Morgantown Dominion Post
10 October 2005
By Kathy Plum
So what's a watershed association and who needs it anyway?
Ask Evan Hansen or any of a host of others in Preston and Monongalia counties, and they'll tell you it's a way of accomplishing something good across county, political and economic lines, in a way no single corporation or government entity could.
Why would they want to?
"The thing about water is what happens upstream affects you downstream," Hansen said. "We're all connected in that way."
To quote the Friends of Deckers Creek's annual report, "A community can transform its environmental liabilities into productive economic assets." That connection between economy and ecology will keep watersheds strong, Hansen said.
"The watershed groups have an important part that no one else is filling," he added.
The W.Va. Department of Environmental Protection selected Hansen, 39, of Morgantown, for its Guiding Light Award this year, in recognition of his work toward that result. He received the award last month at the annual Watershed Celebration Day.
Two other local groups also were honored. Friends of Deckers Creek, where Hansen is president of the board of directors, won an award for urban work, while Friends of the Cheat shared the recreation award.
"Evan Hansen truly is a great resource to watershed groups in the state," Friends of Cheat Director Keith Pitzer said.
In his role with the West Virginia Rivers Coalition, Hansen reviews permits and provides technical information to groups that otherwise would not have a source of this information, Pitzer said.
"Evan understands the technical aspects of issues and can communicate that understanding into terms the rest of us can understand," Pitzer said.
Hansen was raised in New Jersey, about 20 miles from New York City, but he enjoyed hiking, camping and other outdoor recreation. When he went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he majored in computer science and engineering, and used those skills the next seven years to write computer software at Tellus in Boston for environmentalists.
For example, he wrote a program that estimated the trend for water supply needs in rivers, "thinking forward," Hansen said.
He returned to school for a master's degree in energy and resources at the University of California at Berkley.
In 1997, he and his wife moved to Morgantown.
"We liked it," he said. "We had known people who had lived here, and we had visited here and thought it was a nice small town and we would like to live here."
Now he divides his time between his own firm, Downstream Strategies LLC, and the West Virginia Rivers Coalition. Across the state, he has observed a pattern in how watershed groups develop.
Often they begin with picking up trash along streams, then realize they need a monitoring program to expand. The third step is partnering with other organizations and finding money for restoration and preservation.
Pitzer points to progress in cleaning up acid mine drainage in the Cheat Narrows as an example of where that third step can lead. Trout for Cheat started stocking there three years ago.
"What would the impact be if the entire river and streams feeding it from Pringle Run downstream were fishable?" he said. "The lower Cheat watershed would be a fishing destination for many people in and out of state, much like the Potomac, Youghiogheny and Casselman, to name a few. That would certainly be positive economic impact for the surrounding community."
The money that watershed associations spend trickles down, the men said. In the past year, Friends of the Cheat has brought $675,000 in acid-mine-drainage treatment work to the local area. That includes $580,000 spent with engineering firms, contractors and suppliers.
"This is just through FOC, a small nonprofit watershed group," Pitzer said. "This amount is a fraction of what the state is spending each year for construction and treatment costs at local mineoperation sites that forfeited bonds a decade or more ago. This cost impacts the local economy through local contracts and suppliers."
Friends of Deckers Creek estimated the $2 million spend on restoring that stream, along with $8.2 million allocated for more cleanup, will generate $14 million in local economic impact when contractors buy goods and services, and another $5 million in payroll.
There's a more immediate benefit too. Hansen talked with someone who described how schoolchildren in Boulder, Col., would play in a stream on their way home. No one would dream of doing that now in Deckers Creek, but the day could come, he said.
"A lot of people out there realize there is an alternative and it is a solvable problem," Hansen said.
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