Project Stream Clean - #ProtectCleanWater

By Will Fadely, Baltimore Organizer - Follow Will on Twitter: @TrillChillWill

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Over the past few decades, Earth Day has become Earth Week. It’s a time for people and communities to connect with each other to take a stand for our environment and water. Earth Week and Earth Month give people a chance to focus finding solutions to everyday environmental problems – like the illegal dumping of trash into our creeks.  Unfortunately, illegal dumping is rampant in the Huntington community. But there are people who want to stop it and protect their creeks. “People are always dumping back here, regardless of the time of day,” says Angelica Carter, community member. “We just want our stream to be clean and we want to protect clean water.” According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as a result of illegal dumping upstream, the local stream in Huntington is contaminated with Chlorides, Total suspended solids (TSS), and other toxins. And when Clean Water staff surveyed the site, we didn’t need EPA data to tell us this stream was infected and needed help. So we got together with the Huntington Community Association and came up with a plan. So, in late February we began planning a stream clean day to help stem the tide of public dumping in the neighborhood. We rallied our troops – reaching out to Towson University and partnering with The Big Event. The Big Event is Towson’s largest day of community service. Towson students responded to the call and more 30 signed up for the big stream clean.  Likewise, The Huntington Community Association canvassed their community and gathered over a dozen community volunteers.

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The big day was Saturday, April 26, 2014 - Clean Water, Towson’s Big Event volunteers, and the local community members came together on the Alter Street bridge to welcome Earth Day and to protect clean water. After introductions, more than 50 volunteers got to work. Together, students, Clean Water staff and the community all joined in to clean up the local stream – and have some fun! After 3 hours in the mud, our group had worked its way down 1 mile of stream bank. We  gathered enough tires for 3 cars, found a lawn mower, a ceramic bathtub, pool liners and rusted cable lines. We cleaned up numerous bikes, filled 100 bags of trash, loaded it all onto two large dump trucks and took it to be sorted, and recycled.  It was a great day! “We can’t tell you how much this means to us,” said Barbara Peters, President, HCA. “You all are really angels for helping us.” Grateful and successful on this day the fight for clean water extends far beyond Earth Day events and Ms. Pewter’s local stream.

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There is still much to be done. The local stream running through the Huntington community represents only one of hundreds of Maryland small streams, which lost protections because of policy decisions by the Bush administration more than a decade ago.  Since then developers and other large and small polluters have allowed to discharge, dump and endanger our waterways, often without consequence.  Ms. Carter’s fight for clean water extends beyond her local stream. Recently however, EPA proposed a rule to restore protections to over a half of all stream miles in the U.S. - streams that feed the drinking water for more than 117 million Americans. The unnamed stream we helped to clean would be one of the streams that will be protected under the new EPA rule.  Many of these streams provide critical habitat for fish and other aquatic life and feed into rivers, lakes and bays. There is no doubt that new EPA rule, will protect our community’s drinking water, environment and public health. I hope that you’ll stand wit the Huntington Community Association, the students from TU’s Big Event, and Clean Water to #ProtectCleanWater - click here.