"Water is the driving force of all nature."
-- Leonardo da Vinci
[LINESPACE]
Since 2005, the Environmental Protection Agency has declared each August as National Water Quality Month, so perhaps we should pause for an august moment and quiz ourselves about water.
Do you know where your water comes from (other than out of the faucet), how much is available and how clean it is? Do you know what watershed you live in or, for that matter, what a watershed is?
Simply defined, a watershed is a land area over which water drains and collects into creeks and joins rivers making their way into bays, lakes, marshes, reservoirs and, eventually, the ocean. If the land can hold onto its water, seeping and filtering it down into underground aquifers, then humans can tap into it as a water supply from natural springs or from drilled wells.
Major parts of Fayetteville, Springdale, Rogers and south Bentonville lie in the Illinois River watershed close to its eastern-most rim. This westward drainage basin extends into Oklahoma, covering slightly more area there than in Arkansas, as it flows southward to include Tenkiller Lake. Interestingly, the river's spring-fed headwaters are near Hogeye, just southwest of Fayetteville. The watershed straddles the two states and covers 1,700 square miles with over 1,000 miles of streams and is home to several hundred thousand people. It's fun to see where your address sits in the watershed. Find out at: https://watersheds.cast.uark.edu/find_your_watershed.html
Humans, realizing the multiple uses and needs for water, are still learning how we treat or mistreat this precious resource. In the hope of preventing its waste, loss or contamination, local governments and citizen organizations have created some protection and education strategies. One of those non-profits is the Illinois River Watershed Partnership, a mouthful of a name usually shortened to IRWP. If you want to know about your water in Northwest Arkansas, their website is a good place to start for educational materials, events, and general information. Their vision for this river is for it to be restored and sustained as "a fully functioning ecosystem, where ecological protection, conservation, and economically productive uses" can support the whole system.
That's a tall order for our little corner of the world. If Benton and Washington counties double in population by 2045 to at least a million residents, as projected by the Arkansas Economic Development Institute at the University of Arkansas, our two major watersheds will be pressured by development even more. (The Beaver Lake-White River watershed borders on the east.) Creating policies in our region about storm water management and protection of waterways and forested areas will translate into better water quality and water supply.
IRWP is an organization of people interested in protecting this watershed, but is not a regulatory or enforcement entity. Instead they share information, and recently held storm water discussions about the challenges that urbanization imposes on water along with some possible solutions.
Rapidly flooding streams erode stream banks sending sediment and phosphorus down river, an estimated loss of productive land in the watershed averaging 40 acres a year. The partnership reports show that "approximately 38% of stream banks are losing at least one foot per year." That's a figure that "may impact the economic development potential of Northwest Arkansas as we expand westward."
Stream bank erosion contributes twice the amount of phosphorous into the watershed as the region's five largest wastewater facilities. Phosphorous originating from Arkansas sources has long been the curse of our neighboring state's water quality in the Illinois, an Oklahoma Scenic River that state values for tourism and recreation just as we do Arkansas' Buffalo River.
In continuing efforts to limit the pollutant, IRWP has created various programs. One is Blue Neighborhoods, "which will identify key challenges on a neighborhood scale and then promote low impact practices that best solve the problem(s)." Another program, Blue Cities, "will tailor education to help elected officials and staff understand how humans impact the land, how the land impacts the water, and what are the recommended best practices to neutralize the addition of impervious surfaces as we develop our region."
Their IRWP.org website has posted the Stormwater Assessment and Discussion program they recently held, which I think should be required viewing for all planning departments, commissions, and city and state government decision-makers. Fortunately, some of those folks did attend. We of the public also need all the education we can get on water issues in order to speak out for the prevention of irreversible damage that uncontrolled growth will do to our water quality as our population continues exploding.