Neither snow nor rain nor dark of night stops members of the French Creek Pennsylvania Senior Environment Corp from doing their part to keep an eye on French Creek’s health.

These volunteers are active year round, doing monthly water chemistry tests and biannual macroinvertebrate studies. Members regularly gather to collect samples from area streams and take them to a lab at Allegheny College for analysis.

In addition to the actual field-testing days, the French Creek PaSEC meets monthly. Recent guest speakers included Jennifer Hill from the DEP’s Northwest Regional Office who spoke about Total Maximum Daily Loads as a way to determine the greatest amount of a given pollutant that a water body can receive without violating water quality standards and designated uses.

With so many miles of water to check, the French Creek, PaSEC would like to expand its group and train new members to cover more testing sites in Crawford County. Anyone aged 55 and over is invited to join volunteers in the field to learn about what the group is doing. Those that find it interesting are invited to go to meetings and to undergo hands-on training sessions.

Meadville resident Clara Sheakley became interested in the PaSEC by talking with some members, and she decided to give it a try. Heading out into the field with the group, Sheakley says, “Tests have always fascinated me. It’s interesting to see what information you can gather from a jug of water!”

Because she does not have a background in chemistry, she admits it was intimidating at first. “It’s scary, but the manual lays out the steps – it’s doable.” Sheakley also finds the fellow group members to be extremely helpful and friendly. “The others seem to be really devoted to what they are doing. They are very serious about it.”

The PaSEC uses standardized protocols to assess physical, chemical, and biological indicators in streams. This data can be used as a screening tool to determine where further study is needed and the success or failure of restoration efforts. The data is housed in a database that includes an open component with fields for a limited number of parameters and can be utilized by other volunteer monitoring groups not following the PaSEC's standardized protocols.

The French Creek PaSEC is a part of a statewide program created by DEP’s Citizens’ Volunteer Monitoring Program and the Environmental Alliance for Senior Involvement.

For more information about the French Creek PaSEC contact Crawford County RSVP at 814-335-6111 or visit the Pennsylvania Senior Environment Corps webpage.

2/10/2006