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Red Cedar River (Michigan)

From Great Lakes Wiki

By Lauren Phillips

The Red Cedar is popular with local canoeists.

The Red Cedar River winds for more than 45 miles through farm fields, scenic villages and cramped cities. On a map, the 472-square mile area it drains – its watershed – looks like a giant puddle reaching into parts of five counties and covering an area the size of Los Angeles.

The watershed is a good proxy for many of Michigan’s rivers and streams. What ends up in the Red Cedar River can reach far beyond the local ecosystem. The same goes for five similar watersheds that also drain an ever-growing accumulation of pollutants into the Grand River. And it doesn’t stop there. The pollutants that go down the Red Cedar illustrate the constant loading of contaminants up and down Michigan’s watercourses.

“The Red Cedar dumps into the Grand River, which goes to Lake Michigan, which goes to the ocean,” said Ingham County Drain Commissioner Pat Lindemann. “What comes out of the Red Cedar River ends up in the ocean.”

[edit] Among the pressures that affect the Red Cedar’s water quality:

Rain washes contaminants into the river from an increasing number of roads, driveways, parking lots and roofs. Such runoff is the number one pollutant of U.S. streams, experts say.

There are 16 sewer plants and industrial facilities with permits to legally discharge up to 145 million gallons of wastewater a day within the Red Cedar watershed.

Bacteria associated with human or animal waste were at levels high enough that last year that portions of the Red Cedar failed to meet safe swimming guidelines 25 percent of the time.

The Red Cedar watershed has 36 industrial sites considered by the state to be contaminated, and 207 underground storage tanks that have leaked petroleum products.

Farm manure and pesticides potentially threaten the river, but their impact is hotly disputed.

Increasing development threatens fragile riverside habitats, impedes the land’s ability to cleanse water and causes flooding of homes and businesses.

Wetlands that mitigate flooding and provide habitat for wildlife are increasingly paved.

Medicines, perfumes, caffeine, lotions and other personal care products go down household drains and eventually into rivers like the Red Cedar. Sewage plants were never designed to filter such substances that some researchers link to health problems in fish, wildlife and perhaps humans.

[edit] Undeserved reputation

Still, while some MSU students nickname it “The Dead Sewer,” experts say the public perception of the Red Cedar River is much more negative than it deserves. In recent years, the river has actually improved.

John Hesse, an adjunct faculty member with MSU’s Fisheries and Wildlife Department, first heard about the river in 1965 when he left Idaho to pursue a graduate degree at MSU.

“They said, ‘MSU has a river flowing through the campus that’s the dirtiest river you’ve ever seen,’” Hesse said. He found the rumors true: “It looked rather bad back then.”

Feeding ducks on the north side of the Red Cedar River at the rapids near the MSU Administration building.

That was when the river had an abundance of duckweed and other algaes that flourish when water quality’s bad, Hesse said. Still, the fishing was “pretty good,” a sign of a certain level of water quality.

“Over the years, it’s gotten a lot better,” he said.

In 2000, Hesse collected fish from the Red Cedar River for the state Department of Environmental Quality to analyze for contaminants. The tests - at a cost of $16,000 – revealed excellent water quality.

“They’re cleaner than those species would be in an inner lake in the Upper Peninsula,” he said. The only state advisory on eating fish caught in the Red Cedar is for women and children to eat no more than one meal of carp a week.

“It’s not surprising,” said Joe Bohr, an aquatic biologist with the DEQ. “There’s not a serious problem there.”

Mercury and PCBs drive most fish advisories across the state but are present in relatively low concentrations in Red Cedar fish, Bohr said.

In fact, Hesse said that the river meets partial body contact standards 84 percent of the time, based on weekly surveys done by MSU WATER, a university initiative that promotes education about watersheds. Those same surveys show it’s OK to swim in the Red Cedar River 74 percent of the year.

“That surprises people,” he said.

Another indicator of good water quality is the macro invertebrates found in the river. The presence in parts of the river of insects like mayflies, caddisflies and other organisms are indicators of high water quality.

With many clean-up initiatives in recent years - efforts by student groups focusing on campus stretches of the river, increased efforts to comply with the Federal Clean Water Act - officials working with these projects say water quality has improved.

[edit] Problems remain

But it’s far from perfect.

The Ingham County Drain Commissioner’s office is in the middle of a series of tests to improve compliance with the federal Clean Water Act. The first phase was testing to get a basis for the levels of pollution in the river.

Port-a-john tipped into Red Cedar on MSU campus

“During the four year period, we’ve found it’s completely filthy,” Lindemann said. Most pollution stems from non-point sources, he said. That’s pollution where it’s hard to tell exactly where it comes from, unlike a waste pipe from a factory or a sewer plant. Contamination could come from dog poop on the side of a road or a car washed on a driveway that drains into the river. Researchers don’t know whose dog it is or where exactly the soap found in the river comes from.

