Health Publications

Mending our waterways - News For Members - cleaning up the water

Sierra, May-June, 2003 by Elisa Freeling

The water Cindi Jablonski is looking at appears fresh as Edenic dew, but she's about to discover it's full of fish-strangling phosphate. Too much of this nutrient, which can come from sewage-treatment plants and runoff, feeds oxygen-stealing algae, harming aquatic animals. Collected that day from an Illinois stream, the water is in a glass jar in a lab at McHenry County College, where Jablonski, a small-business owner, is studying to become a wildlife biologist. "I was the only girl on my block who liked bugs," she notes, "and I probably still am."

Her partner in titration is Dan Eickemeyer, who teaches classes on chemistry and society--air and water pollution, ozone holes--at the college. In the beaker-strewn lab, Jablonski and Eickemeyer pipette samples from jars into test tubes, add chemicals that will react with contaminants by turning a certain color, and measure the change with, of course, a colorimeter. As Jablonski's sample turns blue, indicating phosphate, Eickemeyer records the data. "Saving the lives of more fish!" he says cheerily.

These days Jablonski and Eickemeyer spend a lot of their time with teachers, anglers, and amateur scientists. ("There aren't a lot of other people I can talk to about bugs," Jablonski points out.) They're all Sierra Club Water Sentinels: hundreds of volunteers in seven states documenting the status of waterways to get them cleaned up or help keep them clean. In Illinois, 108 Water Sentinels are testing for pollutants in 30 streams, 2 lakes, and a marsh, collecting data with which the Club's Illinois Chapter can alert the public and press. Since the Sentinels began raising awareness, the state environmental agency has targeted 115 additional miles of river for cleanup.

When she's not in the lab, Jablonski pulls on rubber waders to collect samples north of Chicago on Nippersink Creek, one of the cleanest streams around. For now, the Nippersink is alive with smallmouth bass and catfish, but in one of the state's fastest-growing counties, unbridled development threatens its health.

Last year the Illinois Chapter helped establish rules that protect such stellar streams from degradation, which activists now hope to use to curb sprawl. As Jablonski and Eickemeyer hunker down, carefully pouring and shaking and timing and measuring, the results show even the Nippersink is imperfect in places: The sample that turned a lovely shade of periwinkle was collected from a site on the creek below both a golf course and a sewage-treatment plant that doesn't filter out phosphates; samples from farther upstream were clear. The state's environmental agency, however, has not set limits on the amounts of pollutants like phosphorus that sewage-treatment plants are allowed to dump, a policy the Sentinels are pushing to change.

"Water Sentinels are just ordinary folks trying to make a difference," says Fran Caffee, one of the first Club water monitors in Illinois. When the project began in 1996, she says, "our biggest goal was to encourage the public to take responsibility for our rivers." Though the EPA estimates that 40 percent of America's waters fail to meet federal cleanliness standards, President Bush's 2003 budget reduces funds for water-quality monitoring nationwide. The future of our waterways may well depend on citizen scientists like the Water Sentinels.

JOIN

To join the Sierra Club activist network, write to the Office of Volunteer and Activist Services, 85 Second St., San Francisco, CA 94105-3441; e-mail activist.desk@sierraclub.org. Members receive a free subscription to the Planet bimonthly newsletter and Sierra Club Currents, a twice-weekly e-mail update.

GO ONLINE

Visit the Club's Web site at www.sierraclub.org. To sign up for our other e-mail lists and forums, go to www.sierraclub.org/takeaction/lists.> EXPRESS YOURSELF

To make your voice count on environmental issues, write or call your elected officials at:

U.S. Senate
Washington, DC 20510

U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515

U.S. Capitol Switchboard
(202) 224-3121

Contact President Bush at:

The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. N.W.
Washington, DC 20500
Comment line (202) 456-1414
Fax (202) 456-2461
E-mail president@whitehouse.gov

* ON THE WEB Read more about the Sierra Club's Water Sentinels program at www.sierraclub.org/watersentinels.>