A clean week, Withlacoochee River 2020-05-08

Update 2020-05-16: Clean Withlacoochee River 2020-05-13.

Update 2020-05-14: Withlacoochee River Landings on Swim Guide 2020-05-14.

Last week was clean for the Withlacoochee River, and with no rain predicted, probably this weekend and the coming week, too.

Don’t forget to send in your comment on the GA-EPD Valdosta Consent Order.

But remember, Valdosta is not the source of the recent contamination. WWALS is talking to some of the agricultural sources. Please be patient: agriculture takes months or years to fix.

You can help.

[Approaching State Line Ramp --Bobby McKenzie]
Approaching State Line Ramp —Bobby McKenzie, 2020-05-10

We’ve seldom seen a week this clean.

[Clean with no rain]
Clean with no rain
For context, including the entire WWALS composite water quality table of results from both Georgia and Florida, see wwals.net/issues/testing/.

The above chart starts where the last one posted left off, with Madison Health’s good results for Tuesday, May 5, 2020.

Valdosta, GA, and Madison County, FL, agree that the Withlacoochee River was clean all last week.

[A clean week]
A clean week

I’ve left the locations of the Skipper Bridge, Tifton, Adel, and Hahira gauges on there, to show there’s no rain recorded for them for all last week.

The most recent Valdosta results we have are for Friday, and from Madison Health for Thursday. But there’s no reason to believe the clean spell did not last through the weekend until now.

Well, except maybe downstream on the Suwannee, where there seem to be other sources of contamination. Florida isn’t testing there, so we don’t know.

[Cook County Boat Ramp to Running Springs]
Cook County Boat Ramp (top left) to Running Springs (lower right)
in WWALS map of all public launches and Boat Ramps in the Suwannee River Basin.

You probably noticed no recent WWALS results on that chart. Our testers took the weekend off, since with no rain there was unlikely to be anything much to detect. Don’t worry, we’ll be back.

This weekend we may take down our yellow diamond Caution signs.

Until the next big rain. Or spill.

 -jsq, John S. Quarterman, Suwannee RIVERKEEPER®

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