CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Dozens of students from Kanawha County learned about the importance of clean water and the effect it has on our lives and the environment by participating in the 2015 Annual Charleston Water Festival Thursday at the State Capitol.
Both Point Harmony and Ruthlawn Elementary school students took part in six different water stations ran by state employees.
The stations included: Water Conservation, Acid Rain, Aquatic Habitat, Macro Mayhem, Stream Ecology and Tree Life Cycle.
West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection worker Glenn Nelson was the leader for the Aquatic Habitat station that teaches children about bugs that are found in West Virginia streams.
“We talk about, obviously, the chemical spill that happened here, the importance of water, so what proportions of our Earth is water. Ultimately, break it down to how small amount of water is available to us as humans, how we should take care of it and how it all connects to our own health,” said Nelson.
Nelson said the Macro Mayhem station allowed kids to act as bugs and others to act as pollution by playing a form of tag with swimming noodles.
“They get to whack each other. If they get ‘whacked’ by pollution, they go from being a sensitive bug to a tolerant bug,” he said.
Kids even learned about the most basic thing about water, said Nelson.
“Unfortunately, I’ve had students come up and be like ‘I’ve never seen a pond or a lake’ or ‘I’ve never saw these bugs’ or ‘I’m scared of bugs’ whereas at the end they’re like ‘Wow these things are pretty cool. They do relate to us.'”
Carissa Turley and Ken Poland, also DEP workers, hosted the Macro Mayhem station. Turley said the festival was a good way to show kids how stream populations work.
“(It shows) how we come in and get a very good judgement of how the stream health is in just one simple bug collection,” Turley said.
Ultimately, Poland said water effects our lives in many ways that young children need to know about.
“Using it for recreational purposes, you can be affected by what’s in the water. For drinking water, for transportation, it touches all aspects of our lives in various ways and we, likewise, effect it in various ways,” said Poland.
Other companies that participated in Thursday’s event included: West Virginia American Water, the New River Gorge National Park Service, the West Virginia Save our Streams and the West Virginia Division of Forestry.
The Marshall University Water Festival will be held in Huntington Sept. 17.