BRYSON CITY — It was like watching someone suffocate.

On July 28, Paul Bourcq raced out to his old haunts on the Nantahala, the river that snakes through Nantahala National Forest in Swain County, to see what had sent his angler friends spiraling into panic.

In every eddy he searched, Bourcq found about a dozen mature rainbow trout dead or dying. Those still alive swam in dazed circles on the surface, wobbling like they’d received a blow to the head. The dead swirled with the eddies, their discolored bodies thumping against rocks until they were swept downstream or sank to the bottom.

The next day, tourists rushed to buy fishing nets from angler Nick Johnson at a river outfitter. They'd caught several stunned trout with their bare hands, but figured they could haul away dozens of fish with nets.

At the river's terminus at Lake Fontana, fishing guide Kyle Fronrath watched blue heron and osprey swoop down to feast on the unexpected windfall of dead and dying fish for the third day in a row.

Unofficial stewards of the Nantahala such as Bourcq, Johnson and Fronrath watched with growing alarm as their thermometers logged up to 78-degree temperatures in the normally 45-degree river. They knew the measurements weren’t scientific, but said they worried that if they weren't watching, no one else was.

And they were right.

Weeks before the massive Aug. 25 landslides that led the U.S. Forest Service to close the river to all recreation for a week, the Nantahala's ecosystem appeared to be in jeopardy because of the action — and inaction — of the people paid to safeguard it: Duke Energy, the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality and the state Wildlife Resources Commission.

Anglers insisted the scale of the fish kill was much greater than reported by Duke Energy and state agencies. They fear the impact on the river's ecosystem will be felt for years to come.

A Citizen Times investigation of Duke Energy's compliance with its FERC license, including its emergency protocols, found several rule violations.

Duke Energy's actions are under review on both the federal and state levels, although the N.C. DEQ and the Federal Energy Resources Commission have not confirmed what penalties the utility may face if it is found in violation of environmental laws and its federal agreement.

Nantahala hydro station fish kill

In July, news outlets reported on what initially seemed to be a minor fish kill in the Nantahala River after an equipment failure in a hydro station managed by Duke Energy. A switchboard had ceased to communicate with the energy-generating turbine on July 23, shutting off the flow of cool water.

Every day from July 24-28, Duke Energy opened the spillway gates to the dam itself, allowing warm water from the lake's surface to flow into the river "to provide whitewater recreation flow releases," according to the utility. In a typical year, those gates are open and gushing warm water for a total of 38 hours to provide a higher-difficulty rafting experience. During that five-day period alone, the gates were open for 62 hours.

That’s bad news if you’re a trout.

On July 29, Duke Energy scientists estimated a few dozen trout had died; on July 31, they bumped that figure up to 200-250 fish affected after discovering a total of 18 dead trout.

More:Duke Energy equipment failure kills hundreds of Nantahala River trout

In a July 31 email, utility spokeswoman Heather Danenhower insisted decisions following the malfunction were dictated by the terms of a federal license, the Federal Energy Resources Commission document that outlines Duke Energy’s responsibilities in exchange for the opportunity to operate on a public waterway. The releases through the spillway gates were "required," Danenhower wrote in bold and with an underline.

The N.C. Department for Environmental Quality is responsible for investigating fish kills. On July 29, a DEQ scientist told the Citizen Times the fish kill was "unfortunate," but sounded "fairly unavoidable." An agency spokeswoman warned that the counts Duke Energy provided weren’t official, but said the agency determined a state investigation wouldn't be necessary.

“The cause is known and the event is over," wrote DEQ spokeswoman Sarah Young.

But when the Citizen Times reviewed the FERC agreement's emergency protocols, it became clear that Duke Energy hadn't handled the situation the way the license "required."

According to the protocols, to protect trout and other cold-water wildlife, Duke shouldn't open the spillway gates for more than two consecutive days. But in July, Duke opened the gates for five consecutive days after its hydro station failed. Duke Energy scientists trained to monitor the water's temperature and the behavior of the trout weren't on site until the third day of warm water flow, a company spokeswoman said.

In follow-up inquiries, Duke Energy's answers changed.

“It wasn’t a conscious decision” to handle things the way they did, spokeswoman Kim Crawford said.

According to Duke, the technicians didn't remember the protocol.

Nantahala River and its industries

Outdoor recreation is an economic anchor for Western North Carolina, and the Nantahala is among the region’s main attractions.

But for all the thousands who come to commune with nature on the Nantahala, the river is anything but natural. Duke Energy holds all of it — the water, the wildlife and the industry — in the palm of its hands, because it's the utility's dam that makes the Nantahala special.

