Environment
Aired December 18 and 19, 1999
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This is Internet on the Air. I’m Joan Silvi. Have you surfed your
watershed lately? Details in a moment.
Funding Credit: Internet On The Air is a production of the University of Michigan School
of Information and Michigan radio, made possible by a grant from the W.K. Kellogg
Foundation.
Are you interested in finding out how healthy the rivers and streams are in your
community? You can look up the report card for your watershed on the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency’s Web site. Find out where your drinking water comes from, what
chemicals may be present in local water bodies, and which aquatic species may be
endangered due to poor water quality.
Another interesting feature of the EPA site is the EnviroMapper for Watersheds, which
allows users to view spatial data at the national, state, and county levels using a GIS,
or Geographical Information Systems, application. Users can zoom in to see whether
it’s safe to eat the fish in their area, and where runoff from rain and storm sewers
ultimately winds up.
The Rouge River is the local watershed for many residents of southeastern Michigan.
Communities along the Rouge are developing innovative ways to revitalize the river,
including a Web site that promotes public outreach and involvement. According to Barb
Farrah, Community Relations Director of the Rouge Project, high school students are
collecting water quality samples and conducting bug counts for school projects. Students
and their parents can then log in to rougeriver.com to see the information that their
class has collected. The web site gets the whole family involved and educated about the
river in an exciting and creative way.
To find out how to get involved in other Rouge River activities, or in the watershed in
your community, visit our site at www.iota.org. For Internet on the Air, I’m Joan
Silvi.
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The Interview
IOTA interviewed Barb Farrah in December 1999.
How does rougeriver.com involve students in
the river redevelopment?
We have a students and teachers page on our site. The Friends of the Rouge, which is a
non-profit organization that has given us a lot of public relations [assistance] and has
done wonderful things for the Rouge, runs a public education project. They go into the
schools and give teachers a curriculum to show them what they can do with students. The
students, in addition to learning, get to do actual water quality testing out in portions
of the Rouge that are in their community.
The students actually visit the site quite often. A lot of them use it for term papers
and for their projects in school, as well as general interest to learn more about what
they’re getting in school. Usually a lot of times when students visit the site,
they’re the ones who e-mail questions (they’ve got more technological savvy than
their parents, maybe?). They’ll e-mail us back and ask us questions, and tell us what
they’re doing, and then we give them ideas for what else they could be thinking about
or doing. It’s exciting for us to know that they’re using the site for different
projects in schools.
What are the most effective aspects of the
site?
We try to put everything that we create or that has been produced, on the site. One of
our major goals is to get [all the documents related to the project] on there so that they
can be downloaded. Because it’s a National Wet Weather Demonstration project, and
therefore federally funded, we try to promote it not just in southeastern Michigan and the
Rouge watershed, but throughout the entire country, and the world, for example,
Switzerland and other places where there are projects like ours.
What we want is for people who see a brochure, or something we’ve designed for
public education, to be able to download it and re-create it to fit their community
profile. Actual programs that we’ve developed, for instance the River Friendly
Partners program, which deals with the business community. We go in and teach businesses
what they can do to implement best management practices within their own business, such as
an auto repair shop or a dry cleaners. Businesses we’ve started with are ones that
have more critical environmental issues. We teach them [best management practices] and
hope that they teach their employees and once they pass the criteria of the program they
get recognized as a River Friendly Partner. They can then pass out stickers within their
own community, and other materials that we supply, in order to educate their community. It
helps to promote their business, and the people who are involved with the project and who
are environmentally conscious, will hopefully go to these businesses more than they would
to a business that doesn’t follow these rules. We’ve had people in different
places in the country who’ve seen these programs and have adapted them to their own
piece of the country. Other people have adopted whole programs from our Web site to put
into their own communities.
How successful do you feel rougeriver.com
has been?
After we got our own domain name, rougeriver.com, and started marketing it, telling
people, this is where you come for information, we jumped to about 50,000 hits a month.
It’s exciting to know that there are 48 communities in the Rouge watershed that
spread over three counties, with 1.5 million people living in the watershed. Not that all
the [hits] are coming from the watershed, but 50,000 people are interested in coming every
month and finding out what’s going on. We know that our word is getting out and that
the information is spreading.
How has the Web site changed the way you do
your work?
We have a Rouge hotline, so people can always call in and request materials. We used to
have a products catalog, which was a hard copy catalog that we had to reprint every six
months when we updated [the new products]. It was so costly that we only did it every six
months, rather than monthly. Now our whole products catalog is on our Web site, so we
update it as items come in. If someone were to call and say we need a copy of the products
catalog, we would just print it off of our Web site. What’s nice is you can see
product descriptions on-line, and order it right off the Web, and we will send you a hard
copy, or you can download it. That’s one of our biggest goals - to have people doing
it themselves so that we’re not wasting our resources.
How would you compare your efforts to that
of other local governments or entities pursuing similar ends?
I like to think we’re on the cutting edge. It’s been our goal for a couple of
years and we’re finally starting to see it take hold within the communities. When
people call us we tell them, “Did you know we had a Web site?” and they’ll
go to the Web site and that answers all their questions. It’s easier for them because
they can find what they need directly. I do think that having all of our products on-line
is something new. A lot of people are still only to the point, at least in government,
where some information is on-line that you can read, but then you need to call a phone
number for more information. Not that we don’t want human contact, but we’d like
to spend our time and resources either working directly one on one with a group of
students or teaching groups of people and doing things that are more productive than
sitting on a phone taking orders for things that people can get off the Web.
Please direct questions or comments to iota.webmaster@umich.edu.
Last Updated December 17, 1999
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