Update 2021-07-06: Tropical Storm Elsa headed up Suwannee River Basin 2021-07-06
Valdosta has published its upstream results for Friday, which showed very bad water quality at US 41, GA 133, and US 84 on the Withlacoochee River.
There’s been even more rain since then, and more is coming straight at the Suwannee River Basin with Tropical Storm Elsa. Continue reading
Update 9 AM 2021-07-07: Elsa again Tropical Storm, but hurricane warnings persist, landfall soon 2021-07-07
Recent heavy rains were just the start. Expect 4 to 6 inches more today or tomorrow from Tropical Storm Elsa, along with winds from hurricane force in Dixie County plus possible storm surge, dropping to maybe 30 mph in south Georgia, with marginal risk of flash flooding throughout.
Where I am near the GA-FL line, we already got 6.25 inches in the past two days. That’s six weeks of rain by the annual average. Also near the state line, western Brooks County, GA got almost an inch and a half, Skipper Bridge on the Withlacoochee River got almost an inch and US 84 more than half an inch, while Statenville on the Alapaha got almost an inch, and Fargo on the Suwannee got almost two inches.
According to the National Hurricane Center at 8AM this morning, Tropical Storm Elsa is west of Key West, heading up the Florida Gulf Coast past Tampa, expected to make landfall around 2AM Wednesday (tomorrow), probably in Dixie County, for which county a hurricane warning has been issued. Continue reading
Update 2021-09-17: Cancelled.
Leisurely paddle down the Suwannee River visiting Telford Springs, Peacock Slough River Camp, as well as Cow and Running Springs for some cooling off swim time.
When: Gather 9 AM, launch 10 AM, end 3 PM, Saturday, September 18, 2021
Put In: Hal W. Adams Bridge Ramp. From Mayo, travel north on SR 51 to the river and the ramp is on the right, in Lafayette County.
GPS: 30.098833, -83.171
Take Out: Hardenbergh Ramp
Bring: the usual personal flotation device, boat, paddles, food, drinking water, warm clothes, and first aid kit. Also trash pickers and trash bags: every WWALS outing is also a cleanup.
Free: This outing is free to WWALS members, and $10 (ten dollars) for non-members.
You can pay the $10 at the outing, or online:
https://wwals.net//donations/#outings
We recommend you support the work of WWALS by
becoming a WWALS member today!
https://wwals.net/donations/#join
![[Paddle Map: WWALS SRWT]](https://www.wwals.net/pictures/2020-08-29--bike-paddle-suwannee/map-wwals-srwt.jpg)
Paddle Map:
WWALS map of Suwannee River Wilderness Trail (SRWT)
Songwriters, it’s time to send in your song! This Wednesday, July 7, is the deadline.
Here is the entry form:
https://forms.gle/tWrqas7qPWDKgpqF6
![[Songwriting Contest Instagram Alapahoochee]](https://www.wwals.net/pictures/2021-08-21--songwriting/instagram-crop-alapahoochee-songwriting.jpg)
Instagram image by Angela and Josh Duncan.
First prize is $300 plus one day of recording studio time, in the Fourth Annual Suwannee Riverkeeper Songwriting Contest. Plus $50 for best song from inside the Suwannee River Basin, and $50 for best song from outside. And plaques to best in each musical genre. Youth songwriters, we’ll add a prize for you if you send in your songs.
Submissions can be songs about any river, stream, spring, sink, swamp, lake, or pond in the Suwannee River Basin or Estuary (except not the Santa Fe Basin; that has its own contest).
This year we will have online voting on the songs submitted, which the Committee will take into account when selecting finalists.
Finalists will play at the Contest, 7-10 PM, Saturday, August 21, 2021, and judges will judge at the Turner Center Art Park, 527 N. Patterson St., Valdosta, GA 31601. There will be food and a cash bar, as you watch and listen, and you can browse the artworks at the Turner Center. There will also be a kayak raffle and a silent auction, as well as a range of buttons, stickers, hats, notecards, signs, shirts, and posters for sale (this is a fundraiser for WWALS Watershed Coalition).
Much more about the Contest is here, including song submission form,
contest Rules, and, soon, tickets:
wwals.net/pictures/2021-08-21–songwriting/
Georgia Beer Company is back as our top tier sponsor. We have more sponsors, and we can use more!
About WWALS: Continue reading
Update 2021-07-06: Bad Upstream, Withlacoochee River 2021-07-02.
The Little, Withlacoochee, and Alapaha Rivers are remarkably clean by samples Thursday, July 1, 2021. No sewage spills have been reported for Georgia.
Some bad news: something caused high E. coli in the Withlacoochee River at GA 133 on Tuesday. And Starke, Florida, had two more small spills above the Santa Fe River, but nothing like the big one that Florida city had a week ago.