The river's chilly flow, the reason it’s home to cold-loving trout even in North Carolina’s balmy summers? It’s because the hydro station’s turbines draw water from deep in the Nantahala Lake, where the sun's rays can't penetrate.

For the hundreds of years before the Nantahala Dam was installed, trout couldn't survive year round in the river. In fact, there aren't any self-sustaining "native" trout at all in the river proper — only wild-born descendants of the trout stocked after the dam was built in 1942.

The Wildlife Resources Commission stocks the Nantahala with thousands of hatchery-raised brook, rainbow and brown trout a year. March through July, there's a stocking once or twice a month, each carrying around 1,500 to 4,800 fish. According to Doug Besler, regional fishery supervisor for WNC, "85% of those fish are caught within two weeks."

More:NC fishery biologists, anglers, conservationists work to recover WNC's native brook trout

The Class II+ rapids that make the Nantahala ideal for beginners' lessons and the high-flow days that attract world-class competitions are carefully modulated by water releases from the dam. There’s a calendar.

Whitewater tourism — and the trout — wither and die without careful tending of the Nantahala hydro station.

Trout versus whitewater

The current water release schedule strikes a precarious balance between the whitewater and trout-fishing communities’ needs — which are often in direct opposition. Big, warm flows for whitewater rafting risk cooking the fish, but without regular flows, the outfitters go out of business.

Deviation from that schedule can prove financially ruinous, not to speak of the impact on the ecosystem.

When the Duke Energy hydro station failed to grind to life the morning of July 23, it should have triggered an emergency protocol outlined in the hydro station’s FERC license, designed to strike a compromise between the competing interests.

The equipment failure's timing couldn't have been worse. The outage fell during both a Critical Commercial Whitewater Recreation period (9 a.m.-5 p.m.; July 1-Aug.15) and a Critical Flow Period for Stream Fish (June 1-Oct.31).

But this scenario was not unforeseen: The FERC emergency protocols spell out exactly how to prioritize the needs of the various stakeholders, and during a Critical Flow Period for Stream Fish, the fish win.

The Critical Flow Period for Stream Fish is defined in the FERC License as the “portion of the year when fish in the streams affected by the hydro project most need minimum flows or can be most impacted by higher temperature water releases from the Tainter gates at Nantahala Dam."

In this case, Duke Energy forgot to read the playbook, based on statements from utility spokeswoman Kim Crawford.

The emergency protocol states that in just that situation, Duke Energy will "avoid scheduling replacement releases for more than two consecutive days." In July, the spillway gates were opened and warm water flowed on five consecutive days.

It also says that releases should stop if stressed or dead trout are observed. Duke Energy scientists didn't arrive on site until July 26, the fourth day of the outage.

Duke representatives seem to be of two minds — in the same conversation saying leaders regret handling the situation the way they did and insisting they were within their rights to do so.

“It’s been 10 years since we had to implement (the emergency protocol),” Crawford told the Citizen Times in a phone interview Aug. 14. “It was really not a usual situation, something that operators are used to. It’s been more than 10 years.”

“You still have human beings making decisions,” she said. “We certainly would perform differently within the situation."

She pointed to a line in the FERC license that says the licensee has discretion on how to implement the protocol when there are extenuating circumstances. But when asked what those extenuating circumstances were, she couldn’t identify any.

“We would admit that we probably should have gotten some monitoring out there earlier,” Crawford said. “I don’t think in all likelihood, it would have changed the operational decisions. … Even when they started monitoring on that Friday, they didn’t see any (stressed or dead fish) until Sunday morning."

'Days of denial'

In interviews with half a dozen anglers, many reported seeing dead or dying fish as early as July 25, the day Fronrath watched blue heron and osprey feast at the river's terminus in Lake Fontana.

It's hard for the anglers to wrap their minds around the fact that Duke Energy scientists couldn't find stressed trout on July 26, when trout fishing guide Mac Brown saw the white bellies of over a hundred dead fish covering the riverbed, or on July 27, when Bourcq says he saw easily 200 over the course of a few hours.

Documents from the DEQ state Duke Energy scientists reported observing only 18 total dead fish on July 28.

"I was there all day (July 27)," Bourcq said. "I never saw any Duke Energy scientists on the river," and neither did the other half-dozen anglers who spoke to the Citizen Times.

Duke Energy spokeswoman Crawford told the Citizen Times the company's fisheries scientists were not available for interview.

