News Where You Live
By Jeffery Robichaud
Technology and communication have evolved over the past decade to provide consumers with experiences that are personally tailored to them. Facebook feeds can be set to only show items from those folks and groups that interest you. Twitter hashtags, RSS Feeds, Tumblr and Blog feeds all can be tweaked to allow you to consume what you want, when you want it. Google news even uses algorithms based on your history and web searches to share news it thinks you will be interested in reading, while your sibling on the other side of the country might see a whole different set of items based on their own unique web-footprint.
At EPA, part of our responsibility is sharing messages about important items, whether they be public meetings, results of enforcement activities, outreach events, or grant awards. Traditionally these are shared via news release like last week’s Earth Day event in Kansas City (you can visit EPA’s news room here).
We also have our own Region 7 specific newsroom, however we have taken it one step further. Even though our Region only consists of four States, it stretches over 1,100 miles from the Oglala National Grassland in northwest Nebraska to the Bootheel of southeast Missouri, a nearly 20-hour drive. Environmental News related to Garden City, Kansas might not be as germane to folks living in Decorah Iowa (and vice versa). So several years ago our Public Affairs and GIS folks got together to develop a quick and dirty web map called News Where You Live that allows citizens to view news releases based on geography, not just date, or category. It is starting to show its age a bit given all of the new advances in web mapping, but it still does its job well reinforcing that old adage, if it ain’t broke don’t try to fix it.
So check us out. And remember you can add the Big Blue Thread’s RSS Feed to get your daily dose (well more like twice a week) of environmental information from the heartland.
Jeffery Robichaud is a second generation EPA scientist who has worked for the Agency since 1998. He currently serves as Deputy Director of EPA Region 7′s Environmental Services Division. His 15 minutes of fame may be over with his face already having graced newsprint from coverage of a first grade production of ‘Stone Soup’.
Editor's Note: The opinions expressed in Greenversations are those of the author. They do not reflect EPA policy, endorsement, or action, and EPA does not verify the accuracy or science of the contents of the blog.
NEPAssist: One of EPA’s Newest Geospatial Tools
By Amber Tucker
Hi all, this is my first attempt at the blogging world, so please bear with me. I initially started out intending to major in Journalism so maybe this won’t be as mighty of a feat as I’ve imagined it to be. Even though I still do enjoy journaling in my personal time, my passion for career choice took a turn in my second semester of college. It was in a requisite biology course that I took greater notice of and fell in love with wildlife, nature, and the great outdoors. This led to a change in majors to Environmental Science which in turn, led me to the most amazing workplace I never dreamt I would get to be a part of; EPA. Since day one, I’ve never stopped learning, and along the way, I’ve had the pleasure of being exposed to and able to utilize some of the most progressive scientific advances.
I think we can all agree that technology is pretty amazing these days; through the remarkable technology of public GIS platforms like Google Earth, you have the ability to essentially tour the world from the comfort of your own living room. In the words of the late, great Dr. Seuss…”Oh the places you’ll go.” Well, if you’re like me, with the world at your fingertips and the possibilities endless, the first place you decide to visit…an aerial view of your own home. Exotic destination, no doubt. However, there’s certainly some value in checking out your own neighborhood from a different point of view. It’s good to know what all encompasses your surrounding areas. You may discover things you never knew about the places you see every day.
EPA has rolled out some new technology that allows you to do just that; spatially discover the world around you, from an environmental perspective. Previously only accessible to EPA employees and contractors, NEPAssist is now available to everyone wanting to take a look at environmental factors and conditions in any given area throughout the country. A web-based mapping tool, NEPAssist is designed to help promote collaboration and early involvement in the NEPA process by allowing the user to raise and identify important environmental issues at the earliest stages of project development.
The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1970 requires all federal agencies to incorporate environmental considerations in their planning and decision-making through a systematic interdisciplinary process. NEPAssist is designed to help promote collaboration and early involvement in the NEPA process by raising important environmental issues at the primary stages of project development. The mapping tool can be used by Federal agencies to identify alternative project locations, to avoid and minimize impacts, as well as identify potential mitigation areas. It’s a tool that can also help citizens to be aware of and involved in environmental decisions that affect their community.
