"What Do You Know About Water Quality?"

The title of today's blog was the rather belligerent question that came from a friend when I told him that I would be part of a stream team testing our Queset Brook as part of a larger project to monitor the Taunton River watershed. I actually know a fair amount since sporadic water testing has taken place at the NRT since the 1970s, and I did a summary report for them when I was on the Board of Directors.

It's an important topic and admittedly I knew next to nothing when I started. Why is the topic important? Queset Brook, really the subsurface flow that goes along with the brook, is the major source of water for our largest well. Water quality from that well is very good to excellent, but as older residents know we never used to have to heavily chlorinate our water, something we occasionally have to do now especially after very heavy rain events. The little summaries of water quality we get from the water department is only a tiny fraction of the raw data that flows into the department from their extensive state mandated quality control program, but that data only looks at water at the well head after it's passed through nature's generally effective filtration system and that is much, much better than any surface water.

But what about the water in the stream before it is filtered? Well, it depends. The short answer is that old septic systems in North Easton can overflow, perhaps with no surface indications, during heavy rain events and extensively pollute the Queset from Shovel Shop Pond downstream to the point where you shouldn't wade in it. On most days, however, water quality is still pretty good. Not pure mountain stream good, but good for a stream with so many people living nearby.

How do we know this? There are two kinds of water testing. The project I'm involved in is chemical testing. Another option is a complex indexing of plant and animal life in the stream. The records at Sheep Pasture include both types. Nonchemical testing depends on the fact that some macroinvertebrates (creepy crawlies big enough to see without a microscope) don't like polluted water. By that test the Queset is doing pretty well.

The Taunton River Watershed Alliance has a contract to use volunteers to collect water samples that will be chemically tested by professionals. My stream team includes Carrie and Andrew from Bridgewater, and we are collecting a monthly sample on the Queset in Easton and on the Town River in Bridgewater. Once a month we go to our stream at a specific time and collect a big bucket of water from the fastest flowing part of our stream. Water is checked for color, smell, and temperature before it is divided into bags and bottles. The water yesterday was at 10 degrees Celsius about 50 degrees Fahrenheit which explains why I haven't caught any fish yet this season. The water was a light yellow color from the decaying oak leaves and iron in the water,  and it was odor free.

The bags, specially designed sterile plastic, collected the water for fecal coliform tests. That's an indirect measure of the potential poop in the water although coliform bacteria are found in throughout the environment. It's a cheap and effective alternative to the more specific test for enterococcus bacteria that is found in mammalian guts. A big bottle of water was collected to measure the amount of suspended solids in the water while two smaller bottles were filled to measure nitrogen and phosphorus, two mineral measures of pollution. The two most complex things the stream team is responsible for are the tests for dissolved oxygen and salinity. The Taunton River is very special in that salt water from the Atlantic pushes far up the river on a daily basis. At the very top of the watershed on the Queset there is no chance of a high salt reading unless road salt washes into the stream, but the hydrometer used for the test is hard to read and the salinity has to be determined from a chart that uses the hydrometer results and the water temperature to figure out salinity. Dissolved oxygen is also finicky. The colder the water and the more turbulent the surface, the more oxygen for animals like fish to breathe. Some parts of the Queset get so warm and slow in the late summer that there is not enough oxygen to support fish. Any bubble in the jar or excessive jiggling of the bottle or even improperly dropping the seal into the bottle can influence the test. Chemicals are then added, the bottle sealed and then shaken 25 times.

Yesterday, the first big challenge was not falling in the Queset since the test fell afoul of the change to Daylight Savings Time and had to be done in the early morning gloom. A second challenge was not getting a visit from the police wondering what we were doing! By the time we got to the Town River the sun was up, and a local husband and wife walking their dogs gave the time a lot of encouragement. They were concerned about local farm runoff into the stream. We finally finished and Andrew and Carrie headed for Taunton with our samples. The testing company is based at the Taunton Sewer Treatment plant. We'll appear at our test sight once again on the second Tuesday in April.