Duke Energy representatives have asked anglers why there aren't pictures of these hordes of dead fish. Bourcq said it's not that simple. "There's not some beach where they're all washed up. They sink," he said. "I tried to take pictures, but they weren't compelling. I could only see them underwater because I had polarized glasses on."

Several anglers submitted time- and location-stamped images of blurry underwater blobs to the Citizen Times.

"In hindsight, I would have gone and scooped up fish ... all day and then dumped a huge pile of dead fish in front of the gate" to the hydro station, Bourcq said. "I never thought anyone would dispute (the fish kill)."

Though Besler at the Wildlife Resources Commission says we'll likely never know the full extent of the fish kill, the WRC's management decisions certainly give a sense of scale.

In August, the WRC released 5,000 trout into the Nantahala expressly to offset the impact of the fish kill, Besler told the Citizen Times — a far cry from Duke Energy's estimate of 200 dead fish. When asked about the disparity between those numbers, Duke Energy's Crawford said the stocking event had been planned and had nothing to do with the incident at the hydro station.

"The number of fish the NC Wildlife Resources Commission restocked does not correlate with the estimated number of impacted fish," Crawford said. "The NCWRC had a surplus of fish in the hatchery that were ready and needed to be released."

'They would be toast'

"No," hatchery manager Adam Moticak said with a laugh.

According to Moticak, the managers at Setzer State Fish Hatchery in Pisgah National Forest didn't make any mathematical errors that left them with 5,000 trout burning a hole in their pocket.

Moticak said Setzer always raises more fish than are scheduled to be released, so the hatchery can recover in case of disaster there or in the rivers themselves, like what befell the Nantahala in July.

Moticak said hatchery staff keep a close eye on the temperature in the runs, despite having machinery that keeps the dissolved oxygen concentration high.

"All I'm going to say is this — I'd never want to raise a trout in that hot of water," Moticak said, recalling a time when hatchery water got about as hot as the Nantahala did during the releases. "Everything just started croaking, they couldn't stop it," he said.

David Gillette is a stream and fish ecologist at UNC Asheville. He's also skeptical of a Duke Energy claim that hot water can't hurt trout as long as the water has a high enough oxygen content.

"We find very different fish in rivers that are maybe just 10 degrees different," Gillette told the Citizen Times. "Very different fish are adapted to those conditions."

A dramatic temperature change, like the jump from 45 to 78 degrees Fahrenheit the fish in the Nantahala experienced?

"In a matter of hours, there’s really just no fish that could deal with that," Gillette said. "For their body system to go from operating at 50 degrees Fahrenheit, to all of a sudden jump to the upper 70s — it just can’t. It shuts down.”

If trout can't find refuge in cooler waters, "they would be toast, for lack of a better word," Gillette said. "Probably within a couple hours.”

But it's not just this generation of trout that Gillette's worried about. What other Nantahala wildlife might be affected?

“The short answer is everything. Because whatever the (water) temperature is, they’re all in there. Insects, which are really the base of the food chain, I’m sure would get hammered. That’s the base of the food web — not just for trout, for everything else,” Gillette said.

“So if insect larva are impacted, that can be a longer-term effect, having less food around" for years to come, he added.

"Any deviation in the integrity of that ecosystem — it won’t be solved by just putting in hatchery trout," Gillette said. "If we’re talking about the overall integrity of the ecosystem, it doesn’t do much to put those fish in, which again, will probably only be in there a couple weeks."

Communication failures

Three hours after the hydro station didn't start on July 23, Wildlife Resources Commission trucks rolled in, heavy with 4,500 hatchery-raised trout, spilling their precious cargo into what would soon be hot water indeed.

The FERC license allows Duke Energy a generous timeline for reaching out to the appropriate government agencies: as soon as possible, but certainly within five days depending on the emergency. They were ahead of the curve on that front, reaching out to stakeholders in a mass email the day of the equipment failure.

But Duke Energy might as well have never sent the emails.

At the DEQ, Duke Energy emailed a transportation permit specialist and a dam specialist because they had been involved with the FERC licensing talks.

According to the DEQ, the Asheville regional office didn’t hear of a potential fish kill until July 27, the fourth day of hot water flows — and not from Duke Energy, but from the WRC.

“It sounds like the anglers are the ones that caught it, no pun intended,” stream ecologist Gillette said.

Environmental oversight?

Gordon Vanderpool and Paul Bourcq say they they called the DEQ and WRC repeatedly to describe what they saw on the water, starting July 25.

After the DEQ received a tip about a possible fish kill, the agency asked a nearby WRC game warden to investigate, DEQ spokeswoman Sarah Young wrote in an email to the Citizen Times. The game warden found only a single dead fish on July 27, Young said, so the DEQ and WRC jointly decided not to investigate further.

