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• Take an interactive tour of the Roanoke River.

Photo by Eric Brady | The Roanoke Times

More miles of the Roanoke River and its tributaries are listed as polluted compared with three decades ago.

Cleaner, greener, keener

• Greater numbers of walkers, joggers and bicyclists on the Roanoke River Greenway.
• A 20 percent increase in numbers of the endangered Roanoke logperch in the past decade.
• A biomedical business park and flood control project.
• Fecal bacteria levels have dropped by half compared with the 1970s.
• New interest by locals in river-related businesses.

Mike Whiteside figures he's perfectly positioned to tap into a rebirth of the Roanoke River.

Below his Black Dog Salvage business on Memorial Avenue, the river winds around an often flooded mobile home park. The city bought the park to make way for a $65 million flood-control and greenway project, one of the biggest public works initiatives in the city's history.

The project, coupled with other efforts to clean up the river and its banks, is drawing public attention to the neglected Roanoke River for the first time in years.

It's also sparking talk that the river could one day become another of America's urban waterways that have gone from eyesores to showpieces, which has happened in such places as Milwaukee, Wis., Denver and San Antonio.

Whiteside and his business partner, Robert Culp, are restoring a 19th century stone house beside Black Dog Salvage.

They're considering leasing it out as a restaurant, a bike-and-canoe livery or a gift shop that would draw customers from the riverside park that's rapidly coming their way.

"We definitely want to be a part of it," Whiteside said. "We're very excited. I have absolutely no doubt that cleaning up the river is the right thing to do for this community."

A nascent comeback

A revitalization of the Roanoke River has been a long time coming -- 100 years, in fact.

In 1907, noted landscape architect John Nolen proposed the municipal purchase of both river banks within the city to preserve its natural resources "before it is too late and set them apart for the public for all time to come."

Instead, Roanoke used its namesake as an industrial drainage ditch and open sewer that meandered through the city largely unnoticed except when its oily, trashy floodwaters spilled into the streets.

A century later, the Roanoke Valley is rediscovering the river as a natural resource that's rich with recreation and commercial possibilities, said C.J. Mitchem, chairman of the Upper Roanoke River Roundtable, a citizen watchdog group.

The nascent comeback includes:

• Water is much cleaner than it has been in years because of lower levels of human and animal wastes and more tightly regulated industrial discharges.
• A rebound of the Roanoke logperch, a federally endangered species.
• Healthier aquatic insects, which are important food sources for fish.

It also includes several riverside initiatives, including the greenway, a major flood-control project, a brownfield cleanup, a biomedical business park and sewage system upgrades.

Among the reasons the river is important is that it's a prime source of much of the Roanoke Valley's drinking water. Roanoke County and Salem get most of their public water from the Roanoke River; and the county and Roanoke merged their water systems in 2004.

But the river still has problems -- mainly storm water runoff from roads, parking lots, farms and lawns. That dumps silt, nutrients, toxic chemicals and pathogens into the water.

Critics contend the flood-control project is a waste of money that's killing trees, that water quality and quantity problems are being glossed over and that the watershed won't fully heal until the region adopts better storm-water management practices and stronger water conservation practices.

Many different masters

The current improvement projects overlap and are being coordinated under a general vision for the river's future, but there's no regional master plan to protect the watershed's water quality and quantity or to guide development, public land usage, biodiversity and ecosystem health.

Since the 1985 flood, Roanoke, Roanoke County, Salem and Vinton have tightened regulations on flood-plain development, created a regional storm-water management plan and updated their erosion and sediment control regulations in an effort to reduce flooding and protect streams.

The localities developed a river corridor study in 1990 and 1993, but most of the reports' recommendations were not implemented.

Rupert Cutler, one of Roanoke's most prominent conservationists, has asked Roanoke's government and business leaders to create a "Future of the Roanoke River" study commission. He wants a special river plan similar to those adopted for parks and recreation, housing, public art, urban forestry and neighborhoods.

"We've got a lot of work to do," Cutler said.

That's what Milwaukee, Wis., has done over the past decade.

Kimberly Gleffe, executive director of the River Revitalization Foundation in Milwaukee, said: "It's been a real collaboration between our nonprofits and public agencies to protect the whole waterfront. ... It's very exciting stuff. It's amazing when the powers that be make up their minds to do something how quickly it happens. Then it's easy to get the rest of the community on board."

