October 2019

October 20, 2019: completely overcast, which – finally –  kept the temperature reasonable and what it should be given that we’re in mid October. This summer – starting in mid to late July (if memory serves), we’ve had 57 days of 100+. And that doesn’t count the days where it “only” reached 98-99. Temperature-wise, we had an extra month of summer. Yuk. And barely any rain since July, so all that was originally green is now mostly brown. We did have about 1/2 inch last week which helped, but it’s not nearly enough. All of central Texas (and beyond) is well into the exceptional drought stage.

The water was still flowing from the street, through the storm culvert to the stream and even that was a lower flow than normal. In the culvert, some of the pools of water had a scummy surface (as before) and there was more trash on the sides of that inflowing stream.

There was no algae, surface or even submerged. There was scum on the stream surface by the sample site, and a faint smell of sewage. The water was stagnant, with no flow. The waterfall was flowing a bit but only through part of its width. Further up the stream, the inlet was completely dry and even further upstream, the “sometime island” rocks were dry. I didn’t walk up to them though I could have easily done so with dry feet, given the shrunken stream. And I could have easily walked to the south side with dry feet both on the upstream side of the bridge and by the trail crossing, on the latter thanks to some well-placed rocks.

A bit surprising given the lack of flow, there was no ecoli at the sample site and virtually none at the control site above the waterfall. Still no pigeons or other birds (pigeon poop is a possible ecoli source).

The other item of note was the paint on the wall under the bridge: it’s a running battle between the graffiti artists and graffiti “police” painters. One area of the covering gray paint had fallen / been removed and one of the graffiti layers were slightly visible.

Observations:

Air temp 22.5 C
water temp 20 C
Dissolved oxygen 3.7
specific conductance 530
pH 7.0
Nitrate < 0.3
transparency/dissolved solids 1.1 meters

sample site and beyond from streamside

sample site area scummy surface

culvert trash and scummy water

sample site area from north bank

downstream bridge side to trail crossing

stream on downstream bridge side

trail crossing area

stream under and below bridge no gravel bar

stream from north bank

under bridge

upstream view from under bridge near middle

upstream view from under bridge

waterfall area and below

waterfall area with dry rock

stream from culvert to bridge

stream from above culvert

missing paint over graffiti

low water upstream side of bridge

dry inlet above waterfall

low stream sometime island rocks

above inlet no algae

downstream view from above inlet

dissolved oxygen 3-7