Apr. 1—Fire and smoke will soon be visible from the high mountain peaks above Waynesville.

But don’t worry, it’s not a wildfire. A series of prescribed burns will be conducted within the 8,600-acre Waynesville watershed. The protected watershed rises from Allens Creek up the flanks of the mountainside to the Blue Ridge Parkway, making it visible from much of South Waynesville.

The watershed supplies pristine drinking water not only to the town, but also to Lake Junaluska and along N.C. 209 into Crabtree. The prescribed burn is intended to improve the health of the forest, which in turn means improved water quality of the streams flowing through it.

The hope is that prescribed burns will be an “Rx” to restore forest health and diversity in the watershed, according to Dr. Pete Bates, both a WCU professor and forester with Forest Stewards.

“Fire was a very key disturbance that shaped Southern Appalachian forests,” Bates said. “It is a natural part of our forest ecosystems.”

To effectively restore forest diversity, prescribed burns will likely be done every five to 10 years, he said.

“It’s not a one and done,” Bates said. “If you are going to try and restore conditions to resemble what they might have been a while ago, you just can’t go in and burn one time and expect that to happen.”

The prescribed burn plan was outlined at the Waynesville town council meeting last week by Forest Stewards, a forestry nonprofit affiliated with Western Carolina University that oversees forest management in the watershed.

Because of clear-cutting that started around 1900 and continued for many decades, Bates said that much of the forest in the watershed is of uniform ages — in other words trees grew back from clear cut areas all at once so the trees in those areas all roughly the same age. He also said maple, birch and beech trees are replacing oaks, hickories and yellow pines in the watershed.

“Maples are much higher users of water than oaks are,” Bates said. “Those species use 17% more water than oaks do. We need all the water we can get.”

Mountain laurel is also becoming increasingly dense in the watershed and that is limiting the regeneration and growth of other species.

“What we are trying to do is mitigate some of those issues and restore some of these forests by introducing fire,” Bates said. “The forest is less diverse than it used to be. It is our hope that we can initiate a prescribed burn program in the watershed to mitigate some of those changes, bring back some of that diversity.”

When will the burns happen?

Waynesville signed an agreement with the North Carolina Fire Service to carry out the prescribed burns devised by Bates and his team. The prescribed burns will be conducted at no cost to the town.

“The North Carolina Forest Service has been interested in this property and working with us for a long time,” Bates said. “We now have a signed agreement and they will implement any burns in the watershed. We will work with them to develop that.”

He said the prescribed burns could begin sometime in April. The NCFS is currently working out the logistics for the first prescribed burn in the watershed but Bates expects it to be sooner rather than later.

“As with any prescribed burn all the stars must align, the weather and everything else,” Bates said.

Town manager Rob Hites said that town residents will be informed about the prescribed burn before it is initiated.

“Our fire department will be involved, you just won’t wake up one morning and there is a forest fire,” Hites said.

Bates added that “anyone in the fire world will know what is going on.”