Constantly evolving developments affect the amount of pollution and make sources hard to pinpoint. When a field is turned into a mall, water runs off the parking lot more quickly. That changes the quantity and quality of water entering the river.

Addressing such issues is complex on any stream. The Red Cedar is one of more than 400 Michigan water bodies on a list created for a federal program to tackle pollution.

Putting it on the list was easy. Getting it off may not be. The state is supposed to develop plans for such rivers that calculate their Total Maximum Daily Loads, or TMDLs, said Christine Alexander, an aquatic biologist with the DEQ. TMDLs are supposed to keep the river at a level for acceptable recreational use.

A plan won’t be in place until at least 2011. Government agencies and community groups with a stake in the clean up will start meeting closer to the year the plan is installed, Alexander said.

Meanwhile, the Red Cedar is a focus of the communities it flows through. It’s part of the MSU fight song. It’s the center of towns and a natural habitat in many urban environments. Many East Lansing student apartments butt up to the river’s edge, a major selling point.

Apartments aren’t the only part of the river bank that wasn’t here when settlers arrived. In fact, half the river wasn’t even here. About half of it was dug in the 1870s to drain farmland near Williamston. The headwaters, a small creek near road intersections in Williamston, now lie in the same type of swampy land it originally was made through. The upper river flows through rural areas; the lower part is highly urbanized. It stretches from its headwaters just north of Webberville eventually consolidating into a small creek and continuing as a river through Williamston, East Lansing and MSU before passing under highways into Lansing and emptying into the Grand River.

[edit] Trash magnet

The lower half winds between park-like banks, areas so tranquil it’s hard to tell there’s a major road just to the right or a subdivision to the left. Closer to MSU, businesses and apartments increasingly encroach until the parking lots go almost to the water. On campus the grassy banks become park-like again. But it’s here that a slew of items - bikes, shopping carts, the occasional Port-a-Potty - are thrown into the river.

Fallen branches and leaves create dams that accumulate the trash. One spotted recently downriver from MSU held pop bottles, a CD case, Meijer spray paint and a pair of Nike Air shoes. There are annual attempts to clean out the trash.

Chris Homeister, the Red Cedar River Clean-Up coordinator for the Fisheries and Wildlife Club, said among the items found by 50 volunteers on Oct. 23 were:

Trash in the Red Cedar

28 Bikes
39 Bags of trash
7 Folding chair/lawn chairs
3 Purses (2 with wallets in them)
4 Tables
1 Moped
1 Couch
2 Vacuums
1 Halloween Decoration (skeleton playing the piano)

But removing trash has little effect on the river's health, Lindemann said. It’s the behavior on land that needs to change. To preserve the river’s oxygen, people need to wash cars on lawns instead of driveways, quit dumping yard waste into streets and keep dumpster lids closed.

Education is key, Hesse said. He’d like to see signs along the river explaining the cycles of fish that live in it. And the avid angler would like to see the campus ban on fishing lifted.

“It’s perhaps the worst thing they could have done,” Hesse said. “It helps perpetuate the negative image of the river students hear about, if you don’t see anyone out there.”

It’s a persistent image. A random survey of 25 MSU undergraduates found 19 who wouldn’t fish, swim or canoe the Red Cedar because they thought it was too polluted.

[edit] Fighting the image

But others are combating that image. The MSU WATERgroup sets up a display near Spartan Stadium during homecoming. Baby rock bass, rainbow darters and other fish, insects and creatures indicative of a healthy river are taken from the Red Cedar and displayed in tanks in the high-traffic area. The display is met with fascination, disinterest and disbelief.

Football fans examine fish and other creatures captured from the Red Cedar River in aquariums outside of MSU's nearby Spartan Stadium on a football Saturday. The project is an attempt to make people aware that the river has rich biodiversity worth protecting.

“They assume that the river is dead,” said Ruth Kline-Robach, an MSU WATER collaborator and specialist at the MSU Water Research Institute. A lot of people don’t realize there are fish in the river, she said.

Those concerned with changing the image of the river say now is the time to do it, although they are unsure of the best way to reach people.

“Now’s the time it’s safest in 50 years,” Hess said. “I don’t know how we break this cycle.”

It isn’t easy, Lindemann said.

“Constant site plan reviews, townships putting in new subdivisions, fixing old storm water systems - it’s a constant struggle,” he said. “You can’t click your fingers and make it go away instantly.

“In order to stop that, you have to change people. I don’t know how to reach everyone. It’s going to take awhile.”

Katie Coleman, Claire Cummings, Andrew Engel, Jackie Franzil, Yu-Ting Lin, Thomas Morgan and Danielle Masterson contributed to this report.