NEPAssist draws information from publicly available federal, state, and local datasets, allowing NEPA practitioners, stakeholders and the public to view information about environmental conditions within the area of a proposed project quickly and easily at early stages of project development. There’s information on regulated facilities, demographics, water features, historic places, threatened & endangered species, wetlands, and so much more! You can trust me on this, or you can check it out for yourself (even though I assure you I’m trustworthy, I’d go with the latter).
The thought behind this is that NEPAssist could serve as an essential “one-stop shop” to garner environmental information for your desired vicinity. NEPAssist also houses EJView data, formerly known as the Environmental Justice Geographic Assessment Tool, which is a mapping tool that allows users to create maps and generate detailed reports based on the geographic areas and data sets they choose. Similar to the likes of Google Maps or Bing Maps, NEPAssist offers a variety of viewing options; Road, Aerial, and in some of the more urban areas, Birds Eye view. I have to admit, the clarity and close-up image that Birds Eye view affords simultaneously amazes and freaks me out a little; I think I can see my dad’s pickup truck parked in my driveway!
A really cool feature of NEPAssist is the ability for you to define an area and then generate a detailed environmental report for that area. Using this tool, you can draw a point, line, area, or rectangle. You can also specify a buffer area radius for which the report will be generated. Draw your desired area, hit the NEPAssist Report button, and voila! You have yourself an environmental snapshot report. Information in the report will be displayed as a series of questions with yes or no answers based on the location of your project area. Click on a hyperlinked question to view the data source and associated metadata. All of this data, historical and current, available to you with just the push of a button.
This is the same primary and first-line tool we at EPA use to evaluate projects and generate comments. To access this tool and to learn more about NEPAssist and how it can aid you in your NEPA work, please visit the public NEPAssist website at http://www.epa.gov/compliance/nepa/nepassist-mapping.html. Here you will also find a link to a NEPAssist Demonstration Webinar, as well as other NEPAssist user resources. EPA is continually striving to enhance the NEPAssist tool to facilitate more efficient and effective federal environmental reviews and project planning.
Pretty neat, right? I’m all about making well-informed decisions and I appreciate that NEPAssist allows me to become more aware of the environmental conditions and features in my backyard, my neighborhood, my community, my state, and my nation. Today, my cul-de-sac. Tomorrow, the world! Check out our NEPAssist page and create your own environmental knowledge quest.
Amber Tucker is an Environmental Scientist who serves as a NEPA reviewer for EPA Region 7. She is a graduate of Haskell University and serves as Region 7′s Special Emphasis Program Manager for Native American Employment Programs.
Editor's Note: The opinions expressed in Greenversations are those of the author. They do not reflect EPA policy, endorsement, or action, and EPA does not verify the accuracy or science of the contents of the blog.
Earth Day and the Next Generation
By Gabrielle Thompson
Do you know how many people observe our great earth on Earth Day? According to the Earth Day Network 
(http://www.earthday.org/2013/about.html), more than one billion people participate in Earth Day activities. That is a very significant number considering that when I was a school girl growing up in small-town, Alabama in the 1970’s, I had never heard of Earth Day; not to mention Earth Day activities. What was that? Thank goodness for the growing support of environmental awareness. Today, school children from around the world celebrate Earth Day with activities varying from one day to sometimes a week.
Stan Walker (a colleague of mine shown to the right) and I were invited to Delaware Ridge Elementary School, in Kansas City, Kansas earlier this year to share our thoughts on environmental protection. What can be more fun than 3 classrooms of happy go-lucky fourth graders? The time went by quickly as Stan and I treated them to our presentation. Who doesn’t love a PowerPoint presentation? That’s a rhetorical question.
Anyway, we tried to keep it light and informative. I begin by giving some interesting tidbits about EPA and how we protect our health by ensuring our air, water, and soil/land are safe. The kids really liked many of the examples I shared of Region 7’s commitment to the environment especially those about our assisting with Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, Joplin after the tornado, and the Gulf after the oil spill.
Stan followed up with concrete examples of Region 7’s Superfund activities by showing how seemingly impossible and abandoned residential areas can be transformed into beautiful living areas for all to enjoy in our own backyards (before and after shots below). He stressed the importance of different stakeholders (federal, state, city and the community) working collaboratively to make change happen.
