Jordan Lake is a place people love.
Every year more people move near it, drink its water, play and fish there. It has become one of the largest summer homes of the bald eagle, our national symbol of freedom.
• Jordan Lake’s watershed is now home to more than 800,000 people—a 37 percent increase in 10 years.
• North Carolina’s biologically rich rivers and streams are home to nearly 200 native species of fish, many of them found in Jordan Lake and its tributaries.
Jordan Lake is a hard-working lake.
It gives the public a chance to swim, fish, paddle, camp and play, not far from some of our largest cities. The Jordan Lake area is one of the most desirable places in the state to live, near the Research Triangle and many universities.
• More than a million people visited the lake in 2004.
• Jordan Lake is the main drinking water source for Cary, Apex, Morrisville, and sections of Chatham and Wake Counties.
• Growth is exploding in Chatham County, the second-fastest growing county in the state. In the past three years 20 major developments have either begun construction, been approved for construction, or submitted proposals for development. 1
Jordan Lake accepts a lot of water pollution resulting from our daily lives.
Jordan Lake collects pollution that runs off roads and rooftops, forests, farms and office buildings (called nonpoint sources) every time it rains. And treated wastewater from many communities goes into the lake.
• Runoff pollution includes nitrogen and phosphorus. These elements are called “nutrients” because they nourish plant life, such as algae.
• Nonpoint sources account for 68% of the nitrogen and 84% of the phosphorus in the lake.2
• More than 65 permitted wastewater treatment operations (called point sources) release more than 75 million gallons of waste per day into the watershed.
• Point sources account for 32 percent of the nitrogen and 16 percent of the phosphorus in the lake.
Pollution overload has hit Jordan Lake.
If we don’t take action soon, we risk working this lake to death, and jeopardizing the quality of life in our communities.
• Water monitoring data shows that the entire lake is now polluted by excessive nitrogen and phosphorus.
• The upper ends of the lake routinely violate state and federal standards for chlorophyll a, a pigment from algae which is a sign of too much nitrogen and phosphorus.
Some types of algae can be dangerous for some people to come into contact with. 3
• While some algae is a food source for fish, too much kills off aquatic life.
• As pollution increases, drinking water can continue to be treated, but the cost to taxpayers increases as the treatment process becomes more difficult.
Existing protections don’t do enough for drinking water lakes like Jordan.
• They focus more on downstream problems. The federal Clean Water Act and North Carolina’s own laws have helped clean up estuaries in the Neuse and Tar-Pamlico. While the Neuse and Tar-Pamlico rules have helped improve water quality in the estuaries, they were not designed to protect water quality in upstream portions of the basins.
• It takes too long to get results. State and federal water quality laws have only been triggered after the pollution has reached damaging levels. After initial pollution problems were identified in Jordan Lake, the NC General Assembly in 1997 ordered the Environmental Management Commission (EMC) and local governments to act to clean up the lake by 2002. Eight years later the EMC is just beginning rulemaking to protect the lake; those rules will not take effect until 2010 at the earliest.
Visit www.nccleanwater.org for more information, to get more involved and to learn more about how to protect clean water in North Carolina.
This information provided by which supports Senate Bill 981 to clean up Jordan Lake. Member organizations include:
NC Wildlife Federation
Haw River Assembly
Neuse River Foundation
Conservation Council of NC
Eno River Association
NC Conservation Network
NC Environmental Defense
NC PIRG
NC Sierra Club
Southern Environmental Law Center
For a complete listing of supporting organizations, see www.nccleanwater.org.
1 Haw River Assembly
2 Jordan Lake Nonpoint Source Pollution Management Strategy
3 Blue-Green Algae and Human Health,by Thomas Morris, M.D., M.P.H., Medical Epidemiologist, N.C. Harmful Algal Blooms Program, Occupational and Environmental Epidemiology Branch, December 2000.)
