Satilla has new watchdog

      Family of riverkeeper from Waynesville has a long history on the blackwater

stream.

By TERRY DICKSON 

      WAYNESVILLE -- Gordon Rogers' workplace starts on the outskirts of Fitzgerald

and ends at the ocean.

      Now about two weeks on his job, Rogers has the gray-bearded face people can

put with the name Satilla Riverkeeper.

      The Satilla Riverwatch Alliance, a watchdog group formed to protect the

blackwater river, hired the Waynesville resident Aug. 27, said Doug Tarver, a

South Georgia College professor and member of the organization's board of

directors.

      "We met at his home Friday night and signed the papers,'' and Rogers went to

work Sept. 1, Tarver said. "There's plenty to do.''

      Rogers' job, in brief, is to find ways to clean up existing messes on the

river and prevent new ones.

      His own history on the river goes back a ways. Holding a cup of coffee the

color of the Satilla's water, Rogers walked out one day last week on the U.S.

82 bridge that carries westbound traffic over the river. His maternal

grandfather, Chester Smith, built the bridge in 1964. Pointing to a spot

upstream at the foot of a railroad trestle, Rogers said it was there he caught

his first redbreast sunfish while fishing with his other grandfather, Gordon

Rogers Jr.

      That was 40 years ago, when he was a 5-year-old on a Sunday school picnic from

College Place United Methodist Church -- the church his father, the Rev.

Gordon Rogers III, pastored and where Rogers still worships with his wife,

Gina, son, Quint, 9, and daughter, Jamie Leigh, 6.

      That personal relationship with the river notwithstanding, Tarver noted that

Rogers had a good academic and work background for the job.

      The holder of a bachelor's degree in zoology from the University of Georgia

and a graduate degree from Skidaway Institute, Rogers worked at the Coastal

Resources Division of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. While

there, he worked on commercial fisheries statistics and did stock modeling for

shrimp and blue crab. He left in 1995 to start his own waste business in

Brunswick, the only construction and demolition recycler outside Atlanta.

      The company was making money, but Rogers got into financial difficulty and had

to bring in other investors.

      "I didn't have enough of my own money in it,'' he said.

      Although the business was successful, the other investors came up with a way

to make even more money.

      "They fired me so they could save my salary,'' he said.

      Willing to leave South Georgia for the right job, Rogers found a way to stay.

      "I tripped across what they were doing and thought I was a good fit,'' he said.

      'Just when we needed him'

      Alliance President Frank Quinby said the ink was barely dry on the

advertisements for a riverkeeper when Rogers' name popped up by way of the

neighboring Altamaha Riverkeeper organ- ization.

      "He's heaven-sent. He came at a time just when we needed him,'' said Quinby,

who is also co-chairman of the Southeastern Group of the Sierra Club.

      The Riverkeeper organization itself is a response to a perceived threat to

wetlands: the TE Consolidated titanium mine at the Lulaton community west of

the river. A hastily formed group of residents, Save Our Satilla, as well as

the Sierra Club, the Center for a Sustainable Coast and others, sued TE

Consolidated over environmental issues. In settling that suit, TE Consolidated

offered $35,000 a year for so long as it mines in Brantley County to fund a

riverkeeper.

      The mine has had a few spills of turbid water from its containment ponds,

which were caught by wetlands short of the river, but so far the mine has

operated without harming the Satilla itself, Quinby said.

      And the $35,000 seed money will be useful in getting the organization started,

he said.

      TE Consolidated spokeswoman Elizabeth Revell said the mining company is

looking forward to working with Rogers, not just on the Satilla but on the

environment of Southeast Georgia.

      "We've been anxious for his arrival,'' she said.

      Board member Chip Sasser, a Waycross real estate agent, agrees that Rogers is

a good fit.

      "Everything I know is positive," Sasser said. "I think we've found ourselves a

good riverkeeper."

      Environmental issues

      With his knowledge of all the technical aspects of the river, Rogers will be

able to watch out for the lack of enforcement of water discharge permits and

enlist others to help, Sasser said.

      "There's a lot of development on the Satilla and we want to make sure it's

done properly,'' he said.

      A former assistant manager of refuges for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service,

Sasser is well connected to environmental issues himself. He moved home long

ago to Waycross to work in his father's real estate business. Sasser remembers

a much cleaner river during the days he was growing up.

      One of the hot spots on the Satilla is the area just downstream from Waycross,

where rafts of soda bottles, foam cups, basketballs and all sorts of litter

float in eddies, trapped by overhanging vegetation.

      "In my youth, there wasn't so much litter, but there weren't so many

convenience stores and pickups with stuff blowing out of the beds,'' Sasser

said.

      But some of it is being purposely dumped if the antifreeze and pesticide

containers -- including some 55-gallon sizes -- are any indicator, he said.

      "What gets people going on the Satilla is that litter," he said. "The stuff

you see gets the emotions going. What you can't see scares me."

      And that, Rogers said, will be one of his chief concerns.

      "We know a substantial part of the river has impaired water quality and we

don't know why,'' he said.

      Part of the impairment stems from added nutrients in the water causing

vegetation to grow where it should not -- increasing the growth of

oxygen-depleting algae, he said.

      Bluffs and sandbars

      There was a time when the whole length of the winding river alternated between

bluffs on the outsides of bends and bars of snow white sand on the insides.

      "We call it sugar sand," Rogers said. "The sandbars, while they're still

there, have grown up in vegetation because of silt and nutrients."

      And beneath the water, the fish species are changing as a result, he said.

      He suspects the nutrients are from municipal runoff and from agriculture and

forestry, but acknowledges: "I've been on the job a week. I don't know the

answer.''

      But he'll be looking, from the reedy, swampy headwaters in Ben Hill County, to

the main tributaries, Hurricane Creek and Big Satilla Creek, to the point were

the Satilla flows into the saltwater of St. Andrews Sound.

      Perhaps his most ambitious goal is to meet all the property owners along the

river in the next three years. He promises to hold the line on pollution with

moderate approaches to finding solutions.

      He'll work from his Waynesville home, a two-story structure that may be the

third-oldest thing in Brantley County after the dirt and the river. Built in

1826, the old house stands among more modern homes on Browntown Road, a

two-lane road bordered by mobile homes and pines.

      Since buying the house in 1997, the Rogerses have learned to go with the flow

in the community.

      "We don't have a mailbox," Gordon Rogers said. "It kept getting knocked down

for recreational purposes."

      Don't expect him to go with the flow on the river.

      "I want to be as accommodating as possible,'' he said, ''but we're going to be

rabid defenders of what's right.''