Use of a Volunteer Monitoring Program to Assess Water Quality in a TMDL Watershed Utilized for Recreational Use, Pickens County, South Carolina

Municipalities, regulatory agencies, and resource advocacy organizations are often tasked with the enormous responsibility of monitoring water quality and implementing management strategies for vast areas within their jurisdictions. A potential means for addressing the resulting sampling shortfall is the use of volunteer monitoring programs. The project reported herein demonstrates the use of QA/QC protocols developed by Georgia Adopt-aStream (AAS) to monitor water quality issues for Twelve Mile Creek located in Pickens County, SC. The Twelve Mile watershed has a storied past as a U.S. EPA Superfund site due to industrial PCB contamination. Recent mitigation efforts involving the removal of two concrete dams have resulted in the creation of a nearly two-mile section of whitewater which is used by the local paddling community and is being marketed as a recreational destination. However, the Twelve Mile watershed also has a TMDL Implementation Plan in place due to chronic impairment from fecal coliform bacteria. Using sampling and monitoring methods developed by AAS, this project determined that E. coli levels increase significantly during high-flow discharges due to storm events and there were no significant differences in E. coli concentrations among sites located along a longitudinal gradient following the proposed Twelve Mile Creek Blueway. Ironically, the popularity of this area for paddling increases during periods of high discharge, thus recreational users are likely exposed to unhealthy levels of bacteria under these “desirable” conditions. Volunteer monitoring programs like AAS exhibit tremendous potential for gathering water quality data that may not be possible if left solely up to other stakeholders. Appropriately managed volunteer monitoring programs have the capability to increase the resolution, reach, and efficiency of existing monitoring programs and serve to benefit a variety of stakeholders. INTRODUCTION The Clean Water Act of 1972, and its numerous revisions, attempts to address surface water pollution from a variety of directions including permitting and monitoring at federal, state, and local levels. However, efforts of regulatory agencies are limited in that it is impossible to monitor each and every waterway, tributary, and headwater stream in a given watershed. One way to address this monitoring shortfall is to make use of volunteer water quality monitoring programs (Bonney et al., 2009; Cohn, 2008; Conrad & Hilchey, 2011; Overdevest et al., 2004; Silvertown, 2009). Effective volunter water quality monitoring programs are desirable in that they have the potential to inexpensively and efficiently gather large amounts of data with a higher frequency and over a larger geographic area than regulatory agencies are able to do. As an example, the Adopt-a-Stream Foundation was established in 1985 with the goal of encouraging water quality awareness by promoting watershed education and engaging citizens in a volunteer monitoring program utilizing their local waterways. Specifically, Georgia Adopt-a-Stream (hereto after referred to as AAS), funded through a federal 319(h) grant and operated through the Georgia Environmental Protection Division, has developed a robust program consisting of manuals, training, and network support and has become a model for volunteer water quality monitoring programs in the southeast (AAS, 2014). Volunteers are trained using quality assurance/quality control (QA/QC) protocols for measuring biological, chemical, and physical parameters and must obtain certification via practical and written exams in order to become a “QA/QC volunteer.” This designation enables volunteers to enter data into an online AAS database which, in turn, can be accessed by a variety of entities including universities, environmental groups, and regulatory agencies for the purpose of monitoring the health of local waterways. The project described here demonstrates the ability of AAS protocols to gather useful, quantitative data which can be used for compiling baseline water quality information and addressing research questions. Water Policy and Planning Track Journal of South Carolina Water Resources Volume 2, Issue 1, Page 11-15, 2015