Earth
Day, 2003
FOSEC and Durham Stormwater Services coordinated this creek clean-up at East End Park where more than twenty volunteers gathered in the rain to clear more than 2.5 tons of litter from Goose Creek. Our clean-up was featured in water bills mailed to all Bull City households. (Photos courtesy of Durham Stormwater Services)
Volunteers check out old oil furnace. Two Duke students were pulling out a rusty transmission when an elderly resident came out to see the goings on. She told us she was born in her house by this creek, looked around, and immediately pulled on some work gloves to lend a hand.
Volunteers cleared log jams blocking two culverts, filled several bags of debris and hauled out two bicycles, three car seats, a soccer goal, shopping cart, drenched mattress, and an old oil furnace. FOSEC has organized more than 40 clean-ups along the two creeks we've adopted with the state (one through Durham Central Park and Trinity Park and the other through Old West Durham and Walltown).
Streams
Vital in Removing Water Pollution
(Reuters,
April 5, 2001)
Streams play a bigger
role than previously thought in removing pollutants before they get to
larger waterways, scrubbing as much as half of the excess nitrogen from
fertilizer runoff and auto emissions, scientists said on Thursday.
A nationwide study of 12 streams found that the smaller the stream -- with its shallow depth and high surface-to-volume ratio -- the more quickly nitrogen was removed, scientists said in the latest edition of the journal Science.
Previously, experts studying pollution focused on larger bodies of water rather than small streams, considering them more like gutters that simply carried nitrogen to lakes, rivers and oceans.
Excess nitrogen can cause ecologically damaging effects in large waterways, including algal blooms, which can kill fish and other aquatic animals.
Bruce Peterson of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, one of the study's 15 co-authors, said the finding could have important implications for land-use policies. He said human efforts to control streams by covering or channeling them have made them less effective at nitrogen removal.
Streams remove nitrogen by providing a habitat for nitrogen-absorbing organisms and by releasing nitrogen from the water into the atmosphere.
"Small tributary streams in our watersheds, the ones most likely to be plowed under or buried in culverts or destroyed by human activity, have a very important role to play in removing nitrogen from water," Peterson said.
"If we restored and took care of all the small streams on the landscape, our water quality coming down rivers would be greatly improved," he said.
NC Big Sweep
Organized by the Friends of South Ellerbe, several Duke volunteer groups picked up litter (and a go-cart) from sections of South Ellerbe on Green Street, Hale Street and Durham Central Park.
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Photos courtesy of the City of Durham.
"In 50 years, Durham had spread rapidly from a village to a bustling factory center, sucking in the rolling pine country around it. Shacks for factory workers mushroomed in the lowlands between the graded streets. The little communities, which clung precariously to the banks of streams or sat crazily on washed out gullies and were held together by cowpaths or rutted wagon tracks, were called the Bottoms. It was as if the town had swallowed more than it could hold and had regurgitated, for the Bottoms was an odorous conglomeration of trash piles, garbage dumps, cow stalls, pigpens and crowded humanity ...."
-Pauli Murray ("Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family")
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