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Muddy Waters
Better road maintenance, cleaner streams
Brook trout are not having an easy life these days. These native fish like living in cold, clean, undisturbed streams, a habitat that is increasingly hard to find as acid deposition and runoff from roads is polluting their waterways.

When fishermen in Pennsylvania discovered that the trout streams in their state were turning murky, some of them looked into the cause of this problem. They found that sand and gravel from dirt roads was washed into the streams, making the water murky, covering rock surfaces, and filling up the little cracks and holes between the rocks where some aquatic insects live. The muddy runoff was polluting the water and making it inhospitable for the brook trout and other aquatic life. (More about this in Watershed Radio's Mud Pollution.)

Although, statewide, dirt roads were not the main contributors to sediment in Pennsylvania's waterways, the dirt and gravel roads were threatening some of the state's best waterways; the cleanest streams are often in the most rural areas, which is where the dirt roads are.

Volunteers, including many Pennsylvania trout fishermen, set out to investigate how widespread the mud pollution problem was and what could be done about it. The solutions they came up with were not the same for every stream, but included clearing out and repairing culverts, diverting runoff away from the stream, and using crushed limestone to bind the soil and gravel together so it wouldn't get washed into the streams anymore.

For the full story about this dirt road maintenance in Pennsylvania, read "Better maintenance of dirt roads will pave the way to cleaner streams," an article in the Bay Journal.