The good news: according to those Tuesday tests, whatever was in the Withlacoochee River at GA 133 was not coming from Valdosta’s Mulch Yard off of Val-Tech Road. And by Thursday samples, whatever it was was gone by then.
So by the results we have right now, it’s clear for swimming, diving, fishing, and boating.
And still more good news: Madison Health has lifted its former Bacterial Advisory for the Withlacoochee River.
But beware: many inches of rain fell later Thursday and today. That usually washes more contamination into the rivers. See Cattle and hogs: Withlacoochee River water quality status 2021-06-27 https://wwals.net/?p=55966
![[Chart, rivers, results, Swim Guide]](https://www.wwals.net/pictures/2021-07-01--wq/many.jpg)
Chart, rivers, results, Swim Guide
Just don’t say we didn’t mention those rains yesterday and today, which in Brooks County started even earlier, and have been very heavy. If we’re all lucky, most of what manure would wash off has already washed off. We shall see.
With a dozen tests this week, we’re burning through testing materials. Thanks to Joe Brownlee, Southwest Director, Georgia Power, for another generous water quality testing grant that helps make this possible. Continue reading
There are a couple of new things in what I sent on the deadline day, yesterday. (PDF)
For what this is all about, see Calling for pictures of swimming, diving, rapids, tubing, water skiing, or surfing, Suwannee River Basin, Georgia.
June 30, 2021
To: EPD.Comments@dnr.ga.gov
Elizabeth Booth, Environmental Protection Division
Watershed Protection Branch,
Watershed Planning & Monitoring Program,
Suite 1152 East, 2 Martin Luther King, Jr., Dr., Atlanta, GA 30334
Re: Georgia Triennial Review of Water Quality Standards
Dear Ms. Booth,
Once again I would like to commend you and all the GA-EPD staff for your diligence in this Triennial Review process. I thank you for your consideration of the request by WWALS Watershed Coalition, Inc. (WWALS) to upgrade GA EPD’s designated use of the Little, Withlacoochee, Alapaha, and Suwannee Rivers, as well as Grand Bay WMA, Banks Lake NWR, and the Okefenokee NWR, from Fishing to Recreational, to set higher water quality standards for these bodies of water.
In the interests of saving you and me time, I will try to merely summarize the arguments I have already made, while adding some material you may not have previously seen.
As you know WWALS would prefer that redesignation applied uniformly, year-round. As you mentioned in the recent EPD zoom meeting on this subject, perhaps one reason Florida has all its rivers as Recreational by default is its climate. South Georgia, like north Florida (and unlike north Georgia) has a subtropical climate in which we are not surprised by 80-degree weather in January. People swim, dive, fish, and boat on our rivers year-round. Some people even prefer to be on and in the water in the winter because there are fewer insects. I have recently been reminded that local churches also use them for immersion baptisms, which can happen in any season of the year.
Per request of EPD, please find attached a Recreational Data
Spreadsheet, which is also online here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1g9gLcNnbRx4H9djZAlKd1ZaB7zrlmDbz/view?usp=sharing
In that spreadsheet are examples of swimming and diving locations, including almost every boat ramp or landing, plus selected sandbars, beaches, and springs. Also included are a few examples of rapids. None of them are Class III, but at least two are Class II+, and as Gwyneth Moody pointed out on the recent zoom, people frequently capsize in those.
Included for every location in that spreadsheet is a link to further information, mostly to one of our three river trails (“blue trails”):
Continue readingUpdate 2021-07-02: Clean Rivers after Tuesday blip and before Thursday rains 2021-07-01.
Sewage spills were reported last week, but not from Georgia: Florida State Prison Tuesday into the New River (of the Santa Fe), and Starke WWTF Saturday above the Santa Fe River. I must commend FDEP for sending out pollution notices on a Sunday, and Starke WWTF for reporting on a weekend. We don’t know what effect those spills had on those rivers, because so far as we know nobody tests there.
Floridians, please ask SRWMD and FDEP to test water quality frequently on all the rivers, all the way to the Gulf, instead of wasting money on water pipe boondoggles.
Meanwhile on the Withlacoochee River for Saturday, Suzy Hall found State Line Boat Ramp filthy, yet Florida Campsites downstream pretty clean. Gus Cleary found Cleary Bluff below Allen Ramp spotless for Friday and with only one spot for Saturday.
How can it be dirty upstream but clean downstream? With all this recent rain, the rivers are moving fast, and a glob of E. coli can flit right past in a few hours.
We can also hope much of the cattle manure has already been washed off. See also Cattle and hogs: Withlacoochee River water quality status 2021-06-27.
We have no data from Valdosta more recent than for Monday, and nothing from Madison Health more recent than Tuesday. Meanwhile, WWALS testers wanted to know, so you could know.
