Various public agencies publish reports on the condition of our nation's water. Familiarizing yourself with this information can be useful before jumping into the NPDES permitting process because it will help you decide where to focus your efforts.
     The Division of Water Quality maintains an alphabetical list of all active and pending point source discharges in North Carolina. You will need  Adobe Acrobat Reader to view this document and some of those that follow. For the status of any permit (including NPDES individual or general permits), you may navigate the reports section of the division's database, BIMS, which lets you search for all permits by region.

Online Resources

Watershed Plans
Once every five years, the Division of Water Quality assesses the condition of each of the state's 17 river basins. These integrated plans are invaluable in understanding your watershed. They describe its geography, land uses and growth patterns; assess the quality of most water bodies in the basin; and attempt to pinpoint pollution sources. 

305(b) and 303(d) Reports
The Clean Water Act requires the Division of Water Quality to publish these integrated reports every two years. The first report gives a detailed analysis of the state's overall health of surface waters and helps determine pollution control and management priorities at all governmental levels. The second is a list of all impaired waters in North Carolina. Those are rivers, streams, sounds and lakes that don't meet water quality goals even after all current regulatory requirements are met. The Division of Water Quality must include plans, called TMDL, to clean up the polluted waters on this list. The state combined the two reports into one this year.

Fish Kill Reports
These annual reports compiled by the Division of Water Quality describe all the major fish kills in the state and their causes.

Scorecard.org
This is a great site because it provides links to many government reports. The links offer information on your watershed's status, a summary of EPA watershed indicators, EPA water-quality indicators, and EPA watershed vulnerability indicators.

Surf Your Watershed
Maintained by EPA, this site contains useful information on water quality, land use, trends, threats, and links to other sources of information.