Chemical spill from Country Oven Bakery affects Jennings Creek
BOWLING GREEN, Ky. – The City of Bowling Green’s Public Works Department found a chemical spill caused by a local factory that impacts Jennings Creek.
“They were seeing some algae and some formations in the creek that weren’t normal… We found that the stream was experiencing incredibly depressed, dissolved oxygen and depressed PH numbers… which in ordinary terms is a red sludge,” Matt Powell, Environmental Manager for the City of Bowling Green says.
Staff at Western Kentucky University were conducting a study at the creek, when they found the contamination.
“We were able to realize that it was something out in the basin. We alerted the city to the problem to let them know that we thought there may be something. The rest of it was a multi partnership engagement of various different folks trying to go out and figure out what was happening, what the source was, what might be the problem,” Dr. Jason Polk, CHNGES Department professor at WKU says.
If the city did not act upon it immediately, there could have been dire consequences for the creek.
“The good news is that in finding and sort of resolving the situation pretty quickly, it didn’t have as much long term impact on the creek and it can resolve itself typically because these types of issues where you have a bacterial explosion based on some nutrients or some of the things getting in a creek that that create a great environment for them to sort of grow,” Polk says.
The city is requesting your help as well to make sure the water in all streams are kept clean.
“In a cave area where all of our water is interconnected between the surface, the subsurface and the surface again. Anything that you do on top of the ground, even though it seems out of sight, out of mind, if it washes away, it’s going to find its way into a sinkhole. Everything that you can do to make sure nothing is lying around or is spilled in such a fashion that rainwater will carry it away will do a lot to protect our local streams,” Powell says.