I’d still be wary of the Withlacoochee River until we see repeated clean State Line results. Continue reading
Update 2025-07-25: SRWMD & SJRWMD aquifer recharge project update @ SRWMD 2025-07-08.
Four years ago SRWMD proposed to pipe Suwannee River water from near White Springs to a sinkhole near Falling Creek to replenish the Ichetucknee River. Now the District has come up with something worse: not one, but two pipelines, adding one from Branford, both to spread water on the ground nearer the Ichetucknee headspring. SRWMD told reporters these were just tentative plans, but SRWMD’s own slides lay out a process just like four years ago when a plan was rubberstamped by SRWMD and SJRWMD despite numerous objections. Head it off now!
Here are some easier, less costly, and simpler methods than pipeline boondoggles: send pine plantation ditch water into the aquifer; three ways to limit water withdrawals, and Right to Clean Water.
![[Map: Recharge %]](https://www.wwals.net/pictures/2021-06-08--srwmd-board/pipe-slides-0010.jpg)
Map: Recharge % in SRWMD’s slides
Prevention and Recovery Strategy for
the Lower Santa Fe and Ichetucknee
Rivers and Priority Springs.
What we wrote four years ago applies twice as much this time:
“The Falling Creek project has very large up-front expense, involves environmental risk in running a large-diameter pipe through wetlands, and has high maintenance cost. In addition it only benefits the Ichetucknee Springs watershed. It is seasonal, for instance at the water levels now in the Suwannee, there is no water to pump to Falling Creek.”
Back then we included in our comments to SRWMD a much simpler and less costly proposal Continue reading
Update 2021-06-28: Filthy GA-FL Line, Withlacoochee River 2021-06-26.
Most Withlacoochee River contamination comes from cattle manure runoff, according to extensive testing. Yet there is the myth that every problem with the Withlacoochee River comes from Valdosta sewage. Actually, Valdosta has not had a spill that got into the river in more than a year and a half.
Other cities do have sewage spills (especially Quitman), which do cause problems. But when the rivers have E. coli after big rains, it usually comes from cattle manure runoff.
Most of the time our rivers are clean, and here’s how we know that.
![[Map: Quitman, Valdosta, Okapilco Creek, Knights Ferry Boat Ramp, Withlacoochee-River]](https://www.wwals.net/pictures/2021-06-23--water-quality-status/map-Quitman-Valdosta-Knights-Ferry-Withlacoochee-River.jpg)
Map: Quitman, Valdosta, Okapilco Creek, Knights Ferry Boat Ramp, Withlacoochee-River
in the WWALS
map of all public landings in the Suwannee River Basin.
These questions from a year ago still reflect many we get to this day: Continue reading
Update 2021-06-27: Cattle and hogs: Withlacoochee River water quality status 2021-06-27.
Going by WWALS water quality testing results for Thursday, it’s best to stay off the Withlacoochee River, and maybe the Alapaha River, for a few more days.
![[Bad Knights Ferry and Willacoochee Landing]](https://www.wwals.net/pictures/2021-06-24--wq/many.jpg)
Bad Knights Ferry and Willacoochee Landing
Very unusual: too-high E. coli on the Alapaha River, at Willacoochee Landing on GA 135 in Atkinson County, Georgia. Thanks to WWALS tester Valerie Folsom. There was a lot of rain upstream in the previous few days, which make me wonder about the city of Alapaha’s wastewater treatment plant.
Unfortunately expected: way-high E. coli on the Withlacoochee River, at Knights Ferry Boat Ramp, downstream of Okapilco Creek, with many thousand cattle in Brooks County, Georgia. Thanks to WWALS tester Michael Bachrach. Don’t be surprised if Quitman had a spill and gets around to reporting it about a week later.
Somewhat puzzling: downstream on the Withlacoochee results range from acceptable to clean as a whistle at Cleary Bluff, between Allen Ramp and the Suwannee River. Thaks to WWALS tester Gus Cleary. Even with the river high and fast after the recent rains, it takes a little while for the contamination to wash downstream. Three inches of rain fell in Brooks County Thursday, so don’t be surprised if things get dirty downstream.
We have no new data upstream of Knights Ferry, because we had a technical glitch with upstream WWALS tests.
Meanwhile, Valdosta has posted nothing newer than for Monday. They did catch up to last week with the downstream data, which corroborated what we already knew from WWALS tests.
The Tuesday too-high Madison Health result for the state line still has not appeared on the FDEP website. Continue reading
![[Chart, Map]](https://www.wwals.net/pictures/2021-07-02--wq/many.jpg)
![[Rainfall]](https://www.wwals.net/pictures/2021-07-06--elsa/rainfall-114641WPCQPF_sm.jpg)
![[Rivers, Letter]](https://www.wwals.net/pictures/2021-06-30--recreational/many.jpg)