout with a septic system and a 250-gallon tank. Sherrill then took this boat to houseboats on the lake and encouraged them to use this free pumpout rather than dumping their waste.

This makeshift pumpout boat removed the waste from these houseboats and took it to the TVA septic system where it was properly treated. Boaters got accustomed to using the pumpout boat after a year and a half, and then Sherrill started charging boaters $25 per pumpout to cover his maintenance costs.

Getting involved

While Sherrill was doing his best to combat the dumping in Fontana Lake, Swain County Commissioner David Monteith also realized that this dumping was causing a problem. “A doctor told me there were 67 cases of fecal illness in 1998. So I took 40 samples from the lake to find out why so many people were getting sick, and we got very high fecal coliform readings of 700-800 parts per million,” said Monteith.

Monteith took these readings to the state of North Carolina, which recommended the county pass an ordinance against straight piping. An ordinance was passed in 2002 forbidding boaters from dumping sewage into the lake.

Monteith also joined forces with Sherrill, TVA and Southwestern North Carolina Resource Conservation and Development Counsel Inc. (RC&D) to form Fontana Lake Waste Recovery in 2004.

This organization, which was created to clean up the lake, got a total of about $760,000 in grants from RC&D, The Clean Water Management Trust Fund, TVA and The Little Tennessee Non-Points Team. They used the money to give each marina on Fontana Lake a floating pumpout boat and a 1,000-gallon floating holding tank for sewage, the first such floating holding tanks in the state, so boats stopped dumping in the lake.

Fontana Lake Waste Recovery used the remaining grant money of about $175 per houseboat, to help pay for toilets and holding tanks that needed to be installed on TVA houseboats.

A cleaner lake

Water samples taken in 2006 showed a significantly lower level of fecal coliform in the water compared to just a few years before. In one location the test results gave a fecal reading of 27 parts per million, a major improvement from the several hundred parts per million measurements that were making swimmers sick.

This amazing transformation was attributed to the efforts of Commissioner Monteith, Tony Sherrill, Steve Akers and the organizations who contributed thousands of dollars to fight this problem. The new tougher ordinance prohibiting dumping also played a major role as houseboat owners are now required to sign an agreement with their marinas that they won’t dump and will submit to inspections to ensure compliance.

Rob Preston is managing editor of Marina Dock Age magazine. He can be reached by phone at 847/647-2900 Ext. 1311 or via e-mail at rpreston@prestonpub.com.