SEQUIM — Wanted: People who like water when it’s rushing, roiling and falling from the sky, with wind and fish mixed in.
You know you’re out there, you who are thrilled by a storm, a muscular river and those creeks that look so much bigger than creeks.
And now’s your chance, say the planners at Clallam County’s Community Development Department, to get out there in it and do some good for people, wildlife and land.
The department is recruiting storm-tracking, stream-sampling and meal-cooking volunteers this fall and winter for the Streamkeepers of Clallam County, as it ramps up its work on a countywide stormwater plan.
Pollution, flooding
This plan will confront the two byproducts of dirty runoff: pollution and flooding that hurt farmers, fish and the rest of the residents of the North Olympic Peninsula.
Fortified by a three-year, $538,000 grant from the federal Environmental Protection Agency, plus $181,700 in locally generated funds and staff time, county planners Carol Creasey, Robert Knapp and Streamkeepers manager Ed Chadd are laying the bedrock for the plan, which will be a localized document addressing Clallam County’s needs.
One building block of the plan is data from water samples, gathered as storms are stirring up the streams.
Tribal partnership
Clallam County staff and Streamkeepers volunteers, in partnership with the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe, are focusing this sampling on Sequim-area streams such as the Dungeness River and Matriotti, McDonald and Bell creeks.
Steve and C.J. Rankin of Sequim are already seasoned samplers, having volunteered to bottle river water last winter and earlier this month.
C.J., 62, said that for her, collecting stormwater is a mind-broadening adventure.
“You go out there, and the river is just roaring by. It’s exciting,” she said. “And it’s so different from anything I’ve ever done in my life. I was raised in a family where you didn’t get dirty. Then I worked in an office by myself for years.”
As a stormwater volunteer, “you get to see parts of the streams that you never see just driving by,” she added.
Having moved from working for a federal judge in California to sampling rivers near Sequim, she feels a new connection with the land, one she never got working in a high-rise.
“Water is the most important thing; we all need it,” C.J. added, so she enjoys the satisfaction of doing something to help protect local resources.
The organizers of this project do realize, though, that not everybody relishes stormy weather and fast water. And, Chadd said, there are many other positions to play on the team.
“Some work is outdoor, some is indoor,” he said.
Volunteers are needed to process the samples — an indoor job — so they can be analyzed for fecal coliform bacteria, fine sediment and nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus compounds that can lead to harmful algae blooms.
“We’re also looking for people who would help us do storm tracking,” Chadd added.
That means watching weather patterns, keeping a list of available samplers and, when it looks like a storm is coming, mobilizing those volunteers by phone.
Other tasks include data entry and statistical and graphical analysis of the samples; a training for all of these jobs is planned for mid-December.
One more key cog in this effort, Chadd said, will be the cooks, who prepare and freeze meals for their fellow volunteers who go into the field.
The whole team will, in effect, be feeding facts about local water quality to the Community Development Department.
Then, by February, Creasey and her staff will form a stakeholder work group to consider new regulations, education, data gaps and funding opportunities.
The group will write Clallam’s stormwater management plan based on local conditions and needs, and present it to the county Board of Commissioners by March 2011.
This is the beginning, Chadd said, of a long-term effort to protect both environmental and human health.
As the population continues to grow, the problems of pollution and flooding will only worsen, if local agencies aren’t proactive about managing stormwater.
Volunteering — indoors or out — is a way to be part of the restoration of Puget Sound, Chadd added, “right in our own backyards.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.