Here at the Young Adults Project, our Environmental Explorations class has made some observations and has been testing the water in a stream over by the Douglass Support Facility. We did a lot of water testing and found out that the water was not very clean. It was a brownish color. For the vegetation in the water and along the side of the banks there were trees, dead plants, and algae all along the stream’s floor. We saw a lot of rocks that had similarities around our stream and we’re not sure how they got there. We have written letters to the County but we have not gotten a response yet.
We have seen that human impact is a big problem for our stream. We have seen a lot of trash and also cars’ oil and gas runs off the roads and into our stream when it rains. Our class wants to be able to clean the stream so we picked up trash for community service. This was a part of a town project for Earth Day, called “Keep Leesburg Beautiful,” so we took advantage and got involved.
We want to be able to help the steam and the area around it as much as we can but we didn’t know who had jurisdiction of the stream. We wanted to know the name of the stream, too. We wrote letters to the Loudoun County Mapping Department and got an answer to some of our questions. We found out that the stream did not have a name, but it eventually flows into Goose Creek. One of the students in our class wanted to name the stream, so she wrote the name that she wanted it to be and why she wanted it to be named that. We’ll see what happens.
We believe that our class has done an excellent job on what we can do so far in our first year with Earth Force. We were honored when Staples VP Pat Girard visited our school to talk with us about our project ideas. We presented our project at the Youth Summit and enjoyed talking with all the business partners who were there to share information with the students.