The Dirt on Clean Water

Maybe you’ve heard of a “TMDL.” Or perhaps you’ve heard of the stream monitoring that has been done in recent years by groups like the Montana Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) or the Madison Stream Team. Whether any of this is familiar to you, or not, I’d like to take this opportunity to explain what this means, particularly for the people and the waterways in the Madison Valley.

Waterways in the United States are a public resource. This means that even if an individual has a “right” to use the water, it is still owned by the public. Therefore, there are public state agencies that are tasked with ensuring this public resource maintains a quality that is suitable for the public’s needs. In Montana, this agency is the Montana DEQ. It is the DEQ’s responsibility to make sure that our water meets minimum standards that are suitable for certain uses. These uses include: recreation (swimming, boating, water activities); aquatic life (aquatic plants and animals); and water supply (domestic, municipal, agricultural, industrial).

The Montana DEQ conducts stream monitoring in order to determine if water quality is suitable or unsuitable to support these uses. The monitoring assesses numerous parameters such as: temperature, stream flow, dissolved oxygen, nutrient levels, metals, sediment, and pH. The DEQ has been assessing the streams in the Madison since 2012. Meanwhile, a local group of citizen scientists and partnering organizations called the Madison Stream Team have been collecting similar data since 2010. Therefore, the DEQ asked the Madison Stream Team to assist in their data collection efforts in order to collect better information on the health of streams in the Madison watershed.

After three years of data collection on 22 streams, the state finally made their impairment determinations in spring 2015. After assessing the data against the minimum standards necessary for supporting recreation, aquatic life, or water supply uses, they found that 13 of the 22 streams are “impaired” for at least one of those uses.

Now the state is developing a Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) for each of these impaired streams. The TMDL determines the maximum amount of a pollutant that a stream can withstand before no longer supporting one of the beneficial uses. The information in these TMDLs can then be used by local partners and community members to identify opportunities where voluntary improvements have potential to make the streams healthier. Improvement opportunities for all of the impaired streams will be accumulated into what is called a “Watershed Restoration Plan.” This restoration plan will be the product of the local community’s interests, and will outline voluntary approaches to improve water quality. In addition to focusing on the local community’s interests, the Watershed Restoration Plan will also be written locally by the Conservation District. Once the plan is approved by the state it will open a large funding source for landowners in the Madison Valley to implement the voluntary solutions to solving water quality issues on the 13 impaired streams.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, or you’re getting acronym-a-phobia, let me provide a “cliff notes” summary of the process I described above. We collected data to see if the streams were healthy enough to support people and fish. Thirteen of the streams were not in ideal condition. Now the state is asking local organizations and community members to come up with solutions to fix the unhealthy streams. Then, we’ll put all of that information together in a plan. If the state likes our plan, they’ll give the community money for projects to implement the plan so we can make the streams healthier. Furthermore, it’s all voluntary. It’s up to us as a community to decide how we go about ensuring our water resources can remain sustainable and healthy in the coming years.