Adopt a Drain program

It’s official, ice-out season is in, and open waters are coming our way! Dedicated water enthusiasts are ready to pry their way out the door and itching for their chance to get out to enjoy the season.

But with all the time we spend enjoying our waterways, how many of us think to give back to help preserve our favorite escapes?

Cliché as it might sound, with great enjoyment comes great responsibility. And, more than ever, we really need everybody’s participation to help maintain our water-enthusiast lifestyle, with more than 40 percent of our state’s waterways classified as impaired, with 58 water bodies labeled as such in Carlton County.

One idea is to volunteer your time to help clean a storm drain! I mentioned this in my last article about our new Adopt-A-Drain program, where select city residents can help stop pollutants such as suspended solids from entering our waterways.

What is this pollutant? Let me explain.

Suspended solids is simply debris that can be carried and suspended in water. They’re not always small, as large rocks can be carried with forceful-enough flows, but generally are considered to be the size of sand and finer grains.

When storm runoff washes this debris off pavement and carries it away, we encounter the first stage, suspension: the debris floats with the current and its particles slowly begin their process of settling, if they can settle at all. The debris blocks out light, making the water turbid and giving it a dirty or cloudy appearance.

With enough clouding, light has a hard time reaching the bottom, ultimately restricting solar energy needed by plants and other bottom dwelling organisms (benthic life). This leads to a major problem, as the lack of light reduces plant and benthic critter production, which limits a major primary food source.

Less light also means less photosynthesis, which supplies a portion of the dissolved oxygen needed for “breathing” underwater — hence, less overall oxygen concentrations. But that problem is compounded by aquatic life having to breath dirty water, which is like us trying to breath in smog-ridden air. It’s choking and leads to development problems, higher mortality, and long-term population risks.

Stage two begins when this grit settles out and begins changing the composition of the floor. Much like snow, it’s benign in small amounts, but continued accumulation results in dramatically different ground cover and changes the offerings of the landscape. As the fallout covers the natural floor, it begins to suffocate habitat, nesting spots, and food sources, ultimately removing overall livability.

Often, the result we see is a loss of sensitive species (think trout or mussels), cascading to altering the populations of creatures interacting with them, and so beginning the unbalancing act of the aquatic and shoreland community.

Additionally, accumulations do not need to blanket the floor to cause issues, as the curbside debris acts like a magnet in picking up urban contaminants and concentrating them in fallout zones. This results in heavy metals, chemicals, and persistent bioaccumulative toxins contaminating anything nearby and possibly downstream.

There is a lot I tried to cover in this short article, so head over to our site, carltonswcd.org, to rad about our Adopt a Drain program and more!