Unit 2: Activities

Pre-activity:

1. Describe the journey of a water droplet falling from the sky and ending up in the river. Where does it land? Where does it go? What pollutants might it pick up along the way? Where would those pollutants come from? Locate the best points to intervene to prevent pollution. How would you do that?
2. Create a map of pervious and impervious surfaces in your yard or schoolyard.

Activity 1:

Where is it all coming from?

Activity 2:

How Does Land Use Affect Stormwater Runoff?

1. Think about your watershed. Make a list of the different land use types present in your watershed? These may include industry, farming, livestock grazing, forestry, mining, recreation, residential, commercial, wildlife habitat, wilderness, or other land uses. 
2. Now make a list of the potential pollutants from each land use type. These may include fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, nutrients, sediment, road salt, animal waste, oil/grease, fuel, metals, toxic materials, or other pollutants. 
3. We have three options when it comes to pollution. We can prevent it, reduce it, or clean it up. Clean up is often very costly and sometimes not possible. Best Management Practices (BMPs) are structural, vegetative, or management practices designed to reduce water or prevent pollution from entering the Columbia. 

Some examples include: 

• minimizing the use of fertilizers, pesticides, and other chemicals; 
• installing silt fences and sediment traps; planting vegetation buffers; 
• creating detention ponds that can hold stormwater until pollutants settle to the bottom; 
• utilizing porous pavement that allows stormwater to infiltrate the pavement and enter the soil; and 
• spill prevention and waste reduction practices.  

4. For each land use type in your watershed design your own BMPs to prevent pollution and protect the Columbia River.

Discussion Questions:

• Who should look for water pollution in our watershed? Who is responsible for keeping the water clean?
• Discuss if you agree or disagree with the following statement: “We all live downstream.” No matter where we live, precipitation runoff has the potential to transport any pollution that we cause or create to the river. And there are land uses occurring upstream from us that have the potential to impact us, just as our actions can impact those living downstream from us.

Activity 3:

Stormwater Simulation

Materials: white paper, water-soluble markers (a few different colors); spray bottle of water, a pan or plate to catch the water

1. Your paper represents the land. Color on the paper with markers using different colors to represent different types of land use and pollutants (pet waste, fertilizers, chemicals, oils and grease, etc.).
2. Crumple the paper into a ball then open it up but keep the ridges. These ridges represent the topography in our watershed (the mountains, valleys, ridges, and hills).
3. Hold the paper over the plate or pan so that one side of the paper is a bit higher than the other. Runoff flows from higher elevations to lower elevations, and the lowest end represents where the water flows into the Columbia River.
4. Make a rainstorm by spraying the paper with water, and watch the water flow across the land.

Discussion Questions:

1. Was the water color different at higher elevations than it was at lower elevations? Did the colors all bleed together?
2. Think about your neighborhood. When it rains are there different pollutants that could be picked up by stormwater? Where does the stormwater runoff flow to?
3. Do you have ideas of ways you could help keep the stormwater runoff in your neighborhood clean from pollutants? (Pick up after your dog? Pull weeds instead of spraying with a chemical?).
4. Who should be responsible to clean up pollutants in our water?

Activity 4:

Google Earth Timelapse

Watch this Google Earth timelapse footage of the Columbia Gorge over the past 35 years. 

• What do you notice? 
• What changes do you see? 
• Are there changes to land use that might impact runoff? How? 
• If you don’t live in the Gorge, find where you live and observe the changes.

Note: look for general outlines, specific landmarks, big developments, interesting changes. Then dig deeper: compare the start to the end, or look for evidence of significant events in the time period shown.

Additional Resources:

• Learn more about potential sources of nonpoint source pollution.
• Read about sources and solutions to stormwater pollution.
• Learn about stormwater management and green infrastructure.
• Click to drop a raindrop on this interactive map of the United States and watch where it ends up.
• Chemicals used automobile tires wash into streams and quickly kill salmon. Learn more about car tires and salmon.

This project has been funded wholly or in part by the United States Environmental Protection Agency under assistance agreement RB 01J73501 to Columbia Riverkeeper. The contents of this website subpage do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Environmental Protection Agency, nor does the EPA endorse trade names or recommend the use of commercial products mentioned in this document.