Warm Springs Watershed Association

08/11/2026

Warm Springs Run jumped from 0.088 cfs to 86.5 cfs in about an hour yesterday afternoon — a nearly 1,000-fold surge after an intense rain band moved through. Numbers like that are a stark reminder: what happens upstream doesn’t stay upstream. Runoff racing off saturated hillsides, roads, and rooftops shows up minutes later as eroded banks, overwhelmed culverts, and flooding right here in town.

The good news is that a real solution already exists on paper. A 2025 NRCS-funded watershed plan lays out how to pair our existing flood-control dams with green infrastructure and water storage projects to blunt exactly this kind of surge before it reaches downtown. The plan is ready. What it’s waiting on now is a sponsor decision to move it from paper to construction.

Until that happens, the work of protecting this town from its own watershed keeps falling on a small group of volunteers — installing rain gardens, monitoring the stream, and chasing funding on their own time, for infrastructure that ultimately protects everyone’s basements, streets, and businesses. That’s not a sustainable way to manage a flood risk this real.

Upstream decisions shape what happens in town. It’s time for that to be reflected in who’s investing in the fix.

08/11/2026

How much rain fell yesterday? Check out the steep peek at Jimstown Rd.

08/10/2026

08/08/2026

Despite how it may look, this Chelydra serpentina was not smiling.

This guy was trying to cross Wi******er Grade Road. I had a big stick with which I tried to urge him to move to the side of the road. Thank you to the guy who lives at the corner of Wi******er Grade and Waugh who used a shovel to return the snapper to the Sheetz Creek trib to Warm Springs Run. And thank you to all the motorists who carefully drove around this guy.

08/05/2026

08/01/2026

Check out the new blog on sinuosity on the WSWA website — warmspringswatershed.com

07/28/2026

07/19/2026

Along the Run

It stood so still in its own color
the run almost kept it secret —
gray folded into green shadow,
legs like two more stems
in the jewelweed.
We were reading pH,
not looking for anything special,
when it stepped out of the leaves
like something the water had been hiding all along.
Some things you measure.
Some things you only get to see —
and the seeing is the whole point.

Kate Lehman, 7/19/2026

07/12/2026

How about West Virginia?

Bradford pear trees were supposed to be sterile, and that lie is finally being uprooted.
North Carolina now lets residents remove invasive Bradford and Callery pear trees and receive free native replacement trees. The program, run through the North Carolina Forest Service and cooperative extension offices, targets one of the most destructive landscaping mistakes in American history. Bradford pear was introduced in the 1960s as a sterile ornamental with beautiful spring blooms and reliable fall color. Nurseries pushed it. Developers planted it by the millions. Homeowners loved the look. The problem was that the sterility was a myth. Bradford pears cross-pollinated with other Callery pear varieties, producing fertile offspring that escaped into the wild and are now invading forests across the eastern United States.
The ancient contract was broken when we replaced native canopy trees with a biological time bomb. North Carolina's native forests support hundreds of moth and butterfly species, which in turn feed songbirds raising their young. A single native oak hosts over five hundred species of caterpillars. A Bradford pear hosts almost nothing. The invasive offspring form dense thickets that shade out native understory plants, eliminate habitat for ground-nesting birds, and create monocultures where diverse forests once stood. The pretty white flowers that homeowners admired were the scent of ecological collapse.
The removal program is smart and direct. Residents register their invasive pears, get approval for removal, and receive native replacement trees suited to their site conditions. Options include native dogwood, redbud, serviceberry, and oak, species that actually belong in the Piedmont and coastal plain ecosystems. The mechanism is a one-for-one swap that turns a liability into an asset without costing the homeowner a dime.
The second-order effect is landscape-scale restoration. As Bradford pears come out of yards and roadsides, native canopy trees are going back in. Songbirds are finding caterpillar hosts. Spring ephemerals are getting the dappled light they need. And the genetic pollution of wild Callery pear is being pushed back one tree at a time.
Invasives out. Natives in. Yards reborn.