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Nancy McClintock is Biologist and Manager of Environmental Resource Management Division with the City of Austin. Photo: Texas Environmental Center

Never pour motor oil (or anything else that's not water!) into a sewer. Service stations and garages that offer oil changes now accept your used motor oil, which can be cleaned and recycled. Photo: Texas Natural Resource Commission

The City of Austin is a national leader in water quality monitoring, regulation, and programs that address water pollution.

Ms. McClintock:
"Highly urbanized areas like Austin typically have a couple of different kinds of pollution to deal with. Pointsource pollution and nonpoint source pollution. PS is the kind of pollution you can trace back to a single point or site--think of an industrial discharge or sewage treatment plant discharge. Barton Creek is not industrialized at all and even the city of Austin is not very industrialized, so we don't have many of those types of problems here. But we do have the other kind--nonpoint source pollution.

"Nonpoint source pollution is the kind of pollution that may come from many of different activities that are happening all over the watershed. Landscaping practices, fertilizing your yard, getting rid of fire ants or fleas, illegal dumping into storm drains of oil or antifreeze, leaky sewer lines, littering--all these can be contributors to nonppoint source pollution. Their cumulative impact is tremendous, even though one particular thing may not contribute a big load.

"We monitor surface water--lakes and creeks. We monitor groundwater. We look at sediments in the creeks--the dirt that settles to the bottom, and we also do biological monitoring. So we get snails and worms and aquatic insects that live in typically live bottom of the creek. We can look at them and see how many they are, what kinds are living there, how diverse they are, and know a whole lot about how healthy the creek is.

"Given the wide array of pollutants we are trying to combat, the City of Austin has developed a very wide array of tools to do that. Among our best tools are the water quality ordinances that regulate development. Those ordinances do things like regulate the amount of impervious cover that a development can lay on the landscape. They require construction setbacks so you can't build too close to creeks, caves, springs and wetlands. They require things like water quality ponds to capture contaminated runoff and treat it before you discharges back into the creeks.

"Aside from all the ordinances and regulations and permitting and monitoring, one of the most important strategies to combat pollution is public education. We do a wide variety of public outreach: posters, billboards, brochures, we go to community meetings. We do whatever we can do to put good technical information in the hands of citizens and business owners."

This story is made possible in part through support from
The National Environmental Education Training Foundation.

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