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Photo by Ashley Cross/The Ottawa Herald
The Marais Des Cygnes River is one of the main sources for water and the watershed in Franklin County. Keeping pollution in the river low and the water quality high is a continuing concern.
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Group: Understanding watersheds key to safeguarding area's water
By CLEON RICKEL, Herald Senior Writer
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Water. It's essential to all of us. But pollution and limited resources threaten our water supplies, and a confusing web of entities controls who gets water and how much. The Herald's exclusive, six-part series examines important water issues facing Franklin County.
What's up is what goes down.
And what's up is protecting watersheds, where water -- and its contaminants -- drain down to the lowest point, be it a pond, lake, river or stream, Charlene Lister, member of the Marais des Cygnes River Basin Authority, said.
Knowing what watersheds are is key to understanding how to protect Franklin County and the surrounding area's water quality, Lister said.
Most of the watersheds in the Marais des Cygnes river basin -- itself a watershed covering all or parts of 13 counties -- have been listed by the U.S. Geological Survey as among some of the most polluted waters in the state.
That's why the Marais des Cygnes River Basin Authority, as well as several other local and area groups, have embarked on several efforts designed to make people more aware of what's happening in their local watersheds and trying to prevent additional contaminants from working their way into the public water supply, she said.
One of the keystones of the groups' efforts is the Marais des Cygnes Watershed Restoration and Protection Strategy, WRAPS, she said.
You'll be hearing more about WRAPS as the basin committee gets its educational campaign into gear, she said.
The structure of the watershed, the land uses, soil types, economic activity and local climate can have an impact on the water quality in a watershed.
For example, many streams and their watersheds in the Marais des Cygnes basin have seen strong residential and commercial development, Fran Bennett, Williamsburg member of the river basin authority, said.
That means more pavement and roofs, which adds to the load of silt and organic contaminants left by internal combustion engines and faster runoff which can grab more debris and make it harder for runoff to naturally mix with the river, Bennett said.
As another example, Melvern Lake tends to be cleaner than Pomona and Hillsdale lakes, he said.
Melvern hasn't seen the same pace of development and most land in the lake's watershed is devoted to ranching and grassland -- the grasses tend to slow runoff and tend to grab and filter contaminants in runoff, he said.
According to the river basin group's research, water quality in the streams in the basin is rated as only fair, with slightly less than half of the streams falling below federal water quality standards.
In the upper part of the basin, Pomona Lake and Crystal Lake, Garnett, have significant impairments and several of the lakes below Ottawa have significant impairments.
Impairments include chemical byproducts of agricultural fertilizers, mud and silt, and algae blooms, which tend to gobble up sunlight and oxygen, killing other aquatic life.ld a $8 billion water treatment system, New York, working with environmentalists and small farmers, decided to spend $2 billion to pay farmers along the Hudson River, the city's main water source, to stay on their farms rather than selling to real estate developers and big timber companies and to adopt conservation practices that cut the amount of soil erosion and chemicals leaching into the Hudson, the Land Institute said.
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