Fauna, Water Quality
Providing habitat to more than 80 species of fish and 26 species of freshwater mussels, French Creek is among the most biologically diverse streams in the northeastern United States.
Environmental concerns about the creek's water quality have been raised since at least the 1990s. Improvements to sewage treatment plants in Meadville, Cambridge Springs, and Saegertown have helped reduce the amount of chlorine and other chemicals entering the stream. Farm and highway runoff, malfunctioning septic systems, erosion, sedimentation, invasive species, and damaged riparian zones are other problems affecting the creek. The French Creek Project, organized in 1995, sponsors French Creek music festivals, ecology tours, and watershed classes for the public. The creek won the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources award for River of the Year in 2003.
Read more about this topic: French Creek (Allegheny River)
Famous quotes containing the words water and/or quality:
“The dominant and most deep-dyed trait of the journalist is his timorousness. Where the novelist fearlessly plunges into the water of self-exposure, the journalist stands trembling on the shore in his beach robe.... The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the griefs and shames of others.”
—Janet Malcolm (b. 1934)
“A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)