Indiana highlights seven water quality 'success stories'

Indiana had more water quality "success stories" than any other state last fiscal year. The Environmental Protection Agency designates a river, lake or stream a "success story" if the water significantly improves after once being too polluted for things like swimming, fishing or hosting aquatic life.

Water pollution can come from so many different places — whether that's soil and fertilizer running off a farm field, a poorly managed construction site or someone's failing septic tank. For the water quality to improve, everyone needs to do their part.

Caleb Rennaker with the Indiana Department of Environmental Management said it isn't always easy to convince someone like a farmer to change things on their land.

"It's risky for them. In many cases, it can be very expensive and costly for them in their livelihood to change their practices. So we really try to look for the win-win solutions where we can," he said.

Things like planting cover crops — which prevent runoff from polluting lakes and streams while also increasing yields and reducing weeds. Rennaker said these water quality improvement projects can take decades of work. He said Indiana does a good job of collaborating with local and federal partners and making the most out of limited resources.
 

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Rennaker said even if you never visit a river, lake or stream, it's important to keep it healthy — and not just for the fish. It might be connected to a water body you use. The water in Jackson Creek in Bloomington, for example, eventually ends up in Lake Monroe — which serves as drinking water and recreation for thousands of people.

"By protecting it, we're also saving ourselves a lot of time and effort and money by fixing something when we can prevent it from being poor quality in the first place," Rennaker said.

Indiana had seven water quality "success stories" last fiscal year. The next closest states — Pennsylvania and Virginia — had two.

IDEM noted improvements at: Prairie Creek near Frankfort, Turman Creek in Vigo and Sullivan counties, Elliott Ditch near Lafayette, Rock Creek in Wells County, the lower Eel River in Clay and Owen counties, the Indian-Kentuck watershed in Jefferson and Ripley counties, and the Flat Creek watershed in Pike and Dubois counties.

Rennaker said the EPA is currently reviewing six more success stories from Indiana.

Rebecca is our energy and environment reporter. Contact her at rthiele@iu.edu or on Signal at IPBenvironment.01. Follow her on Twitter at @beckythiele.