As part of the requirements to finish my Master's in Public Health, I am doing two internships dealing with my favorite subject: Water! The first internship is in progress, as of yesterday, and has me traversing Prince William County with
Shannyn Snyder and her daughter, Eden, to collect samples of stream water. The testing locations were selected by the
Prince William Soil and Water Conservation District in response to the 2008 assessment of Virginia waterways, which found that of the
15, 873 miles of waterways assessed, 66% of them were impaired. This assessment identified a big problem for Prince William County, in which 100% of the waterways are impaired.
In order to comply with regulations set in the Clean Water Act, permissible levels of contaminants must be established for these impaired waters. Our project is to assess the level of fecal contamination in select streams in the county. We are testing 12 sites on a monthly basis, starting with our first sampling this week (May 11-12, 2010).
Collecting the samples has been a fun experience, and has allowed me to escape the basement office at my paying job for a few days. Some of the streams are easily accessible from the road, but others are further back and require a little hiking. At one site, there wasn't enough water at the location right under the bridge for us to collect a sample using our bucket-on-a-rope method, so I had to brave poison ivy, wild vines, and slippery grass to get down to the stream. Once all samples were collected, we returned to our base and inoculated the Coliscan gel, poured the inoculated gel into sterile petri dishes, and set them in an incubator for 24 hours.
Waiting for results...stay tuned!
My research partner, Eden, showing us the water from an adopted stream behind a school:
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