Watershed woes

Sheila Murphy wades into Fourmile Creek, her waist-high beige waders keeping her submerged legs dry. She rinses a plastic container out in the creek, then takes a sample. At the creek bed, she tests the water’s pH and temperature, baseline measures for the health of the stream. Her colleague, Jeff Writer, pulls another testing device out of the water downstream and checks conductivity — the total amount of dissolved ions in the water.

Murphy and Writer, both hydrologists with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), have been studying Fourmile Creek since the first rainfall after the Fourmile Fire, working to better understand the fire’s effects on the stream ecology.

Researchers, public health officials and managers of downstream watersheds have been monitoring the water quality of streams throughout the burn area and how they might be affected by an increase in sediment, plant matter and even heavy minerals.

On Oct. 10, just a month after the fire, a multidisciplinary, multi-agency team filed the Fourmile Emergency Stabilization Burned Area Report, which declared the area a watershed emergency because of the threats to human life and safety, roads and downstream water supplies. While officials and researchers say the risk is low to moderate, they also admit there are a lot of unknowns at this point and that a severe rainstorm could have a major effect on water quality.

“The interesting thing about the Fourmile Creek watershed is historically it was a major mining area,” Murphy says. “So there are quite a number of mine tailings piles and waste rock in the watershed that, without the trees around and grass and shrubs to protect those piles, there’s a concern that if there was a really big rainstorm or something it could wash a lot of metals that are typically in higher amounts in tailings pilings into the creek, which would also be a problem for drinking water issues and for aquatic life in the stream.”

When she and Writer checked water quality during the first rainstorm after the fire, it showed a pulse in conductants — dissolved matter in the water including organic carbon, or plant matter, and nitrates. They try to sample during every storm.

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