Emmett Carlisle, from Gainesville, Florida, just outside the Suwannee River Basin, sang “Suwannee Harmony,” and won a prize for Best Florida Folk, at the First Annual Suwannee Riverkeeper Songwriting Contest, Saturday, June 23, 2018, at the Salty Snapper, Valdosta, GA.
Emmett Carlisle
(Bret Wagenhorst)
As he sang, “just like the river, together we flow.”
Here’s the video: Continue reading
Hollin Gammage, from McMinnville, Tennessee, outside the Suwannee River Basin, sang “Little River,” and won a prize for Best Americana, at the First Annual Suwannee Riverkeeper Songwriting Contest, Saturday, June 23, 2018, at the Salty Snapper, Valdosta, GA.
Hollin Gammage (photo by Bret Wagenhorst)
I think we’ve all been “Half crazy til I hit the water.”
Here’s the video: Continue reading
Jay Jourden sang “Save Our Suwannee” and won a prize, at the First Annual Suwannee Riverkeeper Songwriting Contest, Saturday, June 23, 2018, at the Salty Snapper, Valdosta, GA.
Jay Jourden (photo by Bret Wagenhorst)
If there’s any song other than Stephen Foster’s that anybody knows about the Suwannee, it’s usually this one, which is a call to action:
The water table’s going down, cricks are running dry….
They say we need more power, there’s more rain in the sky….But where’s that water going, and who says it’s so..??..
Somebody’s got the answers that we’d all like to know..!!..
Here’s the video: Continue reading
David B. Pharr sang this Traditional Folk song, “Care For the Waters,” at the First Annual Suwannee Riverkeeper Songwriting Contest, Saturday, June 23, 2018, at the Salty Snapper, Valdosta, GA.
As he sang about the Suwannee and the other rivers: “And you may cross my bridges, But you’ll never get over me.”
Here’s the video: Continue reading
First in a series of Where is the existing water quality data? In Georgia, it’s in Georgia Adopt-A-Stream’s database, online maps, charts, etc. And Adopt-A-Stream is not just for Georgia anymore.
The data record for the Suwannee River Basin is embarrassingly empty.
However, it turns out there’s data in Tennessee, South Carolina, and in Florida way down to Key West. So Georgia Adopt-A-Stream is a candidate for keeping Suwannee Riverkeeper data. Of which there turns out to be quite a bit already for Florida, Continue reading
You can see on these maps that the Suwannee River Basin is massively agricultural, except where it’s forestry or swamp or other wetlands. Thus it’s no wonder that most of the nitrate runoff problem here is due to agriculture, as shown in the Basin Management Action Plans (BMAPs).
WWALS Science Committee Chair Tom Potter points to this Global Croplands map to illustrate the BMAP issues. The question remains of whether agricultural best management practices as advocated in the recent BMAP meetings will be sufficient to deal with the problem, considering they haven’t decreased it in the past decade.
Global Croplands About: Continue reading
Through November 24, 2017, public comment is open about lead in our Georgia watersheds, in a new proposed Total Maximum Daily Load Evaluation.
Georgia EPD, Proposed TMDLs, 29 September 2017, NOTICE OF AVAILABILITY OF REVISED TOTAL MAXIMUM DAILY LOADS FOR WATERS AND POLLUTANTS OF CONCERN IN THE STATE OF GEORGIA, Continue reading
While Alabama is thinking about it (actually, Alabama already does it) and Georgia requires an open records request with slow response (since 2018-12-21 Georgia now posts spills),
Florida has already required and is publishing timely notices of spills, and more recently a map of the most recent 30 days of spills!
Among them, surprisingly few in the Suwannee River Basin from Hurricane Irma: three in Baker and Bradford Counties from The Chemours Company, and two from Camp Blanding.
Follow this link for the interactive google map.
Daniel H. Thompson, Lexology, 4 May 2017, Florida Legislature Passes “Public Notice of Pollution Act” Continue reading
Obviously nobody lives in most of the Okefenokee Swamp or the Osceola National Forest, but also most of Clinch County is unpopulated west of the Swamp, as is much of the Gulf coast along the Suwannee River Estuary, from Cedar Key north to Horsehoe Bay, plus large parts of Dixie and Lafayette Counties west of the Suwannee River.
Nobody Lives Here:
Unpopulated U.S. Census Blocks,
screenshot by jsq from interactive map by
mapsbynik.
Update 2017-06-20: As someone pointed out, rangers do live in the Okefenokee Swamp, presumably in the white area along the access road.
Cedar Key is the island at the bottom of the map, and from a bit north on the Gulf Coast you can follow Continue reading
GA-EPD’s Atlanta office sent
their entire sewage spill database for January 2017 in response to an open records request from WWALS.
For the Suwannee River Basin,
I see only the known ones by Valdosta, plus a spill from Moultrie’s
Carlton Woods Lift Station into the Ocholockonee River,
with 36000 gallons, which matches
the amount we got directly from Moultrie.
That Ochlockonee spill is still not in the Suwannee River Basin.
The Georgia Environmental Protection Division (GA-EPD) Southwest office in Albany handles the other sewage treatment operations in the Suwannee River Basin in Georgia, and that Albany office already told us by telephone that they had no reported spills other than the Tifton spill into the New River which I had gotten directly from Tifton. So I think we can conclude there were no other sewage spills into the Suwannee River Basin in Georgia in January 2017 other than the ones from Valdosta and Tifton.
Interestingly, Valdosta with its 2.2 million gallon Withlacoochee Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) leak (and three manhole spills) was not the winner. Continue reading