Gabrielle Thompson is an environmental scientist in EPA’s Environmental Services Division (ENSV) and has worked at EPA for 5 years. She is single and loves to cook, zumba and travel.
Editor's Note: The opinions expressed in Greenversations are those of the author. They do not reflect EPA policy, endorsement, or action, and EPA does not verify the accuracy or science of the contents of the blog.
Happy 43rd
By Jeffery Robichaud
I hope everyone had the opportunity to enjoy the 22nd of April in whatever fashion they saw fit. The kids and I went for a bike ride Sunday on the new trail along our local stream enjoying the sun and the fresh air. As much as I had hoped to spend the 22nd outside, this is an incredibly busy week in the office. However, I couldn’t go through Earth Day without doing something, even if it was only a small gesture.
There is a unique website called whatwasthere.com which allows the public to upload pictures taken in the past (a quick screen shot is below). You can upload photographs and orient them on a map to give the public a sense of now and then.
I uploaded the picture below to the left, which was taken sometime around the first birthday of Earth Day. It was found in the September, 1971 issue of National Geographic, and depicts a hog carcass floating in the Kansas River. Over 40 years ago this was typical of waters in metropolitan areas throughout the United States, with poor water quality the norm, and waters that were neither fishable nor swimmable. Below to the right is a shot of me and my colleagues at the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas Rivers not too long after Earth Day’s 39th birthday. We were assisting our partners at Missouri River Relief in cleaning up trash along the banks of the Kansas River.
My contribution this Earth Day are these two photos, a reminder that tremendous progress has been made in the years since our first Earth Day (and the birth of the Environmental Protection Agency), and a reminder that there is still work to do for those of us who care. If you have shots that chronicle the improvement from our first Earth Day, upload them to whatwasthere.com or share them below.
Jeffery Robichaud is a second generation EPA scientist who has worked for the Agency since 1998. He currently serves as Deputy Director of EPA Region 7′s Environmental Services Division. He encourages everyone to treat everyday like its Earth Day.
Editor's Note: The opinions expressed in Greenversations are those of the author. They do not reflect EPA policy, endorsement, or action, and EPA does not verify the accuracy or science of the contents of the blog.
Excellent Projects – Students Excelling
By Harvey Fries and Alisha Claycamp
The 62nd Greater Kansas City Science and Engineering Fair Intermediate Level Environmental and Renewable Energy projects were excellent. Chemists from Region 7 USEPA Science and Technology Center, Kansas City, Kansas awarded the agency’s first place in this category to a team from Lakewood Middle School, Overland Park, KS. Team members from left to right in the picture are Faduma Jarik, Hollis Haby, and Katherine Krishna.
Their project title was “The Effect of Hydrophobic Materials Resolving Freshwater Oil Spills”. Their abstract:
Many freshwater oil spills are ruining our waters. They are more common than saltwater oil spills and are causing more damage. We thought that hydrophobic materials would soak up the oil and it is hypothesized that: the hydrophobic sand will soak up the most oil in our freshwater oil spill simulation.
Our procedure was to gather all the materials and put 1 cup of water and half a cup of oil in a beaker, then put in half a cup of one of the 4 hydrophobic materials (hydrophobic sand, wax , lotus leaves, Fibertect) in the simulation. Wait 15 minutes. Record the results of how much oil was soaked up by the material. Repeat for 2 more trials and repeat again for the other three materials. Unlike the hypothesis stated above, the Fibertect soaked up the most oil, lotus leaves soaked up the oil second best, wax soaked it up third best, and the hydrophobic sand soaked up the least oil. Therefore, our results do not support the hypothesis. We think it happened this way because the Fibertect has more layers than any other material we tested. The hydrophobic sand was very thin unlike the other materials and couldn’t hold much oil.Hollis Haby is a sixth grader at Lakewood Middle School in Overland Park, KS. She lives with her parents, brother, two cats, and one dog. Hollis’ favorite activities are playing softball and volleyball. Her future plans are to be a middle school reading teacher.
