River Watch is back for some winter water sampling - specifically looking for chloride that has moved from our roads to our water.
The short story on chloride is that any non-natural sources of chloride pollution (road salt, water softeners) have an incredibly long lasting impact on the water it ends up in. There is not currently widespread cost effective technology to remove salt from our freshwater. Even state of the art facilities like the one in Minneapolis cannot remove chloride from the water. The result is that all of the salt that makes its way into our water stays there. Being that the organisms that rely on freshwater (including ourselves) need it to be without salt, this poses a huge problem for natural waters and drinking water sources.
In conjunction with the recently established Winter Salt Week, and in partnership with the Izaak Walton League’s Salt Watch, River Watch trained students from 5 schools in the Metro Area (Bloomington Jefferson & Kennedy, Wayzata, School of Environmental Studies, & Chaska) how to get involved in the volunteer science initiative to track chloride pollution across the US.
Only one of these three groups (Jefferson) was able to test liquid water (since the stormwater ponds we planned to test were frozen quite deep), but the results from the liquid water tested indicated dangerous levels of salt (670 + mg/L). The groups that tested melted ice found no significant chloride pollution, but that is not entirely surprising since the ice wouldn’t be affected by liquid runoff.
The students at Jefferson started planning an advocacy campaign to talk to their Groundskeepers to reduce salt application to recommended levels that meet safety standards and reduce the overall pollution of the salt. This is exactly the type of data-driven advocacy we hope to see from teams participating in the Salt Watch & River Watch. With a little education to those who make decisions impacting our water, we can drive incremental changes in behavior that will benefit the Minnsotan outdoor space, water, and people.
Thank you to those who participated in chloride sampling. River Watch is looking to work with more schools this winter, so if you are interested in getting your school involved please contact me, Tom Crawford at tom@friendsmnvalley.org.
Bloomington Jefferson HS Earth Corps
Chaska HS Green Club
Wayzata HS Eco Club
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