Flint River Watershed Coalition Monitoring

Flint River

By Rebecca Fedewa

Rebecca Fedewa is director of the flint river watershed Coalition. More information about the coalition can be found at www.flintriver.org.

This is a time of significant hardship for Flint residents. Lead contamination in the city’s drinking water supply has many questioning the quality and health of the Flint River.

We at the Flint River Watershed Coalition share residents’ dismay at the condition of their municipal water and the failure of the governmental agencies entrusted with protecting their health and safety.

Our message to the world is simple: It’s not the river.

A healthy Ecosystem The Flint River is a vibrant ecosystem that supports a growing population of species such as eagles and ospreys. Recreational opportunities in and along the Flint River are abundant, and we see higher numbers of users every year. Local support for the protection, preservation, and improvement of the river has never been stronger.

Yet some news reports during the lead-in-water crisis routinely refer “the highly corrosive Flint River” or “the river serves as an industrial sewer.” Those characterizations simply are not accurate.

Treating river water for drinking water is very different from treating water from large, continuous bodies of surface freshwater, such as Lake Huron.

Rivers generally contain a greater — and often varying —

concentration of organic materials, such as decaying leaves and fish waste. These are naturally-occurring materials found in healthy aquatic ecosystems.

Our data show the Flint River is a strong aquatic ecosystem.

Faulty Infrastructure

It was not the quality of the Flint River that caused the high levels of bacteria and TTHM, the lead crisis and the possible link to the Legionnaires outbreak.

It was improper treatment of the water, rather than the health of the river itself, that sparked the issues with Flint’s drinking water.

The Flint River Watershed Coalition will continue our efforts to protect,

preserve and improve our beautiful Flint River. We hope you join us.

In the near term, we will continue testing the river on a regular basis to definitively demonstrate the river’s water quality, particularly in regard to chloride/conductivity and lead.

The coalition also has made a donation to the Community Foundation of Greater Flint’s

Child Health & Development Fund to support their important work to protect our city’s most vulnerable citizens.

You, too, can help. Participate in  our monitoring program this spring, donate to help us run additional tests and show your support of the river on social media #itsnottheriver).

Flint River Watershed Coalition Monitoring

The Flint River Watershed Coalition monitors 35 sites twice a year. Since monitoring began in 1999, the ecosystem’s scores have improved from fair to good and excellent.

Benthic testing (testing at the bottom of a body of water) shows that 25 of the monitoring sites have multiple “pollution intolerant” species of macroinvertebrates, which could not survive without high water quality and an excellent aquatic habitat.

Recent conductivity testing of untreated river water (as a surrogate for corrosiveness) shows it is very nearly the level for treated drinking water

and many thousand times less than sea water.

Recent tests of the river in three locations, including downstream of the wastewater treatment plant, show no indication of lead in the river itself. The lead that is Flint’s municipal system also is not being found in the river in detectable amounts.

More information about the coalition’s test results is available at www.flintriver.org
#itsnottheriver #FlintFWD