Eagle Creek Clean-up Project: Monitoring Water Quality

Monitoring water quality is an important part of the Eagle Creek Straight Pipe Abatement and Education Project. It provides the community with a measure of the level of impairment in the streams. In addition to the Northern Kentucky Health Department, several groups monitor water quality in Northern Kentucky. Recent monitoring data from the Licking River watershed and smaller tributaries to the Ohio River are available from the Licking River Watershed Watch.  Recent monitoring data from the tributaries to the Kentucky, including Eagle Creek, are available from the Kentucky River Watershed Watch Database.

Water pollution is compared to standards developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Congress in the Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1972 which later was slightly revised and came to be known as the Clean Water Act in 1977.

For many categories of water pollution, these standards are defined by how people use the water and how safe streams are to be used for these purposes. For instance, the EPA uses the Clean Water Act standard of 200 colony forming units, or cfu, for primary contact recreation (swimming, waterskiing, snorkeling, etc.). This means in a standard 100 milliliter sample of water taken from a stream, 200 colonies of bacteria will form during the analysis of this sample.

The EPA has set the limit of safety for swimming, waterskiing and other full contact recreation at 200 cfu. For wading, fishing, boating, etc, where there is less contact with the water, the standard is 1,000 cfu. States are required to report to Congress every other year on the progress being made to improve water quality to make it more useable. For more information on how Kentucky bodies of water are doing, go to Kentucky Division of Water’s page on the 305b report.

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