The Nolichucky Gorge, a crown jewel of North Carolina and Tennessee’s natural heritage, is under threat from devastating, unregulated mining operations. According to a federal lawsuit, following Hurricane Helene, CSX and/or its contractors have begun removing massive amounts of rock and soil from the riverbed and banks under federal authorization. And according to the Southern Environmental Law Center, this authorization was granted unlawfully, without proper environmental review.
Federal agencies failed to assess the devastating ecological and economic consequences of this activity, which violates critical environmental laws, including the Clean Water Act, the lawsuit states. Now, conservation groups are suing to halt the destruction and hold CSX and federal agencies accountable for this reckless degradation of the river.
The Nolichucky Gorge, which straddles the Tennessee-North Carolina state line near Erwin, Tenn., and Poplar, N.C., is vital to the region’s tourism, economy and ecology. The removal of bedrock and riverbank material compromises flood mitigation and increases erosion. Future floodwaters will carve new, unstable channels through the gorge, leaving the river shallower, less navigable and potentially unusable for rafting and other recreation — jeopardizing livelihoods and ecosystems.
This illegal mining threatens to permanently alter one of the Southeast’s premier whitewater rivers, with catastrophic consequences for local communities, wildlife and future generations.
We cannot afford to wait. Contact your local representatives and demand immediate action to stop this destruction. Urge them to enforce environmental laws, investigate federal negligence and protect the Nolichucky Gorge before it’s too late.
Join the fight to preserve this irreplaceable treasure.
Learn more and take action here: [avl.mx/ebq]. Also take action here: [avl.mx/ebr].
— Brad Preslar
Asheville
Perhaps you haven’t seen the numerous videos of the destruction from the flood to railroad tracks through the gorge. Can you suggest a better way to move the freight that that line carried before the storm? How many diesel trucks on narrow winding roads would it take? Maybe repairing the tracks is the safest and “green” solution. Would you advocate for not repairing I-40 where it was washed out as well?
The railroad absolutely needs to be rebuilt, and if I wasn’t clear about my belief in that need, my apologies. Let’s rebuild the railroad, let’s rebuild I-40. What I’m not for is dredging up the rocks and destroying the riverbed so CSX can save some money on gravel. Rather than using crushed rock substrate brought in from a quarry (as per standard accepted practices), they’re scooping up all the rocks in the river and trucking them all over WNC. But we can have both things. We can have the railroad rebuilt AND not destroy the river.
The author is either ignorant or intentionally trying to mislead with his description of this as “mining”. There is NO mining involved at all. The project is intended to rebuild a 125+ year old North/South rail corridor across WNC from Erwin TN to Spartanburg SC. It interchanges freight with the East/West NS /SOU line in Marion NC.
Mining is the process of extracting valuable materials from the earth, such as minerals, metals, coal, oil, or gas. In this case, CSX is mining rocks (aka minerals) from a riverbed because it’s cheaper than paying for crushed rock trucked in from a quarry.
I firmly believe the rail corridor needs to be rebuilt. But I also firmly believe that it can be rebuilt without destroying the Nolichucky River. We can have a railroad AND a river.
ZA Construction excavated and mined the river bottom that formerly supported a riparian forest. Hurricane Helene removed most of the trees and a few feet of soil. ZA Construction, without any regulatory oversight or awareness of the pre-Helene geology scooped up the foundation cobble that remained and shipped it to Poplar NC where it is now supporting an industrial parking lot servicing restoration of the Poplar trestle. Transport required over 500 dump truck loads over 3 days in early November 2024.