Water Marks
From teaching kids the ABCs of watershed health to providing professional certification for developers, WRRC researchers aim to protect the state’s water resources.

By Elise LeQuire

Each spring since 1995, students and volunteer organizers have gathered for an annual festival on the banks of the Tennessee River in Knox County. WaterFest is a county-wide educational event, held at Ijams Nature Center, that focuses on kids, says Ruth Anne Hanahan, senior research associate with the Water Resources Research Center (WRRC), a unit of the University of Tennessee’s Waste Management Research and Education Institute.

WaterFest partners bring about 750 students together, offering a range of engaging activities to introduce the ABCs of watershed health. Students compete in poetry and art contests, make models showing the effects of water pollution, and participate in activities that demonstrate what they can do to protect their streams and rivers.

“Our target is elementary students,” Hanahan says. The kids also engage in activities that are just plain fun, such as water rockets and the dunking booth.

The day-long, annual festival is co-sponsored by the Water Quality Forum (WQF), a consortium of partners with the mission of improving water quality in Knox County and its surrounding counties. On hand to lead or assist with many of the activities are members of the Community Action Committee (CAC) AmeriCorps, which was created in 1995 to engage volunteers in improving urban environments.

AmeriCorps volunteers, who receive a small stipend in exchange for 11 months of service, come from all ages and backgrounds and from across the United States.

“With the Internet, we now have people coming from as far away as Oregon and California,” says Tim Gangaware, associate director of WRRC, which trains the volunteers to conduct many of the WQF’s educational and outreach activities and assist with its watershed remediation projects.

This year, six volunteers comprise the Water Quality Team, which also assists with the WQF’s Adopt-A-Watershed (AAW) Program. Based on a nationally implemented program, AAW involves students in projects that help protect, monitor and restore local watersheds. WRRC staff also train AmeriCorps volunteers to work in the field on research activities with biologists from the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the Tennessee Department of Energy and Conservation (TDEC), doing stream assessments in the Tennessee Valley, Gangaware says. In addition, WRRC trains Knox County teachers who will be participating in AAW  through a Water Quality Boot Camp held in June.

While bacterial contamination, acid mine drainage, industrial effluents, and sewerage treatment problems contribute to the degradation of waterways, 28 percent of the impairment of Tennessee’s streams and rivers can be tracked to erosion and sedimentation from residential and industrial development and road building, says Paul Schmeierbach, environmental program manager with TDEC’s Division of Water Pollution Control.

Amendments of the Clean Water Act have imposed increasingly strict permitting requirements for anyone engaged in land-disturbing activities with the potential to degrade water quality, including contractors and developers. “The state has a training program to enlighten people on Best Management Practices (BMPs) for erosion and sediment control,” Schmeierbach says. In addition, over the past four years, TDEC has issued 1,500 permits required by law in the 16-county eastern district alone. “This is an indication of our educational program, our enforcement, and to some degree the increase in development activities,” he says.

Anyone disturbing an acre or more of land, or developers whose larger projects affect an acre or more, need a Storm Water Construction Permit issued by TDEC, which is responsible for state-wide enforcement of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES).

According to TDEC, permitted activities include housing subdivisions, commercial and industrial buildings, golf courses, utility lines, sewage treatment plants and roads.

To help contractors, developers, engineers and other professionals involved in land-disturbing activities understand BMPs and permit requirements, WRRC has organized two tiers of training workshops. The Level I Fundamentals workshop is a one-day course introducing the basics of Storm Water Pollution Prevention Plans (SWPPP). The course targets contractors, developers, engineers and inspectors involved in land-disturbing activities. Level II training, a two-day advanced course, is aimed at professionals who have completed Level I certification and addresses the engineering technologies for preventing erosion and managing sediment at construction sites, including stable channel design and the proper use of vegetative and structural controls.

WRRC’s Gangaware has noticed a sharp increase in voluntary participation in the workshops and interest in implementing BMPs. In the future, Tennessee may make the training mandatory. The Tennessee Department of Transportation already requires its contractors to take the certification program, and the training is mandatory for contractors in the cities of Cleveland and Dyersburg. “The workshops are always full,” he says.

In addition, some high-profile businesses such as Wal-Mart are putting the pressure on their contractors to comply with BMPs, in part due to liability concerns, such as dangerous road conditions from muddy runoff.

“Wal-Mart was involved in a multi-million dollar enforcement action by EPA and now has written contracts with 185 firms and more than 300 contractors requiring daily sediment- and erosion-control reports to headquarters,” Gangaware says. “They can penalize contractors $5,000 a day for mud on the streets.” There are additional penalties for not filing a daily report.

Now the challenge is to increase awareness among subcontractors and small developers. In May, for example, WRRC will conduct a hands-on demonstration of devices at the Williamson County Agricultural Exposition outside of Nashville.

Gangaware says WRRC plans to expand the program to provide recertification after three years to keep construction professionals current in the latest in BMPs and to train inspectors. The future training courses will include up-to-date detailed information on advanced control methods such as jute, coconut and synthetic nets, the rolled erosion products that are available in addition to siltation fences and other conventional practices. “There are a lot of new products available now to protect waterways during storm events,” Gangaware says.

To accommodate growth without impairing streams and rivers, community planners need to understand how land-use patterns affect water quality. TVA, with support from the Tennessee Department of Agriculture’s Nonpoint Source Program and the assistance of WRRC, is leading a multi-agency effort launched in 2001 to help communities learn how to reduce the impact of land-use decisions on water quality and comply with the NPDES Stormwater Phase II requirements.

The Tennessee Growth Readiness (TGR) program is assisting 85 communities that must meet the criteria of Phase II, including public education, public involvement, and post-construction development rules, says Joel Haden, sustainable development project manager with TVA.

“WRRC’s Gangaware and Hanahan have been instrumental in developing and delivering the workshops,” Haden says. “They have been part of the team from day one.”

The pilot communities represent a mix of urban, suburban and rural areas that confront the range of challenges faced across the state. TGR has used the early results of the program-piloted in Knox County, Blount County, and the cities of Alcoa and Maryville—to roll out a major statewide thrust in the fall of 2003 and winter of 2004.

“In those six months we reached 270 cities and counties,” Haden says. “About 180 have evaluated their existing development rules, and 10 to 20 percent have started making changes. These are the early adopters.”

TVA also provides data on growth patterns and the effects on water quality of stormwater runoff, which increases with the area of paved surfaces, buildings, and compacted soil. By measuring and forecasting the percent of impervious surface in a growth area, a community can gauge the point at which impairment of streams will be serious or even irreversible.

“We have created maps for each county to determine how land-use changes affect the imperviousness of the ground,” Haden says. This indicator is a good measure of how growth in a community and changes in land use affect water quality. “TRG gives communities a choice of best practices, legitimized at a national level, so they can grow and maintain water quality too,” he says.

For more information, contact Tim Gangaware, WRRC, The University of Tennessee, 311 Conference Center Building, Knoxville, TN 37996-4134, or call 865-974-4777.

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