Grant Award Will Support Continued Chloride Monitoring in Starkweather Creek

A $10,000 Community-Based Water Research Grant from UW-Madison will fund a partnership to monitor chloride contamination in Madison’s Starkweather Creek watershed, a 24-square-mile basin that includes the northeast Darbo-Worthington and Truax neighborhoods and empties into Lake Monona.

Increased chloride loads have long-term, non-reversable impacts on groundwater, drinking water, and Lake Monona water quality. Monitoring chloride levels is thus critical to the health of the watershed, especially since just one teaspoon of salt is all it takes to make five gallons of water toxic for freshwater organisms.

The grant will help CARPC and our project partners, including City of Madison Engineering, Friends of Starkweather Creek, and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR), collect better data, ultimately building a more complete understanding of how chloride levels fluctuate with changing stream and weather conditions. Young adults participating in Operation Fresh Start will be trained to install and maintain the monitors and map the collected data.

CARPC and its partners hope to engage and educate the 50,000 residents living within the Starkweather Creek watershed to take an active part in stewardship of the creek and follow Wisconsin Salt Wise’s recommendations when salting their driveways after winter storms.

This project builds on CARPC’s four-year effort to manage chlorides in Starkweather Creek, beginning with the adoption of the Starkweather Creek Watershed Chloride Management Plan in 2020. Since then, over 40 local volunteers have conducted more than 200 chloride tests on samples from 9 sites along Starkweather Creek. Other implementation actions have included increasing awareness of chloride impacts and encouraging reductions in chloride use among key stakeholders.