Alabama reservoir · state assessment record

Chitterling Creek (Little River Lake)

Assessment decisions reported by Alabama Department of Environmental Management to EPA under Clean Water Act sections 303(d) and 305(b), last assessed in the 2006 reporting cycle.

33
Assessed acres
Reservoir
Water type
View watchlist

This waterbody in one line

Chitterling Creek (Little River Lake), a reservoir in Alabama, is assessed as fully supporting its designated uses, with no impairment causes listed in the state's most recent Integrated Report cycle (2006). By assessed acreage it sits below the national median by assessed acreage (38,628 lakes); its impairment list is shorter than on half of assessed lakes (0 listed causes). Alabama assesses fishing as supported; it reported no verdict on fish consumption itself.

Fully Supporting
overall status
P45
Assessed size nationally
P51
Shorter cause list
Fully Supporting
fish-consumption or fishery

Assessment verdicts are the state agency's decisions as reported to EPA ATTAINS; PlainLakes renders them without modification.

B-
Water Quality Standing
67/100
Chitterling Creek (Little River Lake)

A composite of this record's EPA ATTAINS designated-use verdicts, filed impairment count, and assessment currency, weighted and benchmarked against the national corpus of assessed active waterbodies. This is a water-quality standing, not a human-recreation or property-value judgment, and dimensions with no filed verdict drop out rather than count against the score.

RecreationN/A
Not assessed
Swimming, boating, and other primary/secondary contact recreation
Drinking WaterN/A
Not assessed
Suitability as a public drinking-water source
Aquatic LifeN/A
Not assessed
Support for fish, invertebrates, and other aquatic organisms
Fish ConsumptionA+
Meeting criteria
Safety of eating fish caught in this water
Impairment BurdenA+
0 causes
Filed pollutant/stressor causes on this record
Assessment CurrencyF
2006
Reporting cycle this record’s verdicts were last decided in

Chitterling Creek (Little River Lake) against the ATTAINS register

Paragraphs are selected by this unit's percentiles and use matrix: different lakes lead with different dimensions. Figures are ATTAINS / portal register arithmetic, not advice.

The signature stat: cause-list length

The standout filed fact is a short cause list: 0 causes, shorter than 51% of assessed lake-type units. A short list can mean a focused impairment, or a shallow assessment.

All ruled-on uses pass

The filed use determinations for fish consumption are all Fully Supporting. Where an overall IR category still flags the unit, look at the cause list and report standing rather than treating the use row as empty.

IR category in the supporting band

EPA's Integrated Report category for Chitterling Creek (Little River Lake) is 2. In ATTAINS that band means the assessed uses are supporting (or supporting with other waters in the unit), so the narrative weight shifts to how deep the assessment went and whether monitoring is current, not to a restoration plan.

Overall status: fully supporting

Overall status is Fully Supporting. If an IR category or cause row still appears, it usually reflects a prior listing path or a use the overall rollup does not collapse, read those sections rather than stopping at the tile.

Mid-pack assessed size

33 acres lands in the middle tercile of units with an area filed. Acreage is not what distinguishes this record from its peers.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's ATTAINS program, Alabama carries 304 filed lake-type waterbodies in the August 2026 extract, and this page renders the assessment record EPA assigned to Chitterling Creek (Little River Lake) without modification. See our methodology for reporting-unit limits and gauge linking rules.

Limited-coverage record. The reported record for this reservoir currently lacks a definitive recreation verdict, a definitive aquatic-life verdict, listed impairment causes, among other dimensions. It is shown for completeness; the richer records for Alabama are on the state page.
Reporting cycle
2006
Alabama Integrated Report
Listing category
Category 2
Uses with verdicts
2
Definitive use assessments
Sources retrieved
2026-08-17
Portal-wide ATTAINS + NWIS pull

The record

Designated-use assessments

Fully Supporting and Not Supporting are the state's definitive verdicts; other entries mean the use was not conclusively assessed in this cycle. Alabama filed its own confidence on the 2 definitive verdicts it rated: Good. That rating is the filer's, in EPA's own field, and EPA publishes no definition of the four words it offers.

