Conservation group hosts its first

Jan 25, 2024

Izaak Walton League led the efforts, collaborating with Cedar Rapids city staff

May. 24, 2023 6:00 am, Updated: May. 24, 2023 11:41 am

CEDAR RAPIDS — In the cool morning air, Candice Kucera walked to the edge of a small pier jutting out from Cedar Rapids’ Mohawk Park into the Cedar River. She grasped a small bucket-like container in one hand, tied to a rope she held in her other palm.

In one fluid motion, she launched the container into the air. It landed with a splash. Hand over hand, she pulled it back to the pier with the rope — and was rewarded with a full bucket of river water for her efforts.

Kucera — a city of Cedar Rapids water quality analyst — stood on the pier with several other city staffers and members of the conservation organization the Izaak Walton League. Together, the group participated Tuesday in the league's first-ever "clean water snapshot" of nitrate levels in the Cedar River.

Nitrate is a form of nitrogen that's a pervasive pollutant in Iowa's waterways, typically originating from agricultural runoff. The Cedar River has a history of nitrate impairment tracing back to at least 2006, when a water quality protection plan was created to combat the contaminant.

The Izaak Walton League aims to fill in monitoring gaps and encourage water quality conservation with its snapshot.

"People are really looking at water quality. Particularly in Iowa, nitrates are such an important part of that because of our big agricultural presence," said Neil Mittelberg, the chair of the league's Linn Chapter conservation committee. "There's just a statewide interest in looking at (nitrate), monitoring it and really trying to keep an eye on it."

The Izaak Walton League is a nationwide conservation organization that has an Iowa division with local chapters. There are about 725 members in the Linn County chapter, which is based in northeast Cedar Rapids.

The league has been hosting a similar testing initiative for mapping chloride concentrations in waterways, called Salt Watch, for more than five years. The effort aims to monitor road salt's impacts on aquatic ecosystems. This February, the league launched Nitrate Watch to include another common contaminant in its monitoring.

Nitrate levels in drinking water are regulated at 10 milligrams per liter or less under the Safe Drinking Water Act to protect infants from blue baby syndrome. There's also emerging evidence that elevated nitrate levels could present risks to adults like cancer, although there's no scientific consensus yet.

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The "clean water snapshot" took place Tuesday along the Cedar River, both upstream and downstream of Cedar Rapids. Citizen scientists also tested around Cedar Falls and Waterloo and as far north as Osage. It marked the league's first such event along the waterway, drawing at least a dozen participants.

A parallel — and even larger — effort also took place in the Raccoon River watershed upstream of Des Moines, where the league has been active for years.

Once Kucera collected her samples from the Cedar River, members of the Izaak Walton League used their own nitrate testing kits to get an idea of nitrate levels.

Mittelberg dipped what looked like a skinny white slice of paper into the water and quickly pulled it out. Thirty seconds later, he examined the paper — where a spot had turned a shade of pink. He matched it to the labels on the kit's bottle: a beige color signified very low nitrate levels, and a bright magenta signified high levels.

Mittelberg's pink color aligned with levels between 5 and 10 parts per million. A sample taken at another location downstream showed a similar hue.

The result, along with all other results from the snapshot, will be uploaded online at the Clean Water Hub — a publicly available database run by the Izaak Walton League where people across the country can input their water monitoring results. The hub has a specific site dedicated to Nitrate Watch.

Cedar Rapids staff will upload their own analysis of Tuesday's water samples, which will include nitrate data and other variables. The results should go online within a week.

Results from the basic nitrate testing kits are simple and not precise. But they can act as directional indicators of water quality across the watershed, said Justin Schroeder, the city's utilities laboratory manager.

"These partnerships help us tell the larger picture, the larger story of what's going on in our watershed," he said. "For us, it's all about just expanding those partnerships and continuing to educate the people about what's happening in our watershed."

The snapshot took place just days after nitrate levels in the Cedar River spiked, according to provisional data collected by a U.S. Geological Survey sensor near Palo.

Nitrite levels in the waterway peaked at 12.9 milligrams per liter Friday night. Levels stayed above 10 milligrams per liter — the safe drinking water limit — from last Wednesday to early Tuesday morning.

Cedar Rapids drinking water is drawn from below the riverbed downstream with wells. As the water percolates through the riverbed, sand and gravel help purify it from contaminants like nitrate. Therefore, the city's source water is less affected by surface pollutants.

This past weekend, for example, some wells did see small spikes in nitrate levels. But none of them exceeded 10 milligrams per liter. Water collected from the wells can be blended together to decrease nitrate levels in the source water, and more affected wells can be taken offline if needed.

"Spikes like this aren't abnormal during rainy seasons," Schroeder said. "There's no significant or notable impact to our finished water quality from the little spike that we saw this weekend."

The snapshot also came on the heels of Iowa lawmakers passing a bill that transferred $500,000 from Iowa State University's Nutrient Research Fund into the state Agriculture Department's Water Quality Initiative Fund. The transfer could put at risk the network of sensors that measure nitrogen and phosphorus levels in Iowa waterways.

That makes the league's efforts especially important for two reasons, said the league's Iowa division President Dale Braun: "One is to obviously get the measurements. The other is to show people that there are organizations that care about water monitoring."

In November, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources proposed to withdraw a water quality improvement plan for the Cedar River watershed created to help keep Cedar Rapids’ drinking water safe from nitrate contamination. The department also deemed the river segment in question as unimpaired for nitrates — a classification several water quality experts were at odds with, The Gazette reported.

As of last week, the Iowa DNR didn't have any updates on its proposal to remove the plan, the department told The Gazette.

Brittney J. Miller is the Energy & Environment Reporter for The Gazette and a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues. Comments: (319) 398-8370; [email protected]