Friends of the Poudre Winter/Spring 2001 Newsletter
Our interest in water quality has taken one other form. For the past sixteen months we have been working with environmental engineering students from CSU and others to assess water quality monitoring in the basin. We have been fortunate to have the help of a professional water quality engineer on the faculty of the University of Idaho (Fritz Fiedler) and the help of a data base expert (Michael Cullerton) in this effort. We are especially grateful to New Belgium Brewery for a $2, 000 grant to help with funding student efforts on the project.
Our immediate goal is to assess what has happened in the past with water quality monitoring on the Poudre. Unfortunately, most monitoring is done for compliance with pollution discharge permits. Very little is done to determine the overall health of the river or is coordinated with any other efforts in the watershed. As a result a lot of the data collected does not relate to the larger picture in any useable way. Samples are taken at a variety of points using various methods and different sets of water quality indicators. We are working to survey and catalog this data so that questions can be asked about what data is missing. In the future we hope to put the data that is relevant into an EPA website so that it is more readily accessible. The final step in the process is to get stakeholders to invest in a basin wide water quality monitoring system. Such a system and the data that it generates would help us to make sensible decisions about water quality and to act in an efficient and effective way to improve water quality in the river.