Faduma Jarik is a sixth grader at Lakewood Middle School in Overland Park, KS. She lives with her parents, brother, sister, and step-brother. Faduma’s favorite activities are playing on her i-Pod and being outside. Her future plans are to be a writer in the professional world.
Katherine Krishna is a sixth grader at Lakewood Middle School in Overland Park, KS. She lives with her parents and brother. Katherine’s favorite activities are playing soccer and reading. Her future plans are to become an investment banker and to be rich.
Second place went to a team from Martin City Elementary, Kansas City, MO. Team members were Rosa Basurto-Reyes and Iridian Zurita-Lopez. Their project was titled “Effects of Acids & Bases on Plants”.
Third place in this category went to a team from St. Patrick School in Kansas City, MO. Team members were Chance Wagner and Peter Pellumbi. Their project was titled “Comparing Electrical Usage and Cost of Three Different 60 Watt Light Bulbs.
You can also check out the High School and Middle School winners. We had a really difficult time deciding on our top three science projects, a testament to how hard each of the students had worked.Maybe someday we will be lucky enough to have some of these bright kids come to work for EPA. Until then we can probably count on many more years of great projects from these budding scientists.
Harvey Fries and Alisha Claycamp are chemists with the Chemical Analysis and Response Branch of the Environmental Services Division, located at EPA Region 7′s Science and Technology Center in Kansas City, Kansas.
Editor's Note: The opinions expressed in Greenversations are those of the author. They do not reflect EPA policy, endorsement, or action, and EPA does not verify the accuracy or science of the contents of the blog.
MR…
By Jeffery Robichaud
I often get confused by our use of acronyms in the federal government, but there are a particular few that always trip me up, namely those that begin with MR, and we have a lot of them here in the Region (what with both the Missouri River and Mississippi River). For whatever reason when I hear too many MRs (read that as mis-ters) I am immediately transported back to the 80s and the song ‘Kyrie’ (by you guessed it Mr. Mister…no doubt my brain playing some backwards cruel mnemonic trick).
One of my posts six months ago, dealt with a website run by the United States Geological Survey that has wonderful maps created in the late 1800’s by the MRC, Missouri River Commission. At the time I noted the presence of another website that allowed the maps to be displayed without needing to download them. Unfortunately at the time it was down for maintenance, but as luck would have it, I was looking through old posts and came across this loose thread (in the Big Blue Thread). I checked and the MRRP mapping app is up and running.
The MRRP, Missouri River Recovery Program, is administered by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps), and exists to implement actions to accomplish Missouri River ecosystem recovery goals in coordination and collaboration with agency partners and stakeholders. The Corps has put together a short video describing the mission and activities of the Recovery Program.
There is a quite a bit of information to see and learn about on the web site including:
- The US Fish and Wildlife’s Biological Opinion pursuant to the Corps consultation under Section 7 of the Endangered Species Act (just highlighted in a recent blog);
- The MRRIC (the Missouri River Recovery Implementation Committee) authorized by Congress to make recommendations and provide guidance on a study of the Missouri River and its tributaries known as MRERP (the Missouri River Ecosystem Recovery Plan) and activities in the existing MRRP; and
- A link to MRWIP (the Missouri River Water Information Portal) a collaborative effort by the Five USGS Central Region Water Science Centers (Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and South Dakota), in cooperation with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the USGS Biological Resources Discipline, to collect and interpret data as part of the Missouri River Recovery Program.
If you’re not humming ‘Broken Wings’ by now (Mr. Mister’s other big hit) then please make sure to check out the historical mapping application that MRRP has put together. It does a great job of allowing you to look at historic landcover within the floodplain, and see what the course of the river used to look like over 130 years ago.
Jeffery Robichaud is a second generation EPA scientist who has worked for the Agency since 1998. He currently serves as Deputy Director of EPA Region 7′s Environmental Services Division. He crosses one MR every day on his way to and from work. He is not a Mr. Mister fan, but his favorite one hit wonders from the 80s are Flock of Seagulls and Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock.
Editor's Note: The opinions expressed in Greenversations are those of the author. They do not reflect EPA policy, endorsement, or action, and EPA does not verify the accuracy or science of the contents of the blog.
