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In This Issue:1. What's New?2. Our Website is popular! 3. Do You Remember? 4. Progress and Plans 5. Taking Care of Business 1. What's New?"SWAMP" is NEW to us this year ! "SWAMP" is an acronym that stands for "Surface Water Ambient Monitoring Program". We are now helping in this statewide program that is managed by the State Water Resources Control Board and the Regional Water Quality Control Boards. On April 26, and June 13, 2002 we helped staff from the Fresno office of the Regional Board collect samples from the S.F. Kings River, Lewis Creek, Ten Mile Creek, and Hume Lake. The samples were analyzed for fecal coliform, E-coli, and fecal streptococcus bacteria. The highest readings came from the June samples. The State budget problems prevented us from sampling in July and later when the readings may have been higher.April 26th samples were highest for total coliform of 110 MPN/100 ml (Most Probable Number per 100 milliliters) in Hume Lake at Long Meadow Cr. and at Ten Mile Cr. nr. the Hiway 180 Bridge. These compared to total coliform highs of 17 MPN/100 ml in Lewis Cr. and in the South Fork Kings River below Lewis Creek. Fecal streptococcus bacteria was highest at 30 MPN/100 ml at the South Fork Kings River downstream of Hotel Creek. June 13th samples showed high values of 1600 MPN/100 ml for fecal streptococcus at Ten Mile Creek near the Highway 180 bridge and total coliform of 500 MPN/100 ml from Hume Lake at Ten Mile Creek AND at Long Meadow Creek. Highs in the Cedar Grove area were for fecal streptococcus of 50 MPN/100 ml at the South Fork Kings River site just upstream of Copper Creek and 22 MPN/100 ml in Lewis Creek. We hope to find funding for these important analyses again in 2003, but the State budget is presently not looking good. ANY IDEAS?? 2. Our Website is popular!We can now answer some questions about who uses our website and how often. We have some new tools to help us view our progress in getting information out to people who are interested in this area. Thanks to web master John Schinnerer and server sysadmin John Howe for getting us these tools and data!During the year 2002 our site received about 3,400 visits from people all over the world! It received the most (571) visits in Nov. 2002 from as far away as Australia to Zimbabwe and only 2% of the usage came from U.S.Government computers! We are still learning how to best interpret all of these data, but it is clear that U.S. commercial and educational users were among the largest user groups and our most popular pages were the newsletters, monitoring, and photo gallery (contributions, anyone?). 3. Do You Remember?...when the bridge spanning the Kings River at Zumwalt Meadow was a suspension bridge?
(click on images for larger versions) |
It indeed was a suspension bridge prior to the 1990's. The bridge, in
the late 1940's, was a very narrow bridge and could really sway from side to side as you walked on it...not only did it sway, but not much to hold on to as you walked. High water would come and the bridge would end up down-stream. Each new bridge meant an improvement in construction of another bridge. Now there is a nice fixed bridge that we hope can withstand any flood.
(Historian: Emilia Wandro) 4. Progress and PlansEncouraged by the feedback we've received on our website use this past year, this next year we plan to keep trying to improve on "getting the word out" on what's going on in the South Fork Kings River, Kings Canyon, the National Park, National Forest, and National Monument.How can you help? Ask not what your canyon can do for you, ask what you can do for your canyon! We are interested in hearing from YOU! We want to continue building our base of interested folks who live and work in the local (Fresno, Tulare, Visalia...) area, but you all (you know where you are) mean a lot to us; LET US HEAR FROM YOU! We are looking for ideas on how to make the best use of our limited resources, so if you have ideas, opinions, or just thoughts to share...please speak up! We are looking for ideas on how to get samples taken, analyzed, and reported/displayed for everyone to use. Our website may be one resource that we need to focus some financial attention on as well. We hope to make web-site updates and additions/revisions something that more of us can do from home. We'd like to hear from you on your visits to the area, how successful you were, etc. Do you know of anyone who is looking for a good subject to study in college, or for any reason? We are still looking for someone who might like to learn more about the natural "nutrient cycle" in the South Fork Kings River and any other services to the community that you might have to offer. Do we have any Boy Scouts or other public service interests out there looking for a great area to focus a project on? How about a "River Day"where we can focus on picking up after those visitors who have left their debris along the rivers edge? We have been successful in getting the concerns for the river's health recognized, and we need to keep the interest stoked up! We still have more questions than answers, but we can now start to help them find the funding to work on answers to the many questions we have raised. 5. Taking Care of BusinessTreasurer's Report: Account Balance = $409.38.Thanks for your donations!!
Expenses: None due. We are officially "nonprofit" by both IRS and the CA FTB, so your donations are all tax deductible! If you'd like to become a member, please print out and fill in our membership form and mail it to us with your contribution. Thanks for your support !!Your Board of Directors:Marlene Ballard |
