Asheville Field Office biologist Jay Mays spent the first days after Hurricane Helene working a supply distribution site, helping get water, food, diapers, and myriad other necessities to his own community and transporting them to neighboring counties. Mays is an aquatic biologist with the Service’s Asheville Field Office, and when the dust began to settle after the hurricane, he turned his attention to impacts on the area’s streams, many of which are home to the endangered Appalachian elktoe mussel.
His preliminary assessments focused on stream erosion, with broad-brush, bank-side evaluations and short stream wades with a view bucket allowing a glimpse of the stream-bottom habitat mussels rely on. This first look turned up streams whose habitat was devastated by scouring floodwater, but surprisingly, also places where the stream seemed largely…normal – a casual observation being that stream habitat fared better in areas where flood waters had ample space to spread out and slow down adjacent to the stream channel.
The potential for stream water contamination from the flood, as well as the dropping temperatures of late autumn mean that a thorough examination of impacts to aquatic life will wait until spring, when it’ll be safe for biologists to don snorkel and mask and log hours face-down in the water…