opportunity

Join the Fox-Wolf Watershed Alliance, partners, and volunteers this winter to monitor for chlorides in streams throughout the Fox-Wolf River Basin!

Road salt (sodium chloride) is everywhere during winter months. It keeps us safe on roads and sidewalks, but it can also pose a threat to fish, wildlife, habitats, and more. Overall it impacts both the environment as well as human health.

Fish and bugs that live in freshwater streams can’t survive in extra salty water. And many of us (more than 118 million Americans) depend on local streams for drinking water. Water treatment plants are not equipped to filter out the extra salt, so it can end up in your tap water and even corrode your pipes.

Please join us at one of our training November 14th at Noon or 6 p.m. at the Fox-Wolf Watershed Alliance. Click the button to fill out our sign-up form for the training event. A free Salt Watch kit will be provided to those who attend. Monitoring is easy and a great way to help your community!

You can use your kit any time you can safely approach a waterway. But it’s especially important to test salt levels around the time of events that cause those levels to change. Those times are:

• Before a winter storm, to find out the “normal” level of salt in your stream
• After salt has been applied to roads
• After the first warm day or rainstorm following a snow or freeze
• After the next rain event

We could use more volunteers throughout the basin. Monitoring efforts are best done on smaller waterbodies, streams, rivers, and more. Please reach out to Alyssa Reinke, Alyssa@fwwa.org with more questions, comments, or concerns.