Geoplatform with EPA’s GIO
By Casey J. McLaughlin
Just like the world, the Federal government is a big place with a geography all of its own and working between agencies can sometimes feel like working with another country! I’ve been working for and in the government for going on 10 years and I believe most of us really want to make the country a better place but bureaucracy can sometimes get in the way. Modern technology and understanding brings the chaos I sometimes feel into some order. For geospatial chaos, enter the Geoplatform.
Born from the intersection of opportunity and preparedness (The Gulf Response), the Geoplatform is the next iteration of federal portals (data.gov) designed to “be a managed portfolio of common geospatial data, services, and applications.” Federal agencies collect lots of geospatial data, but data that is often difficult to share in usable forms. EPA’s former Geographic Information Officer (GIO) and now GIO for the Department of Interior recently remarked on sharing within the government: “The need to more effectively leverage and share each other’s work is becoming a bigger and bigger driver in each of our organizations every day.” The goal of the platform is to provide access to federally maintained geospatial data, services and applications; ultimately to share our work.
Switching gears from software to people, let me take a moment and introduce the current GIO at EPA, Harvey Simon. Harvey has over 27 years of GIS and risk analysis experience. He served as the GIS coordinator for Region 2 (serving New Jersey, New York, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and eight tribal nations) before moving to Washington D.C. to serve as the Chief of the Information Services Branch in the Office of Information Analysis and Access (OIAA), where he was responsible for the Envirofacts Database, a number of national geospatial applications and services, and operational management of the EPA GeoPlatform.
Harvey recently (March, 2013) presented a talk about the Geoplatform at the International Eye on Earth conference where he talked about the benefits and challenges of our Federal Geoplatform efforts during the session entitled, New Challenges and Global Perspectives. Eye On Earth is a ‘global public information network’ for sharing environmental information online. Take a few minutes and learn more about the Geoplatform from the following video recording of his talk. In the coming months I hope to sit down with Harvey to chat about his thoughts on GIS as the new GIO. Does anyone have any questions they would like me to ask?
Watch the video:
EPA GIO Harvey Simon at Eye on Earth 2013
http://www.youtube.com/embed/IffSUKNhlBI?feature=player_embedded
Casey McLaughlin is a first generation Geospatial Enthusiast who has worked with EPA since 2003 as a contractor and now as the Regional GIS Lead. He currently holds the rank of #1 GISer in EPA Region 7′s Environmental Services Division.
Editor's Note: The opinions expressed in Greenversations are those of the author. They do not reflect EPA policy, endorsement, or action, and EPA does not verify the accuracy or science of the contents of the blog.
Next up in Acronym Soup…SDWA
By Jeffery Robichaud
Several weeks ago I mentioned that I was going to start a series of blog entries related to major environmental laws, and to share the availability of related EPA data sets, particularly those that had some geospatial attributes. I started my career with EPA at the Office of Groundwater and Drinking Water in Washington DC, so the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) seems like a good place to wade in.
SDWA was passed in 1974 (and amended in both 1986 and 1996) to protect the quality of drinking water (both above ground and underground sources) in America. You can learn everything you ever wanted to know about SDWA with a quick trip to EPA’s Groundwater and Drinking Water Page.
Established by EPA to protect citizens from harmful contaminants in drinking water, and enforced primarily by States, SDWA establishes two types of standards for drinking water systems: Primary Standards, which are health-based and take the form of maximum contaminant levels (MCLs) or treatment techniques; and Secondary Standards which are cosmetic or aesthetic based.
In Region 7 we have a combination of surface water and groundwater systems throughout our four states. There are thousands more groundwater systems than surface water; however nearly nine out of every ten people in the Region get their water from surface water systems than groundwater.
If you care to find out about drinking water treatment facilities in a particular state or county within a state, the easiest way to access that information is through the SDWIS search function of Envirofacts.
SDWIS stands for the Safe Drinking Water Information System. Simply click on your State (or territory…yes you Virgin Islands) of interest, click on a couple of items in the drop downs and you will have a list of facilities, the type of water that they use, and the population served. Clicking on a particular facility will give you information about violations. If you are adventurous you can access a spreadsheet containing information about all water systems here. From a GIS perspective, it’s easy enough to address match the locations.
