Stream Sampling

We have had a very dry rainy season, but it is finally raining. It has rained a couple of times in the last six weeks, but never on the days that we are allowed to bring water samples to the DEQ lab.

I finally got some samples today and hopefully the rest of the Stream Team will be able to get a few over the next few days. (Thank you to Scott and Bree, who both collected samples last week)

I chose to sample down at Lao Lao today. Man, was it raining hard.

In some places the water ran along the side of the road, but in many places the road was just completey covered in running water. About half of the road leading down to the beach was underwater and the entire stretch of road between stream 2 and stream 3 was a torrent of fast moving mocha colored water. Gross.

All of the streams, which are normally dry, had running water. The two photos above are of our sampling site for Stream 1. Notice how high the water reads.

This photo was taken about halfway between stream 1 and stream 2. We don't have this marked off as stream, but that didn't stop the water from running over the road here.

I took three short videos of the water running in Stream 1,2, and 3. Here is a video of Stream 1, which drains the road leading down to the beach:



Notice the beautiful milky mocha color of the stream water.

Here is a video of Stream 2:



Stream 2 was dumping out onto the road. Some of the water was going over the road and back into the stream, but about 80% of the water kept on flowing down the road. It ran along the road like this for about 300 meters.

Here is a video of Stream 3:



When we were mapping potential sampling sites a few months ago, we couldn't follow the path of the flow of water. Well, today I found it. It goes right over the road.

Hopefully it will continue raining Sunday-Tuesday over the next several months. We'll continue to gather data and I'll report on it as it comes in. In the meantime you can read our QAPP.

Click HERE to read our Quality Assurance Project Plan