Altamaha Rising

April 23, 2011
By HANK ROWLAND | The Brunswick News

It's a 137-mile winding journey to the Atlantic Ocean that begins at the confluence of the Ocmulgee and Oconee rivers, near Lumber City, and which is later joined by the Ohoopee. And what a journey it is, its estuaries teeming with life, its sandbars and islands reawakening the Huckleberry Finn in all who experience a close encounter with what is one of Georgia's most thriving and diverse ecosystems.

This is the Altamaha River - the mighty Altamaha to those who ply its waters to fish or to marvel at its many wonders. On the coast, most people only catch a glimpse of the Altamaha, and a fleeting one of that, as they cross the humpback bridges of Interstate 95 or U.S. 17. It can be a generous river, giving up its bounty of bass, perch and catfish to skilled and patient anglers.

And it can be as moody as a house cat. Just ask people at Altamaha River Park, near the line that separates Glynn and Wayne counties. Flooding waters have chased cabin owners at the park to high ground more than once. It can be treacherous to the inattentive and to those who underestimate its powers, but lucrative to anyone who has learned to co-exist with its splendors.

Two Way Fish Camp and Mudcat Charlie's, nestled on the north shore of the Altamaha, get their share of tourists and locals. And the river is drawing more attention, attracting new interest. That fact has not escaped the notice of Vernon Lewis, president of Altamaha Park of Glynn County, a company that manages the park for Glynn County, and a seasoned fisherman with 55 years of knowledge of the river.

"No doubt about it - there's more canoeists and kayakers on the river," he said.

The explosion in popularity is most discernible on holidays.

"The most change that I've seen in the last 15 years has been young folks that camp out on primitive sites on the river and sandbars," he said. "You see a lot of them on the holidays. It's increased a hundred fold."

The number of recreational anglers also is rising, Lewis noted. The Altamaha River is a natural treasure that those who enjoy gliding across its waters or reeling in food from its depths would like to hand down to their children and grandchildren. But it could be gone in the blink of an eye, environmentalists and river watchers warn.

It already made one alarming list.

"We named the Altamaha one of 'America's Most Endangered Rivers' in 2002 because of the threat from dams and a power plant," said Amy Kober, spokeswoman for the American Rivers, a national conservation organization that monitors the status of rivers.

The Altamaha ranked as the seventh-most-endangered that year, a ranking just below the Powder River (sixth) in Montana and Wyoming and just above the Allagash Wilderness Waterway in Maine (eighth). The Altamaha hasn't been on the list since.

"We recently counted the river among our 'endangered river success stories,' because we successfully fought that threat," Kober said.

But all is not well. Threats to the river and the quality of its water remain, warns Sonja Cox, Altamaha Riverkeeper for the Darien-based environmental and conservation organization with the same name that monitors the Altamaha. It's what's around the various bends along the entire river network - power plants, wetland loss and general urbanization - that most worries Cox. It's a concern that stretches from the hills of Northeast Georgia to the Altamaha Sound and beyond.

Electric power plants withdraw millions of gallons of water each day from the river system that eventually becomes the Altamaha, Cox said. "The power plants have a real impact on flow quantities in the river, particularly in dry and hot times," she said.

"The river system cannot support an infinitely increasing demand for more and more water for more and more power plants or expansion of existing ones."

Water used in the cooling process of nuclear reactors causes turbidity when discharged into a river, which upsets aquatic life. Coal-fired power plants aren't much better.

"Coal power plants discharge toxic emissions into the air, which settle on the ground and find their way back into the water," Cox said. "The Altamaha River system is very important not only to the coastal Georgia region, but to the entire state," she said. "Its headwaters' tributaries reach all the way up to the Atlanta and Athens areas, and the whole watershed encompasses roughly a quarter of the state, about nine million acres."

The more people know, they better they understand the river's importance and why it's vitally necessary to protect the freshwater resource, conservationists agree.

"In my mind the biggest over-arching threat to the river is simple ignorance - usually people simply don't understand or at worst choose to willfully ignore the truth about how their activities can harm the resource," Cox said.

Photo credit Bobby Haven, The Brunswick News

The life of a river