In addition to information about locations and violations found in SDWIS, EPA maintains several other datasets researchers and others may find useful, two of which are available through the National Contaminant Occurrence Database. This database contains information from both Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring and from Six-Year Review Monitoring (currently regulated contaminants) conducted at drinking water plants throughout the country.
Hopefully this post was able to wet your whistle when it comes to SDWA. Thirsty to find out what the next Acronym Du Jour will be (and for more lame puns)? I’ll give you an adjective hint; instead of safe think clean.
Jeffery Robichaud is a second generation EPA scientist who has worked for the Agency since 1998. From 1998 to 2001 he worked as Environmental Engineer in EPA’s Office of Groundwater and Drinking Water at beautiful Waterside Mall in Washington, DC. He currently serves as Deputy Director of EPA Region 7′s Environmental Services Division. He prefers his water from a tap not a bottle.
Editor's Note: The opinions expressed in Greenversations are those of the author. They do not reflect EPA policy, endorsement, or action, and EPA does not verify the accuracy or science of the contents of the blog.
Water, Wind, and Sun
By Neftali Hernandez Santiago
In Kansas City we briefly glimpsed spring before having another snowstorm come through the area. There were a couple of patches of green before the white stuff covered everything again. It got me thinking about diagrams in my old textbooks, the ones showing the cycle of photosynthesis and respiration. As you know photosynthesis is the name we give to the process of converting light into energy that can be used to support plants which create their own food. Nutrients, water and daily sunlight are almost enough to maintain their life styles. Plants could be totally independent but they are not. They also rely upon the wind, pollinators, and other animals to carry seeds and assist with propagation.
If someone asked me what the bare minimum for human beings to survive is, I would say food, water, shelter and clothing. Thankfully, plants don’t only produce energy for themselves, but they share their transformed energy by producing wood, fibers and edible fruits to help us cover our very basic needs. Plants do all these by utilizing the sun as their primary source of energy.
Our modern world, however, is full of needs beyond the basics. Our society is maintained with many complex networks such as transportation, communications, energy supply, water and wastewater. As part of our society we need energy to power our industries, cars, appliances, computers, tablets, and the heating or cooling of our homes. But if we had to act like plants, just getting our needs met by the water, wind and sun, could we do it?
Currently the world human energy consumption during an entire year is 15 terawatts (10 to the 12th power watts give or take). Each day, 89,000 terrawatts of solar radiation (energy) reaches the earth. In a year, this totals almost 32.5 million terawatts. Doing the math, 15 terawatts is a really, really, small percentage (in fact a decimal place with six zeros) of the energy the sun sends our way. In fact, a professor at Stanford (Mark Z. Jacobsen) has put some numbers to it. According to his calculations, we would need: 3.8 million (5-mega watts) wind turbines; 720,000 (0.75-mega watts) wave devices; 5,530 (100-mega watts) geothermal plants; 900 (1300-mega watts) hydro plants; 490,000 (1-mega watts) tidal turbines; 1.7 billion (3-kilo watts) roof PV systems; 40,000 (300-mega watts) solar PV plants; and 20 (300- mega watts) concentrated solar panels plants. This sounds like a lot of Green (both figuratively and metaphorically) but lots of work is already being undertaken.
EPA has established the Green Power Partnership, a voluntary program that encourages organizations to use green power as a way to reduce the environmental impacts associated with conventional electricity use. The Partnership currently has more than 1,400 Partner organizations voluntarily using billions of kilowatt-hours of green power annually. The National Renewable Energy Lab, (part of the US Department of Energy) has as its goal, developing renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies and practices and transferring knowledge and innovations to address both the nation’s energy and environmental goals. They also have great GIS data and maps relating to solar radiation.
So, can we fulfill the energy needs of modern human civilization and improve our environment at the same time as we move forward as a civilization by being more like plants? It may be a long way off, but the math says YES. Plants have been doing a good job of converting sunlight into energy a lot longer than humans. For them it is easy to be green. If we continue to find new ways to be green ourselves, someday we might not find ourselves singing Kermit’s famous song.
About the Author: Neftali Hernandez grew up in Puerto Rico and is an Environmental Scientist with EPA Region 7′s Drinking Water Branch. He is a member of EPA’s Water Emergency Response Group and has a bachelor of science degree in biology and a masters of science degree in environmental health from the University of Puerto Rico.
