Expert: Environmental protection necessary for responsible planning
Posted on Friday, May 16, 2008
BENTON COUNTY - The county landscape - as well as protection of the humans and creatures within it - was the topic Thursday night during a special presentation on karst topography.
The term karst originates from Kras, a limestone region of Slovenia where the first scientific research of this topography was made.
David Kampwerth, a karst biologist with the Arkansas field of the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service, gave a presentation on this topography at the Benton County Quorum Court Room on Thursday evening.
Karst landscapes form as surface water travels down through fractured carbonate bedrock, causing the rock to dissolve. Over time, water-transporting conduits form.
Karst landscapes are generally the result of mildly acidic water hitting the bedrock. What that means for Benton County is the creation of caves, sinkholes, springs and losing streams, the term for a surface stream that loses a significant amount of its flow to the subsurface through bedrock openings.
Twenty-three percent of the United States is in karst regions and are heavily regulated, Kampwerth said. Because of these conduits to groundwater, landowners must be careful regarding how land is developed - and what types of waste are released once that land is developed.
Although there are few sinkholes in Benton County, Kampwerth urges landowners to be mindful of suspicious holes in the ground that could form sinkholes.
"I've seen waste, car bodies, dead cows (in sinkholes )," Kampwerth said. "This is not just something you can put dirt in, because it's going to go to your neighbor somewhere."
These conduits can transport waste for miles each day - and as found in samples of groundwater obtained by the U. S. Geological Survey, there's a lot of waste in the county's groundwater.
That waste, which comes from businesses, homes and individuals alike, includes pesticides, motor oil and illegal drugs that run into streams.
"Every time we put something in our house, it all goes underground. We're all contributing to this problem," Kampwerth said.
Somehow, through all this waste, the protected Ozark cavefish - which lives in the water channels underground - has been able to withstand the pollution.
The solutions are to build adequately around these regions, as well as to implement proper stormwater-management programs to help offset the waste heading into the streams.
One solution, Kampwerth said, is to build detention ponds that can serve to detain stormwater and be used for home irrigation.
Continued protection of the cavefish is necessary, Kampwerth said, because if this species goes away," We're not far off," he said.
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