Besler, of the WRC, tells a different story. He says the decision not to perform an official count was made not because the issue was “resolved,” but because it was impossible that late in the game.

“By the time frame when I talked to Zan (Price of the DEQ), several days had passed under extremely high flows,” meaning many fish would have been swept away, Besler told the Citizen Times by phone on Aug. 7.

They’d need to get “access to the entire river” to produce an accurate estimate, and in the Nantahala’s case, some parts are “unwadeable,” Besler said. It would just be too dangerous for the scientists to attempt a count in that degree of turbulence.

DEQ ultimately issued issued Duke Energy a notice of violation for infractions of state laws protecting aquatic life on Aug. 6. The DEQ did not provide to the Citizen Times its scientists' assessments of the event's impacts to the river.

Duke Energy responded to the DEQ's notice of violation in an Aug. 19 letter, acknowledging that "two aspects of the (emergency protocol) were not strictly followed" in reference to the delayed environmental monitoring and the extended water releases and describing an alert system to remind technicians of the emergency protocols in the event of an accident.

Randy Herrin, Duke Energy's VP of regulated renewables, wrote that the utility contributed $7,500 to the WRC to cover the costs of the extra stocking event to offset the trout lost in the fish kill.

Herrin also claims that "most of the affected fish were stocked brook trout," apparently based on the 18 dead trout Duke scientists collected, and states the original stocking event on July 23 occurred "just before the outage," which is incorrect based on information from the Setzer State Fish Hatchery personnel who stocked the river.

Feds want answers from Duke

Duke Energy is required to submit a report to the FERC that explains the rationale behind its decisions and provide more specific data by Sept. 22. Some of those questions — like the age and species of fish killed — Duke Energy likely will find difficult to answer with only 18 specimens.

In the past, "Duke Energy has had some minor violations from their license," FERC spokeswoman Celeste Miller wrote to the Citizen Times. "Some administrative issues like not informing us timely, and some operational issues, but nothing demonstrating gross negligence rising to the level of civil penalties."

"Licensees are required to comply with the terms and conditions of their license," Miller said. "In this case, we are gathering necessary information to determine what happened and what steps, if any, are necessary once the review is complete."

"We take our FERC license requirements seriously and believe we met the intent of the FERC guidance to perform temperature checks," Duke Energy spokeswoman Crawford said. "We do not feel that the public's trust was ever betrayed during this event."

In a nod to the July releases' impact on trout, Duke Energy rescheduled a whitewater bypass flow planned for Aug. 9 "to give the fishery more time to recover," according to a media release.

The power company's representatives have described the July incident as a "learning opportunity" that will help them refine their protocols. That's been a hard pill to swallow for the anglers who rely on the Nantahala for their livelihood.

Economic effects from the fish kill

"When the water was that warm, we had to refund four days in a row” of guided tours, Mac Brown of Mac Brown Fly Fish told the Citizen Times. One group from California had flown cross country specifically to fish the Nantahala. “They weren’t happy,” Brown said.

But whitewater outfitters want anglers to understand they don't consider Duke Energy's July decisions a win for their industry, according to Nick McCullough, river manager of Rolling Thunder River Co. and president of a collective of whitewater outfitters called the Nantahala Gorge Association.

"We could have avoided the whole situation by taking a day or two off with the dam," McCullough said.

"As (outfitters), our main concern with the river is we have to run (water) to sustain," he said. "But I mean, a few days down here and there, to preserve the ecosystem of the river is definitely within our benefit."

"We don't want to see future impacts (on the) river (because) of a weeklong problem with the dam. If the ecosystem in general would collapse, it would be devastating to the industry and the gorge as a whole."

The WRC's Besler is hopeful that the trout population will rebound. The agency is conducting the final year of a three-year trout population study in September.

“Preliminarily, the fish sample looked similar to other years," he said. "They saw quite a few wild fish in there of various sizes, from very small to very large trout. It looked similar to pre-landslide and pre-events earlier this summer with Duke Energy.”

But some trout fishing guides are convinced the worst-case scenario McCullough feared has already come to pass and are pessimistic about the Nantahala's future.

“How many people from Atlanta you think want to come up here when they know the river got screwed? There are thousands of miles of other water choices, but they’re not gonna be like the Nantahala,” Brown said. “It won’t be back like it was for a lot of years.”

"The whole river situation has been such a mess that I have decided to lease my own private water," Johnson said. "I'm finished with that place in a way. It is sad."