Be Kind To Your Rivers: 'Creek Week' Raises Awareness In Forsyth County

SciWorks Radio is a production of 88.5 WFDD and SciWorks, the Science Center and Environmental Park of Forsyth County, located in Winston-Salem. Follow Shawn on Twitter @SCIFitz.

It's the time of the year when we're getting out into nature and taking in everything spring has sprung so far. Maybe since this week is Creek Week in Forsyth County, you're planning on hiking along a river or stream. While you're at it, take a moment to contemplate how you can help keep these treasures healthy.

"One of the biggest issues we see with our urban streams, and I think in particular in North Carolina, is that our cities have been built on the beginnings of the stream," says Peter Raabe, Conservation Director for the North Carolina branch of American Rivers. "If you are damaging a stream at the very beginning, that has repercussions all the way down the stream."

A city is kind of like a big, impermeable tarp, keeping the ground under it nice and dry. The problem is, this is not how earth systems evolved to handel water. Raabe says as cities have grown, we haven't taken the health of our river systems into account. 

"We see a lot of water coming off our roads, coming off our buildings, going directly into the streams, and that just makes them completely unstable.

In a more natural setting, you'll have the water hit the ground, and then it will be absorbed. Most of it will be in the layer of the soil just under the surface, and that will transport slowly through the soil, through roots, and eventually get to the stream. And that process ends up taking a lot of pollution out of the water, and it then also cools the water down, and so you have cleaner, cooler water going into the streams in a way that the stream was designed to manage."

But a city does not allow the rainwater to go through this natural filtration. In urbanized areas like downtown Winston-Salem or Greensboro, the rain falls on rooftops, roads, and sidewalks. Then it's collected into storm drains and other pipes. From there, it almost directly is deposited in a stream or creek. Raabe says that can cause problems. 

"When you're not managing polluted storm water well, you have additional pollution from brake lines or oil [and] fertilizers from land going into the river without any treatment. But more problematic is actually the amount of water. The natural landscape is designed to absorb and slowly release water. What we see in an urbanized setting is that that absorption doesn't happen, and so there's not the slow release. And so all that water goes into our streams immediately and flows out of the system. And so we see streams that dry up much faster than in a natural setting. Those are the three biggest impacts: flooding, pollution and drought.

Raabe adds that in cities like Winston-Salem, stormwater can actually impact the drinking water supply, which is why it's better to manage pollution beforehand rather than to treat it later. 

So, what can urban areas do? Raabe says the overall goal is to make the landscape work as closely with nature as possible. He calls it "green stormwater infrastructure."

"This can be as simple as a garden that not only will create beautiful trees [and] great flowers, but actually the water can be absorbed by those plots and we can use the natural systems that have evolved over millions of years to purify that and we don't have to worry about wastewater treatment facilities," says Raabe. 

"We've been doing things a certain way for so long because we had other variables that were driving our activities, and now it's just – add this additional variable into the equation, and when you do that you end up being able to change the pollution load that's going into your streams rather dramatically."

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