Testing Of One New Drain Site and Retest Of Three Others On Four Pole Creek

Site Descriptions and Conclusions:

Repeat Testing at beginning of Four-Pole (Country) vs End (After Southside Drainage)

 

         Number of Blue Colonies                    Coliforms/dl

 Beginning Sample #1                        19                                                1900                                                                                               

 Beginning Sample #2                        20                                                2000                                                                                                 

 End Sample #1                                  39                                                3900                                                                                                                             

 End Sample 2                                    36                                                3600                                                                                                           

The date we have here is just the opposite of what we saw the first time we sampled from these same sites.  During the first series, we saw slightly higher coliform counts in the beginning, after country systems and before south side huntington. This second time, we saw higher coliform counts after the south side and lower counts after the country systems vs. after south side.  Another difference is that there were significantly higher coliform counts when counting the sum of both before and after in this last experiment. This is probably because the creek was higher, following heavy rain the day before, which seems to lead to a "catching" of leachate from septic tanks in the country and possibly broken sewer lines on the south side.  We will need to repeat these sites once more and try to arrive at some   conclusions from the data.                                                                                                                       

Study of Fecal Levels from Upstream 4-Pole (septic tanks) vs. Southside Huntington

The purpose of this study was to determine fecal coliform levels in 4-Pole after the stream has gone through
rural areas which have septic tank sewage treatment (or no treatment) and then measure the same thing as the stream flows through Ritter Park, which drains areas on the south side of Huntington, in which sewage treatment is in place. We took two replicate samples from 4-Pole across from the foot of HHS hill. This represented the rural systems. We then took two replicate samples from the stream at the end of Ritter Park, after it had flowed through the south side. We need to find out: 1. Do the rural systems leak greater or lesser levels of fecal coliforms than the area served by the city system.  2. Are the fecal coliform levels we have gotten previously (thousands/dl) in the south side city area the result of drain pipes containing sewage leakage into 4-Pole or just the accumulation from the rural systems upstream plus sewage leakage from the south side.

Results:

             Samples                   # Blue Colonies                Fecal Coliforms/deciliter
                                                    
                                           0.1ml    1ml     5ml
            
             B1                            0          7        36                          720

             B2                            1          7        27                          540

             E1                            0          2        14                          280

             E2                            0          1        22                          440

Where B1 and B2 are replicate samples from a site (Below HHS) representing the effect of rural coliform leakage, and E1 and E2, which were taken after the creek has flowed through the south side of Huntington.