Protecting the Gems

This semester, I acquired an internship with the city of Dayton's department of aviation. As an intern for the city, I was given a brief rundown of the cities political structure and got to meet some influential city workers. After a casual tour of the Dayton International Airport (DAY), I learned of one action that city takes to guard its precious watershed--to protect its gems!

It all starts as October rolls around and those cold north winds get to blowing. As autumn gives way to winter, the airplanes at DAY have to be sprayed down with a de-icing fluid before each flight. The issue, however, is that once the planes have been sprayed down, gallons of this fluid are left on the black-top where they can be swept into the near-by creek which runs  into the Stillwater River. In preparation of this problem, the Environmentalist and Engineers at the airport created a collection system that captures these chemicals to keep them from contaminating the water ways. As you can imagine, this collection process is no cheap task (trust me, I calculated the estimated cost for this winter).

As river stewards, we can understand the significance of our watershed and we know why it is important to keep them healthy, but sometimes I feel like we are the only ones. However, I share this story because I was very encouraged to see that the city was taking seriously their stewardship of the river and that we are not alone in efforts to protect the cities gems.

-Alexander