Clean Campus, Contaminated Creeks

Wandered over to the Little Westham Creek with Taylor. After several warm days, the earth and trees were freshly saturated with the morning’s rain. I’ve always associated rain with cleanliness – with fresh air and dust-less streets. I pushed my way through the foliage with this cleanliness in mind, making it particularly surprising to find the creek veiled with a thin film of foam. It was the first time that I’d explicitly connected the rainy-morning feeling with pollutants in our rivers. The only reason the streets and air feel so clean is because the rain literally wipes it all away, carrying it all into the rivers as runoff.

Upon coming back to Lakeview, I read that this foam is a combination of surfactants in the water and increased aeration. Although not all surfactants are necessarily bad (most are simply decaying organic substances), many are manmade chemicals such as laundry detergents and car wax (which are known to be harmful to fish and other aquatic life) and harmful nutrients such as phosphorus. The other component surprised me, simply because the water level was the lowest I have seen it all semester. Often after storms there is an increased amount of foam. This makes sense because there is an increased amount of runoff (meaning more surfactants) as well as increased discharge (meaning more turbulence, meaning more aeration). Taylor and I discussed the low water level, hypothesizing that perhaps the water level was yet to increase from the rain storm, as the soil was likely dry from the warm weather.  This was based on the assumption that the watershed had a relatively low proportion of impervious surfaces – which upon consideration was likely true. Much of the surrounding area is old neighborhoods with an abundance of green space. In fact, campus probably has the highest proportion of impervious surfaces by far.

I thought about our conversation with Andrew McBride, remembering that he said the amount of impervious surfaces on campus is troubling. It’s strange that such an intentional development, one that has unusually high intellectual and monetary resources, is still so environmentally irresponsible. It saddened me to realize that we’re likely the largest contributor of pollutants within the Little Westham watershed. Of course, that’s a bit silly when I realize that college campuses are incredibly densely populated, but I still feel a strong need for our school to be more intentional about its development. Taylor and I have often mused about pervious pavements on X-lot or greenroofed/ solar panel-adorned buildings around campus; although these feel like impossible tasks even with GreenUR’s budget, it makes me happy to know that our Earth Lodge projects provide us with some sort of jumping point.

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