Your #RaiseTheRegion2026 donations can help get water sampling and tech gear to make a bigger impact across our watershed

​Imagine a moment a white ceramic bowl filled with your favorite fruity or chocolate cereal. Fruit Loops, Fruity Pebbles, Count Chocula, Cocoa Pebbles. You pour in some pure white milk, let it sit a moment and then start snagging the semi-soggy cereal with your spoon.

By the time you work your way down to the milk in the bottom of the bowl, what do you find?

In most cases, the milk isn’t as white as it once was. The dyes, sugars and more have “contaminated” it, not just in color, but in taste, too.

That’s the visual I get every time we get more information on the PFOS concerns in Columbia County … where more than a year ago, news reports started sharing stories of forever chemicals in the groundwater and wells near the Brookside Village Mobile Home park community. The source, according to the Department of Environmental Protection connected back to biosolids (sewage sludge) used on nearby farm fields in the 1980s and 90s as a fertilizer and way to dispose of the waste.

Then, for the past couple decades, rain and snow acted like the milk from our cereal visual, dissolving the biosolids. Some likely ran off into nearby streams, but most of it percolated into the ground and worked into the underground aquifer.

The practice of spreading biosolid waste isn’t an isolated one. Fields across the greater watershed have been enrolled in similar practices for decades, and the likelihood of more communities unknowingly drinking, bathing in and using contaminated water for cooking and other daily needs.

Identifying those sites will take water sampling … something we have urged homeowners to consider numerous times before. Unfortunately, sampling can be expensive, especially when you add in emerging contaminants like PFAS, microplastics and pharmaceuticals.

Help us help families across the greater watershed by donating specifically to our water sampling and tech equipment fund during #RaiseTheRegion2026. The more sites we have testing done at, the better the bigger picture becomes on what contamination issues we face and where they may originate. It is like a large connect-the-dot puzzle and each water sample gives us another key dot to define the need.

In addition to the water sampling, this fund is focused on helping us stay ahead of tech advances in our watershed. We have been heavily involved in using BirdWeather tech to track bird species and their connections to streams that are clean vs. contaminated. Now, there is a bat version of this cool new tech, and bats play an instrumental role in reducing insects around waterways. We'd love to get this new tool added to our network of monitoring. 

Again, your donation to this vital fund during #RaiseTheRegion2026 is a huge help.