From the control room of Canton’s water plant, a steady barrage of numbers flash across the computer monitors.

As days slid by without rain last fall, and the days stacked into weeks, Neil Carpenter watched the water gauge on Jonathan Creek like the ticking hands of a doomsday clock.

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Carpenter usually has 4 million gallons of water a day at his fingertips — triple what he needs to serve the 3,800 homes and businesses in greater Maggie Valley.

Old-time mountaineers often picked their home and church sites according to the location and purity of springs. They were connoisseurs of water.  

Residents and business owners in Hazelwood have grown increasingly frustrated by the slow pace of water-and-sewer line work that has left their street torn up and blocked off since December.

When Michael Bradley first picked up a fly rod in 2011, he wasn’t looking for anything more than a relaxing pastime. He’d tried fly fishing once before, as an 11-year-old kid, but “didn’t do so good at it.” At age 20, he thought things might be different if he gave it another try. 

He was right. 

Engineers for the town of Franklin are recommending the town spend $15.1 million over the next 10 years to make water and sewer infrastructure improvements.

It’s shaping up to be an exciting year for water-lovers in Western North Carolina.

After more than a decade of hydropower relicensing negotiations and years more of permitting and construction, Duke Energy is finishing a slate of river accesses that will make the Tuckasegee one of the most accessible rivers in the Southeast. At the same time, a collective effort to create an interactive map showing where and how to recreate on Western North Carolina waterways — using a tool called Smoky Mountain Blueways — is wrapping up, further boosting WNC’s future as a Mecca for outdoors lovers of all skill levels.

The new wastewater treatment facility in Franklin cost the town more than $5 million to build, but within months of its summer 2013 opening, superintendent Wayne Price noticed a problem. 

“Within six months of putting that into operation, we had fats build up on the walls,” Price said. “It was already getting 2 inches, 3 or 4 inches of fat all around, and there’s no way for us to treat it. We had to do something.”

Western North Carolina won big in the newest round of grants from the N.C. Clean Water Management Trust Fund. The fund, whose goal is to conserve environmentally important land and waterways, gave out $12.7 million total to fund 38 projects state-wide.