Flashback: A little history about timbering in local watersheds


In a March 12 Asheville Citizen-Times article, Rep. Moffitt suggests, “Selective timbering under the auspices of a professional arborist is the best thing for a watershed.” Moffitt chairs a state committee that’s considering stripping the city of Asheville of the water system, creating a new regional authority to own and manage the system, handing it off to the Metropolitan Sewerage District, or leaving things the way they are. Here’s a flashback at the controversy over a late-1980s clear-cutting contract in the 21,000-acre North Fork Reservoir watershed.
(A file photo of clear-cut logging at the North Fork Reservoir in the late 1980s.)

Like water for Asheville: Bee Tree reservoir comes back online

You don’t have to be a dam expert to realize that the new Bee Tree Reservoir holds a whole lot of water (more than 520 million gallons, actually). Dormant for nearly 10 years before its April 25, 2008, reopening, Bee Tree was the city’s primary drinking-water source for more than a quarter-century. After that it […]

Clear as mud

“Water is a living thing; it is life itself. In it life began. And everything that lives in water requires oxygen. It is also a moving thing. A burden bearer, water can carry off great loads of humanity’s leavings—but … as the oxygen in water is used up by waste … the living creatures in […]

Asheville City Council

Trees dominated the agenda at the Asheville City Council’s Jan. 18 work session. From a discussion of what to do about a developer in Montford who cut a swath of trees after promising under oath not to, to turning thumbs down on a staff-initiated plan to hire a private firm to craft a forest-management plan […]

Asheville City Council

“Brevity,” wrote Shakespeare, “is the soul of wit.” That particular bit of wisdom, however, isn’t generally reflected in Asheville City Council meetings, which typically drag on and on, leaving those in attendance at — well, at their wits’ end. But The Bard would probably have approved of the Oct. 12 formal session, which clocked in […]

Asheville City Council

A rare double-header played out in City Hall on Sept. 28, as the Asheville City Council convened 90 minutes before the scheduled start of its 5 p.m. formal session to tackle items left unaddressed at the previous week’s work session. But unlike when the Tourists play two at McCormick Field, scant few showed up to […]