Water Quality Update

This just in from Jennifer Epstein, of Riverkeeper:
“Results from our 8/29 Wallkill River water quality testing are on the Riverkeeper website. You can see them here: http://www.riverkeeper.org/…/citi…/wallkill-river-watershed/.

In other mid- and upper-Hudson tributary watersheds where we sample, including the Rondout Creek, we observed notably good water quality on our late August sampling days. In the Wallkill River watershed, the picture was less clear.

At the Springtown Road boat launch and each of the three sampling sites downstream, the 8/29 Entero count was substantially less than the site’s geometric mean (a long-term, weighted average). From Montgomery to Goshen, the opposite was true. However, despite being elevated, most counts in that stretch of river were still well below the maximum on record. This shows that pollution sources are site-specific, and that the importance of different sources varies throughout the watershed.

Our next sampling date is September 26.”

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