ARCHIVED RESULTS
April 22 2001 Latest Results List of impaired waters DRWA Home

April 22, 2001:

We started our monitoring season April 22 and collected samples from 12 sites. We are excited to have added two sites in Vermont thanks to volunteer John Whitman of Readsboro. We usually see very good water quality for both dissolved oxygen and pH/alkalinity. This year our pHs are lower than usual, as are alkalinities. The West Branch of the Deerfield in Readsboro even had no alkalinity at all! Without buffering capacity, this site also had a low pH of 5.93, well below the Massachusetts standard of 6.5. We can probably attribute low values to the important snowpack this year, which was still actively melting on the 22nd of April. As a matter of fact, a lot of our sites were flooded, and made collection more difficult for our volunteers. Thanks everyone for working extra hard and allowing 100% data collection.

Contact

Local Contact: DRWA Water Quality Monitoring Program: Marie-Françoise Walk 413-774-7025
State Contact: EOEA Deerfield River Watershed Team Leader: Christine Duerring 413-773-7899
National Contact: EPA web site