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WHAT
YOU CAN DOKids Get the Nonpoint Picture
By Andrew
Guy
In the rising sun rays of an early May morning, lanky Joe Bartman drags
the end of a sagging tape measure across the oil-smeared parking lot of
the East Grand Rapids Fire Department. The temperature hovers comfortably
around 70 degrees. Chalk-white puffs of cloud speckle the sky. And 12-year-old
Joe explains offhandedly what happens when thunderstorms roll through
this upscale community.
“When it rains,” he says, tugging the tape taut, “all the
water mixes with pollution, runs off the ground, and goes in our lake.
“That’s another 50 feet,” Joe yells. Then, hooking the
tape measure to his lips, he shouts, “Fish on!” and jumps and
fights as his buddy reels it in. “I’m a bass. I’m a bass.”
It’s community service day for East Grand Rapids Middle School, and
the town of 10,764 bustles with kids rushing around in oversized t-shirts
that read: “The Solution Is You.”
Joe and his classmates, outfitted with clipboards and calculators, apply
the mathematics lessons they’ve learned in school.
The students measure the rooftops, parking lots, and other surfaces throughout
the area that repel, rather than soak up, water. Then, using the local
average rainfall, they figure that the fire department complex alone sends
more than 2.8 million gallons of stormwater rushing each year into nearby
Reeds Lake.
Joe and his classmates are learning the same basic math that local government
officials across Michigan are grappling with as sewage spills into local
swimming areas and weeds grow so thick in lakes that homeowners spend
thousands of dollars combating them with herbicides.
Every square foot of parking lot, rooftop, and road in suburbanizing areas
displaces open farmland, woodlands, and wetlands that used to soak up
rainwater.
Stormwater now rushes off service station lots, salt-covered roads, and
heavily fertilized suburban landscapes and turns into raging, polluted
torrents that gouge creekbeds and overwhelm street drains and sewer lines.
All of it ends up in the nearest lake or stream, many of which are connected
to the Great Lakes.
“If you have too many hard surfaces and no way to catch the water,
you won’t be able to control the rain,” Joe says, hiking up
his grassy-kneed jeans. “That pollutes our water and kills the fish.”
The seventh grader grasps the basic environmental problem that Michigan’s
local and state leaders must now face.
At risk are taxpayers, who end up footing the cleanup bill, and communities,
which lose out on the quality of life and development opportunities that
clean water provides. 
Cheaper by the wetlands>>
