January 2017 monitoring

Posted by: upperwalnutcreekaustin | January 20, 2017

January 2017 monitoring

January 17, 2017. Finally a beautiful day, after nearly a week of clouds and rain – so far 4″ this month, through yesterday. So no surprise that the stream was significantly higher than last month with a good current. Also not surprising, didn’t see any fish… and again there were no birds, including pigeons.

While walking down the hill to the stream, we noticed the creek / culvert bringing water from the parking lot and street was full at the bottom. Its short tunnel under the sidewalk was again blocked, so much of the water was flowing over the sidewalk and into the main stream. At least this time there was no scent of sewage. The stream was high enough that crossing the trail meant getting wet feet, and I was not able to walk to the middle of the stream, as I’ve been recently doing to take some photos (though the dog, visiting the area with her owner, didn’t seem to mind wet feet).

The waterfall was loud due to the water rushing over it (sounded great). Further upstream, the “sometime island” rocks in the middle of the stream were completely underwater, for the first time in months. With the strong current, there was no surface algae, though there were significant submerged plants, enough to turn sections of the stream above the waterfall green. I also didn’t notice too much new debris above the current water level, so either it didn’t flood too much or there just wasn’t much trash added to the stream from the rain (though sadly I doubt the latter is the case).

The e-coli counts at both the control site by the waterfall and the sample site downstream of the bridge were in the acceptable range. With 3 ML samples, the control site had an average of 432 colonies and the control site was slightly less at 399 colonies.

Observations:

Air temperature 15 C
Water temperature 14 C
dissolved oxygen 8.0
specific conductance 390
pH 7.0
Nitrates .75
transparency .8 meters