Editor's Note: The opinions expressed in Greenversations are those of the author. They do not reflect EPA policy, endorsement, or action, and EPA does not verify the accuracy or science of the contents of the blog.
Creepy Crawlies
By Regina Klepikow
It is almost that time of year when all of Mother Nature invades your space and creeps you out. It is funny how we as humans have fears of small insects and spiders. Most of us are quick to jump on a chair or run out of a room with the reflexes of The Six Million Dollar Man when we spot a spider on the wall or see a beetle scurry across the floor. My daughter and my niece have a thing where they crouch down and move their hands in such a fashion that they try to resemble a bug of some sort; all while running around sporadically, wiggling their fingers and screaming “Creepy crawlies… creepy crawlies… creepy crawlies everywhere” repeatedly. It is a hilarious sight to see.
All this has begged the question, “Why are we scared of things we can see and not so scared of things we cannot see?” I am positive that there are many “creepy crawlies” out there that we cannot see that we should be worried about. Do not get me wrong, I am not trying to freak anyone out but it is a cause for concern. We all get cautious when we here about someone having the flu and we have to work alongside them. We all know that when cold and flu season come around that we have to pay more attention to our actions and wash our hands or use more sanitizer. We 
all know that preparing and cooking meat at a certain temperature is necessary in order to keep from acquiring a food borne illness. I am a moderate germ-a-phobe when it comes to coughing people, snotty babies and raw meat. However, how often do people think about bacteria or invisible “creepy crawlies” in our drinking waters or recreational waters?
It is fairly common to grab a glass out of your cabinet and walk over to your refrigerator or kitchen faucet to get a glass of water, and just as common in the summer time to go swimming at a lake or maybe gather a group of friends for a float trip. Therefore, if the things we can see scare us … why not the things we cannot see (no not the paranormal…muwahahaha) like microscopic bacteria. Well, fortunately the EPA has got us covered. As Jeff had blogged about acronym soup, the CWA and SDWA are laws put in place to protect the environments’ watersheds from contaminants and to ensure the quality of our drinking water.
I work most closely with Escherichia coli, or E. coli. (pictured to the right) This microbe is about 1-3 microns or micrometers long in comparison to a strand of hair, which is about 50 microns thick. Typically, it is hard to see anything smaller than a millimeter (1000 microns) with the naked eye. Currently EPA and State environmental and public health agencies use E. coli is an indicator organism. This means that it is easier to test and analyze for E. coli than any other pathogens in a body of water. When a water sample has been collected, it goes back to a laboratory to be analyzed, and if E. coli is found above particular levels, that indicates the potential of other harmful bacteria or other microorganisms in that water source at levels of concern. Bear in mind not all strains of E. coli are harmful. Contaminated waters usually contain high levels E. coli and clean unpolluted waters generally do not contain very small levels of E. coli if any. For that reason, when you hear an alert
from your city water department about a boil order that means the water was potentially compromised. By boiling your drinking water, you kill living organism that could be harmful to your health; thus reducing your potential risk of infection. When your local parks and recreation departments close a swimming beach or water body it is usually because the E. coli counts exceeded a particular level associated with increased risk of infection. The picture to the left is one of the more common methods for analyzing E. coli.
Have you ever had traveled across the US border or abroad? Have you ever been swimming at a lake then accidentally swallowed the water? Have you ever acquired “the stomach flu” after the fact? If you have then you mostly likely drank or swallowed an invisible creepy crawly. Now anytime I see a potential “germy” situation… I picture my daughter and niece running around, bodies contorted with their fingers wiggling and singing “creepy crawlies… creepy crawlies… creepy crawlies everywhere”.
Regina Klepikow is a Life Scientist for EPA Region 7. She is a Drinking Water Certification Officer and maintains the microbiology laboratory at the Science and Technology Center. She loves to spend time at the lake with her family. She always keeps disinfectants nearby because “you never know when you will need them.”
Editor's Note: The opinions expressed in Greenversations are those of the author. They do not reflect EPA policy, endorsement, or action, and EPA does not verify the accuracy or science of the contents of the blog.
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