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Marine monitoring

In worldwide movement, Kings Park teens learn exactly what's floating in Nissequogue River water

By Joe Darrow

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| Kings Park High School SEAS members use a contraption to draw up water from close to the Nissequogue River bottom to test it for pollutants Friday on Landing Avenue in Smithtown. Photo by Joe Darrow (click for larger version) |

September 24, 2009 | 11:33 AM
An environmental science club from Kings Park High School participated in World Water Monitoring Day Friday by testing the Nissequogue River.

Members of the high school's Student Environmental Action Society, moderated by 23-year environmental sciences teacher Rob Gelling, joined personnel from Sweetbriar Nature Center, the New York Sea Grant Foundation and Sierra Club to test the Nissequogue water from the dock of the Landing Avenue town park as the tide went out Friday afternoon.

They evaluated surface and riverbottom water samples for several factors, including the presence of chemicals like nitrogen phosphate, as well as temperature, salinity, dissolved-oxygen level and turbidity, which is the degree to which sediment is suspended in the water. "We test for things in the water that are going to be indicative of a polluted estuary," said Janine Bendicksen, an environmental educator at Sweetbriar Nature Center and a water monitoring volunteer for the Sierra Club.

As a part of the Long Island Water Sentinels water monitoring program, Bendicksen said she tests the Nissequogue from the Landing Avenue site every other week in the three-year grant-funded project. Based on her observations, rainfalls cause a marked increase in contaminant phosphates as runoff from roads and yards flows into the river, she said, although "not to dangerous levels, yet."

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Contaminants including pesticide, fertilizer, household cleaning solutions and oil leaking from cars are absorbed into the groundwater and flushed into the Nissequogue, according to the environmental professionals. Once there, the substances have a negative effect on both floral and marine life in and around the river.

Algae thrive on the nitrogen-rich phosphates and multiply on the river's surface, only to die as rapidly as their number exceeds the nitrogen supply, the environmentalists said. Their mass decomposition uses up the water's oxygen supply, and the ensuring hypoxia — low oxygen — kills or drives off subsurface marine species, they said.

Larissa Graham, Long Island Sound Study outreach coordinator for the New York Sea Grant Foundation, also alerted students to the tall, plumed weeds that line the river. The plants, phragmytes, are an invasive species drawn to the region because they too thrive off the water pollutants. The phragmites actually "help filter all the polluted runoff," said Graham. But the service comes with a price — the phragmites steal the resources of the region's traditional flora, which also help purify the water. The phragmites "out-compete the native plants, which will filter runoff as well," she said.

Just because water from the Nissequogue and Long Island Sound, which the river feeds, may look, taste and smell clean, that's no guarantee it is, Bendicksen told the Kings Park teens. The testing they were doing Friday "is the only way you are going to learn" exactly how pure the water is, she said.

"People don't realize that anything they dump on the ground, such as pesticides and fertilizers on their lawn or cigarette butts, will end up in Long Island Sound," stated Mark Tedesco, Long Island director for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, in a Friday release. "Today we hope to educate our volunteers and open their eyes to their surroundings."

"People all over the world today are sampling their streams, rivers — whatever is close to them," said Graham. "It's on a big scale" but with the student's cooperation, "we've brought it down to a local scale," she said. As with their worldwide testing colleagues, the Kings Park environmental club's results were to be posted online at http://www.wwmd.org/.

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