Celebrate Water

SciWorks Radio is a production of 88.5 WFDD and SciWorks, the Science Center and Environmental Park of Forsyth County, located in Winston-Salem.

Water is vital. Without it there would be no life on Earth. It's not very reactive, so a molecule of a chemical can drift around in it and have a reaction with another molecule it would never have met. This was key to the evolution of life because chemicals had 4 billion years to party in the water before they sparked life. With that in mind, when was the last time you celebrated water?

We started Creek Week really to just kind of celebrate World Water Day. Get people excited about water, get them outside doing some fun things and hopefully learning some nerdy things along the way.

That's Wendi Hartup, Natural Resources Extension Agent at the North Carolina Cooperative Extension in Forsyth County. She's one of the coordinators of Creek Week in Forsyth County. According to Hartup, 16% of the waterways here in North Carolina are somehow impaired. But comparatively, that's not as bad as it seems.

We're so lucky we've had the Clean Water Act come about, the Clean Air Act, because we used to dump all kinds of who knows what. Our creeks and rivers actually used to catch fire in some areas of the country. But really thinking about the health of our streams, that's subjective as well. Is it healthy for us? Is it healthy for the fish?

We don't have industries dumping chemicals in the rivers on purpose anymore, so what are some of the pollutants we deal with today?

Anything that's hanging out on our parking lots. We have the oil and grease that drips out of your car. I mean, just anything that you can think of that's on the ground, if the water starts to pick it up and move it, its going straight to our creeks. Temperature can pollute our streams. When the rainwater hits our parking lot on a really hot summer day it's going to start to heat up that water and then it runs off into a storm drain to go to a creek. We actually have really great data that shows that our water temperatures rise significantly, after a rain, especially in the summer.

This potential pollutant might not be on your radar.

Our systems for water treatment are really not able to handle any extra, unwanted things that pass through our bodies, or if you're just straight dumping your drugs, it kinda starts to break down in our streams and rivers. And then our fish can consume it, and who knows what repercussions that can totally have on them. Appalachian State did a study on female hormones that were in the water, and they think it came from all the birth control pills used by the females on campus. It was something they were finding in elevated levels.

Despite all this, our waterways are pretty healthy. But there are some simple steps we can all take to help keep them that way.

If everybody really kind of thought about some of their actions that they were doing; read the labels on pesticides before you spread them. Same for fertilizers. When you over-apply fertilizers, you over -apply nutrients that the plants can't necessarily take up. Then it just washes away and goes down into our creek. What that does is it starts to allow for plant growth to occur in our creeks and rivers. When it gets to a lake then you get problems with algae growth. It can start to take up all the oxygen that's available under the water and make it so that the fish can't breathe. It can make it hard to use your boat on the pond, because you've got lots and lots of other plants beginning to grow. Think about washing your car on your lawn instead of on your driveway. Think about ways that you could reduce your use of water, planting plants that don't need to be over-watered. Things that are meant to be here. Native plants are a really good choice. Making sure that your plants are really in the right place. There's a little label that comes with the plant that tells you where it's happiest. And put it there. Downspouts on your house: Direct the flow into your landscape instead of direction the flow on to concrete or into the storm drain. Those are all small things you can do that can really help, because if everyone did it it would make a really big difference.

Celebrate Forsyth Creek Week with activities throughout the community including at SciWorks.

This Time Round, the theme music for SciWorks Radio, appears as a generous contribution by the band Storyman and courtesy of UFOmusic.com.