Honors and AP high school students from Howard County, Ind. got their feet really wet Thursday at the 2015 Wildcat Experience at
Wildcat Creek near Kokomo.
The program was started by Howard County Stormwater Technician Sarah Brichford with important goals for these high achievers.
Wildcat Creek is 84 miles long and a major tributary of the Wabash River. In 2003, a study showed that most of its pollutants are from urban and rural run-off and wastewater discharge. Since then, state and local governments have taken steps to stem the flow of contaminants.
Plus, they decided to bring youth into the picture.
“We wanted to get high school students who are taking biology and environmental sciences out into the community so they could see some local natural resources, and more importantly, some of the services and infrastructure that depend on the natural environment like wastewater, drinking water, and stormwater treatment,” Brichford said.
“That’s why we created this, so they could experience it live and in person.”
Six years and hundreds of students later, Wildcat Experience is thriving and educating students with the help of volunteers and IISG specialists.
Jay Beugly, an IISG aquatic ecologist, shared his expertise on the region’s fish and aquatic insects. He was also hoping to change a few minds about the pollution stigma the Wildcat carries to this day.
“Typically students that come to this don’t get in the water initially because they think it’s so polluted,” Beugly said. “But I hope they go home and tell family that it has a lot of good fish and insects that don’t occur in terrible streams. I hope that they’ll decide that Wildcat Creek is a lot better than they initially thought.”
So after fish, water, macroinvertebrate, and soil testing some of the students felt differently about the creek right in their backyard.
“There’s a lot more diversity than you would think there would be in Indiana,” senior Sarah Schwarzkopf said.
“I always thought the Wildcat was really dirty, but after all the tests we did it’s really not that bad.”
The Municipal Water Reclamation District of Chicago is able (and required) to move towards full compliance with the Clean Water Act and other related guidelines as a result of a federal judge approving the consent decree.
“Some good and long-awaited stormwater news quietly dropped the other day—a federal judge approved the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago’s (MWRD) Consent Decree, which is a binding agreement detailing very specific steps MWRD will take to move toward full compliance with the Clean Water Act and other federal guidelines on an equally specific timeline. There has been and will continue to be debate about whether the Consent Decree is strong enough, fast enough or green enough. But the reality is that it is now in place, and I’m excited that we can finally get to work on something, rather than sitting around waiting. I don’t read too many court rulings, but I found this one quite scannable.
MWRD, of course, is responsible for wastewater and stormwater management throughout Cook County; on a daily basis it discharges treated effluent to area waterways, and that water must meet Clean Water Act standards. The same requirements hold true in storms, and that’s where most of the impetus for the Consent Decree lies: If there is more rain more quickly than MWRD’s infrastructure system can handle, the result is overflows of untreated wastewater and stormwater into those same waterways…resulting it MWRD being out of compliance with aspects of its Clean Water Act (and associated regulation) requirements. To be fair, many other metropolitan areas have the same problems, and as a result have their own Consent Decree in place. Several years ago MWRD, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Ill. Environmental Protection Agency began working out the requirements—finish the Tunnel and Reservoir Plan (TARP) by X, improve collection of ‘floatables’ in our waterways by Y, etc. When the draft Consent Decree was released for public comment, two separate coalitions of environmental organizations opined that the whole thing should be faster and greener. A federal judge was asked to determine if the requirements were reasonable, that went on for a bit, he decided they were, and now it’s what we have to work with, so let’s get to work.”
Read the complete post at the link above, which contains information on specific targets and goals related to moving toward Clean Water Act compliance.
“We wanted to get high school students who are taking biology and environmental sciences out into the community so they could see some local natural resources, and more importantly, some of the services and infrastructure that depend on the natural environment like wastewater, drinking water, and stormwater treatment,” Brichford said.
