Who Hates Trout Rivers?

In the fall of 2005, William Sharp III's great-, great-, great-grandson, Tom Shipley, was dismayed to hear Snowshoe's general manager read a letter of conditional support for the treatment plant from the West Virginia Council of Trout Unlimited. Shipley, who lives on the Sharp farm and owns and operates Sharp's Country Store and Museum and Bed and Breakfast on Big Spring Fork, posted the facts about the project on a Web site called WVAngler.com. "That post got more hits than anything they've ever done," he recalls. "The whole fishing community wrote letters, called the governor, blogged."

To its credit, the council promptly withdrew its conditional support, at the same time expressing grave concerns about "the area's geology and karst hydrology, the temperature of the proposed discharge, and sediment impacts" as well as "the effect of the proposed plant on the Upper Elk trout fishery, one of the best trout fisheries in the United States."

More recently, it has chastened DEP as follows: "It is impossible to declare a finding of no significant impact without having first thoroughly evaluated all of the potential impacts. The lack of substantive environmental study leaves too many vital concerns unanswered for this project to move forward at this point."

Finally, the council helped fund the study by Downstream Strategies. "We're very grateful for that support," says Shipley.

Shipley feels betrayed by the state and county. Eight generations of his family have lived and worked at the farm. Robert E. Lee slept in the log house. Shipley's ancestors are buried in the wet meadow that will be seized and torn up by the county.

When Shipley gave up his antiques dealership in Indiana and moved here in December 2004 to run the family business, he wasn't sure he'd done the right thing. But a month later he walked across the wet meadow, pronounced "dry" by the Corps, to the proposed site of the new treatment plant.

"The river takes a meander there," he says. "Water was running under the ice. There were huge icicles hanging from the tree limbs, and the sun was shining at a low angle through everything. It was incredibly beautiful. I knew then I'd made the right decision."

The prevailing wind will blow the bouquet from two enormous, open sewage vats onto and into his bed-and-breakfast and store, 1,000 feet away. Great for business.

Shipley tells me that, so far, his family has spent "several hundred-thousand dollars" on attorney's fees. "We're not wealthy," he says. "But we have the resources to fight this and we will keep fighting because it's wrong."

Wrong and unnecessary. While Snowshoe desperately needs modern sewage treatment, its existing plants could be retrofitted with a technology called "immersed membrane," a microfiltration system that removes even viruses and could at the very least double present capacity. It would cost no more than $8 million (compared with $20 million for the plant planned for the Sharp farm). Finally, Snowshoe could return clean water to the Shavers Fork, restoring the trout fishery it degraded and ending its current (and ecologically dangerous) inter-basin transfer of water from the Cheat River watershed to the Elk River watershed.