Special Guest Article by Steve Hohman and Angela Padeletti of the EPA: Tackling pollution! Making sure Paint Branch Creek is happy and healthy
Tackling pollution! Making sure Paint Branch Creek is happy and healthy
Authors: Steve Hohman and Angela Padeletti
During a storm, have you ever seen water flow off a yard, sidewalk, roof, or road? This water, known as runoff, can pick up pollutants from the landscape and transport them into streams, rivers, and lakes. This type of pollution is called nonpoint source pollution because, unlike a pipe, it is very hard to track exactly where the pollution is coming from. In fact, nonpoint source pollution is one of the leading sources of pollution to waterways in Maryland and across the United States.
If nonpoint source pollution is so bad, how do we protect against it? One way is to restore a stream. Like putting on a cast to help a broken bone heal, we can restore streams to help them behave more naturally. In fact, stream restoration is considered a best management practice to protect streams from nonpoint sources pollution. A key question about stream restoration is whether we see water quality benefits throughout the entire stream when only portions of the entire stream are restored. Restoration is costly; therefore, it is important to know if the benefits achieved are the same whether you are right below a restored site, at the end of a stream, or anywhere in between. Since a mission of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is to help reduce nonpoint source pollution, EPA is investigating just how much stream restoration can improve water quality.
The goal of this research is to understand better how far we see the benefits of restoration activities in Paint Branch Creek in Montgomery and Prince George’s County. In cooperation with the University of Maryland, we performed monthly monitoring at 22 locations along the entirety of Paint Branch Creek. At each location, we measured stream characteristics that would give us information on stream health, as well as collected water samples to look at pollution levels in the creek.
Initial findings suggest that Paint Branch is a relatively healthy creek. Oxygen in the water column is high along the entire creek year-round. Salt concentrations, which are often elevated because of road salt or other household sources, were relatively low, which is great for freshwater plants and animals. This was helped by the fact that there were no big snowstorms last winter; Therefore, less road salt was applied to surfaces. Paint Branch can support predators like Great Blue Herons and Bald Eagles, and we saw several other animals that indicated good water quality in the Creek.
Additionally, our data show that stream restoration did improve water quality, and in some cases, these improvements continued at least 200 meters (4 Olympic swimming pools long) to 1,000 meters (20 Olympic swimming pools long) downstream! This means that stream restoration has some capacity to improve stream health beyond the footprint of the project site.
We also saw that several land uses acted as hotspots for certain pollutants. For example, salt levels were the highest at monitoring sites near roads. On the other hand, we saw that parks and natural areas can protect Paint Branch Creek from certain pollutants. Paint Branch interacts with several park or natural areas, and throughout these areas we saw pollutant concentrations either stay the same or decrease. This shows just how important natural, forested areas are at protecting the water quality of Paint Branch and all streams.
Stream restoration is all around you to provide the activities you love, such as fishing, swimming, watersports, and birding while protecting the health of the natural environment. By monitoring water quality at sites along the entire waterway, we can pinpoint hotspots of pollution and use these data to better design and install projects that maximize their environmental, social, and economic benefit.