Designated use Group Verdict
Fishing Fish-consumption or fishery Fully Supporting
Filer confidence: Good
Industrial and Agriculture Uses Other Fully Supporting
Filer confidence: Good
Contact Recreation Recreation Insufficient Information
Filer confidence: Good
Propagation of Fish and Wildlife Aquatic-life or related Insufficient Information
Filer confidence: Good

The record

Listed impairment causes

The state's reported assessment lists no impairment causes for this reservoir.

Reading the record

Chitterling Creek (Little River Lake): Category 2 reading

2 Category 2: some uses supported, others not assessed

Alabama filed this assessment unit as Category 2: some designated uses are supported and others were not assessed in this cycle. Absence of a failing verdict is not the same as a full Category 1 finding.

How these categories work.

Scale and rank

Chitterling Creek (Little River Lake) is one of 304 lake-type waterbodies reported to EPA from Alabama. It is not among the 263 whose reported record carries enough populated assessment or gauge data for this site to list and index it. At 33 assessed acres it ranks 21,456th by assessed size among the 38,628 lakes the dataset carries an area for, counting a state’s repeated filings of one water once, behind 21,455 lakes with a larger one.

What this record holds

Alabama completed an assessment here and listed no impairment cause, so the record holds a verdict and its supporting use rows but no pollutant to track over time. The state has not yet filed a definitive recreation verdict and a definitive aquatic-life verdict for this record; those fields populate when it reports them in a future Integrated Report cycle.

Reported trophic class

Alabama carried the trophic field for this assessment unit and filed it as unclassified, which records that no class was determined rather than that the water is unenriched. What the trophic scale measures.

In context

Where Chitterling Creek (Little River Lake) sits nationally

Assessed size among U.S. lakes

Distribution of assessed acreage across ATTAINS lakes filed with an area, counting a state’s repeated filings of one water once

33 Top 55% larger than 45% of 38,628 lakes

lakes the dataset carries an area for, counting a state’s repeated filings of one water once, bucketed by value

Source EPA ATTAINS · Reporting cycles 1987–2026

Listed causes vs waterbodies carrying a verdict

How many impairment causes U.S. waterbodies with a reported verdict carry

0 Among the shortest cause lists fewer listed causes than 51% of 23,610 waterbodies carrying a verdict

named waterbodies carrying a verdict, bucketed by value

Source EPA ATTAINS · Reporting cycles 1987–2026

In both charts each bar is a band and taller bars hold more waterbodies; the dashed line and filled bar mark Chitterling Creek (Little River Lake). Hover or tap any bar for its full count and share.

In context

Alabama context

ATTAINS carries 304 lake-type waterbodies in Alabama, 143 assessed as not supporting at least one use and 130 fully supporting.

Other large assessed lakes in Alabama Assessed acres
Tennessee River (Lake Guntersville) Fully Supporting 20,440
Wheeler Lake Not Supporting 18,705
Tallapoosa River (Lake Martin) Fully Supporting 15,867
Coosa River (Weiss Lake) Not Supporting 15,066
Tennessee River (Wheeler Lake) Not Supporting 13,441
Tennessee River (Wilson Lake) Not Supporting 13,363

Peers near Chitterling Creek (Little River Lake)'s size or cause load

Similar assessed acres

Nearest filed extents (33 acres here).

Similar cause load

Nearest listed-cause counts (0 here). Peers already in the acreage column are omitted.

How peers are picked

What to do with this record

  • Assessment verdicts are cycle-based, not real-time. For fish-consumption decisions, your state advisory program is the binding source. Consumption status guide
  • Impairment listings follow the Clean Water Act 303(d) process; a listing is a regulatory finding, not a closure notice. 303(d) explained

PlainLakes renders state assessment decisions and federal gauge observations without modification. It does not issue advisories.

Assessment decisions on this page are rendered directly from state Integrated Report records in EPA's ATTAINS system; gauge figures are daily-value observations from the USGS National Water Information System, no number is typed in by an editor. Overall status, use verdicts, and causes are the state's reported decisions for assessment unit AL03150204-0502-502. Counts and percentiles are computed across all lake-type records PlainLakes ingests from ATTAINS. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error. Data current as of 2026-08-17. Primary sources: EPA ATTAINS and USGS National Water Information System.