Urban Watch today

[ritaxis]

So the Coastal Water Commission does, besides First Flush when we see what comes out of the drainage ditches and culverts on the first rain of the year and Snapshot Day when we see what the water's like at the end of the rainy season, has a program called Urban Watch which is monitoring various urban streams through the dry season. Right now Santa Cruz City is not doing one, so I'm helping with the Capitola one, which is basically Soquel Creek and the stream in Noble Gulch, which is a tributary of Soquel Creek. What we're looking at is storm drain runoff into the creek. Although, parenthetically, one of these empties into the lagoon at the mouth of Soquel Creek and not into the creek itself. The lagoon is a seasonal thing: a sand bar forms across the mouth of the creek in the dry season and the water backs up to form a shallow lakey thing. It's not that it doesn't drain into the bay at all, but that drainage slows way down. In former times the lagoon was the site of numerous frolics including the Begonia Festival parade, which was rafts floating down the last bit of the creek decorated with sculptures made of tuberous begonia blossoms. I think they still do the begonia festival, though as far as I can tell there's no more begonia nurseries at all in Capitola.

So we test the water for specific pollutants -- copper, detergent, phosphates, and I forget what else -- and we evaluate color, smell, turbidity, pH,conductivity, temperature, that kind of thing. Usually it's boring, boring, all the water quality objectives are met. But yesterday the team that went out found so much detergent at the Capitola pier site -- the one that empties into the lagoon -- that they ran out of reagent before they could quantify it. Today there was no more detergent at the site, but there was really elevated phosphates. Which I think was left over from the detergent.

I must say that doing this I am constantly struck by the heartbreaking beauty of these little streams. They're just these little creeks, right, that run behind the auto plaza or the supermarket parking lot, but they're so lush and quiet and full of unruly life.

Science Newsw says that European wild bees are declining in diversity, and so are the wild plants that depend on them. There's honeybees at one of the water sampling sites. They have built a huge nest. It looks like they started out by colonizing a birdhouse or maybe a bathouse nailed to a tree, and then they've outgrown it. They're heartbreakingly beautiful too, even though they're invasive exotics. Our native black bymblebees are beaiutiful, too.

sometime soon I'm going to collaborate with Frank to produce a nutshell history of the Middle East since way back.

Is there any limit on the number of tags we can tag our posts with?

Comments

[diminishedsheep.livejournal.com]

A while back someone was complaining about there being a limit of a hundred or so, but it may have changed since then.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

Phosphates... washing powder... you mean to say that the US has not yet switched to phosphate-free (well, mostly-free) variants?

I remember it being a big discussion in Germany in the 80s since far too many rivers and lakes were suffering.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

For home laundries, yes, but not for industrial companies, which is what these water checks are really for.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Actually, we've got pretty good compliance with most of the obvious big commercial places (and not too many of them in the first place). Capitola Auto Plaza, for example, has produced no dry-season runoff in the longest time. We're on the lookout now for more systemic things.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Dish detergent and clothes washing detergent are both mostly phosphate-free. But there are other sources of phosphates: I don't know, for example, about the detergents sold for washing cars, which is the first most likely suspect we could come up with. Another is fertilizer, which is my favorite suspect for today's high phosphate reading, which was about two and a half times as high as yesterday's phosphate reading, but at a different storm drain where there had never been a detergent reading (and which had not had water in it the day before).