River and regulation

Ankle deep and a stone's throw across in many places, the Roanoke River has never been mighty -- it's no Mississippi or Colorado or Columbia, the respective kings of commerce, recreation and hydropower. But it has a big place in Western Virginia's history.

The waterway begins in Montgomery County, where two spring-fed forks come together to start a 410-mile journey from Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains to North Carolina's coastal plains before reaching the Albemarle Sound.

The upper river basin was once pristine, its salt licks, fish and other game and its clear waters and fertile banks drawing American Indians and Colonial settlers.

But in modern times, the river has been plagued by sewage overflows, toxic chemicals, sediment and trash as it flows through the Roanoke Valley's industrial, agricultural and residential areas.

Nearly two-thirds of Virginia's waterways are listed on the federal Clean Water Act's "dirty waters" list. That isn't because pollution is getting worse, but because federal restrictions are getting tighter, said Jason Hill, who monitors the upper Roanoke River watershed for the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality. He added that more monitoring is being done and improved technology better detects contaminants.

Bill Tanger, chairman of the Friends of the Rivers of Virginia, a coalition of river conservation groups, disputes that assessment. He said water quality and quantity could be greatly improved if state and local officials would adopt stronger regulations on storm-water runoff, watershed development and water consumption.

Virginia didn't start to comply with the 1972 federal Clean Water Act until 1998, after conservation groups sued the state. The federal law requires states to set water quality standards for drinking, fishing, swimming, shellfish and aquatic life.

States also must compile a list of impaired waters and a total maximum daily load, the amount of pollutants a water body can hold and still meet water quality standards.

A total maximum daily load has been completed for the upper Roanoke River and five of its tributaries.

Now, officials are trying to secure state and federal money to implement a cleanup plan over the next several years.

Flood control and greenways

The most visible signs of the river's turnaround are the flood-control project, which started in 2005 after nearly 40 years of discussion, and the associated riverside greenway, which will anchor a proposed recreation trail network across the Roanoke Valley. The $65 million project is scheduled for completion in 2012.

"Once the Roanoke River Greenway is completed, I think it'll be the valley's second most important attraction after the mountains. I really do," said Ted Melnik, president of Novozymes Biologicals. The company has donated $250,000 to the greenway project.

Construction of the most recent leg of the flood reduction-greenway project started earlier this year at the sewage plant in Southeast Roanoke and has reached Piedmont Park. It should stretch to Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital by November, said Maks Hromiak, project engineer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Construction should start in the adjoining Smith and Wasena parks next year and reach Hannah Court Mobile Home Park late next year depending on the availability of funding. The trailer court will become a city park that Whiteside and Culp, the Black Dog Salvage co-owners, are eyeing closely.

It includes a series of bench cuts and levees designed to reduce flooding along the entire 10 miles of the river within the city limits between Vinton and Salem.

Together, the projects will create a linear park that follows the serpentine path of the river through city neighborhoods and past industrial sites. Riverbanks that have long been hidden by brush, trash and private-property "Keep Out" signs will be accessible to the public.

It will be Roanoke's first "metro park," which has the amenities of urban parks such as a paved recreational path, benches and trash cans, but includes features of rural parks such as tall grasses, flowers and trees that attract birds, butterflies, rabbits and other fauna.

A summer day

But already, the Roanoke River is a changed place.

A kayak journey from Green Hill Park in western Roanoke County to the sewage plant in Southeast Roanoke reveals lingering problems: Some tires, plastic bags, beer cans, a whiff of sewage, even a Dumpster in the river. At one spot, a homeless man sleeps under a tarpaulin, dampened by dew, his fishing line slack in the murky green water.

But in many places, the river flows cool and clear. Shallow rapids swirl around rocks. Old sycamores cast shadows. Children's rope swings dangle from the branches.

The water's surface breaks with leaping fish and the slap of beaver tails. Mallards and herons flap through the air. Water bugs swarm the glassy surface like static on a giant TV screen. Little boys skim stones.

One day earlier this summer, Sandra Brighton relaxed in a beach chair along the river in Wasena Park.

The Roanoke native watched her husband, Tom, and daughter, Katherine, 6, stand knee-deep in the water and cast their fishing lines.

Brighton, who has five children from first grade to college, has noticed the growing number of joggers, cyclists and walkers along the river.

She said a greenway and cleaned-up river will be a big draw for families and young professionals.

"It'll be awesome," she said. "Who would have thought the Roanoke River could be a destination where people actually want to go?"