Prevent pollution? There’s an app for that

Mecklenburg County residents can add one more item to the growing list of uses for their smartphones: reporting water pollution.

Charlotte Mecklenburg Storm Water Services launched a new app in February called Water Watchers, which lets users report pollution in local creeks, streams and lakes. Since then, Water Watchers has seen four to five downloads a day of the app, and received seven pollution reports since March submitted by the app’s 300-some users.*

“We encourage people in their neighborhoods walking their dog or running on the greenway to let us know when they notice something unusual,” said city water quality educator Jennifer Frost. “It’s an easy thing, but it helps staff a lot.”

Water Watchers lets the department’s 150 staff members, who monitor and maintain more than 6,000 miles of creeks and stormwater pipes, tap into thousands of smartphone users – putting more eyes on local water.

The app, which cost $20,000 to develop, supplements the department’s aging storm water telephone hotline, which receives about 500 service requests a year. Frost said calls to the hotline aren’t always clear, making it difficult to locate and fix problems callers are reporting.

The Water Watchers app addresses this by asking users for photos and brief descriptions of pollution sites. That lets Storm Water Services staff diagnose the problem themselves instead of relying on caller descriptions. The app also records the user’s location at the time of the report using the smartphone’s GPS. That lets users, wandering in a park or walking through an unfamiliar part of the city, report pollution without knowing their exact location.

“Answering these calls, we always thought it would be nice to have a picture of what was happening. The app was a natural fit to get these photos,” said Frost.

The app also has tools for Storm Water Services’ existing volunteers. Adopt-A-Stream groups, which volunteer to walk and clean up creeks, can submit stream clean-up reports, recording what they pick up and where they stockpile the trash. Volunteer monitoring groups – local residents trained to test the health of local streams – can submit their findings complete with water sample measurements from a government-provided chemistry kit.

Volunteers and laypeople around the county have spotted several pollution sources around the city. One Water Watcher user report of white water coming out of a storm drain revealed that local painters were washing their brushes in another storm drain up the street.

The photo below, also reported with Water Watcher, shows murky, muddy water from uptown construction runoff during a recent storm at the site of the county’s unfinished Romare Bearden Park. (Soil that isn’t contained to construction sites contributes to one of the county’s top stream pollution problems, sedimentation. To read the city’s erosion control ordinance click here.)

In both cases, Storm Water Services fixed the problems with simple solutions: Giving a warning to the painters, and getting the construction site to install silt fences and storm drain covers.

* Correction, June 5, 2013: An earlier version of this article erred in saying there had been four to five pollution reports daily.