Experts tour Carpenter Creek before public kickoff meeting to create restoration plan

• The county is working on a way to restore the water quality and the community connection with Carpenter Creek.
• Carpenter Creek runs four miles, behind neighborhoods, and shopping centers and under busy roads, eventually becoming Bayou Texar and emptying into the bay.
• As part of the research for the plan, the project has uncovered historical accounts of the creek, including a colonial-era British mill on the creek and a swimming hole that was used by children

Moving through a fog-covered tangle of vines, shrubs and trees, a group of engineers, scientists and county employees made their way Tuesday to the edge of Carpenter Creek, a few hundred yards south of the creek's headwaters.

The group marveled at the flow of a small creek through a network of fallen branches and exposed roots. This far north, the creek is only a couple of feet wide, but it's also prime habitat for indicator species that will provide information on the creek's water quality, according to Mary Szafraniec, technical director of water resources for the environmental and infrastructure company Wood.

"There's a lot of roots," Szafraniec said. "It's all a kind of structure for macro-invertebrates, little bugs that live in in the water that tell you if there's good water quality."

Szafraniec and the group spent Tuesday traveling to 18 sites along the creek to get an on-the-ground view of it before the county holds its kickoff public meeting for a restoration plan for the creek at 6 p.m. today at the Booker T. Washington High School auditorium.

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Wood is the company Escambia County hired to lead its effort to develop the restoration plan for the creek and its watershed, which includes some of most populated parts of the county and city. The company has brought in others to help with the plan, including SCAPE Landscape Architecture.

While just a few feet wide at its headwaters off Olive Road, as the creek makes its way behind neighborhoods and shopping centers through Pensacola, it widens out along its four-mile route, becoming Bayou Texar and emptying into Pensacola Bay.

The creek crosses under some of the busiest roads in the city and county — Interstate 10, Burgess Road, Interstate 110, Davis Highway, Airport Boulevard, Bayou Boulevard and Ninth Avenue — but most drivers are unaware they are crossing over the waterway.

Part of the aim of Escambia County's plan is to restore the community connection to that waterway. At the kickoff meeting, there will be a "watershed storybooth" for people to record their memories, ideas and suggestions for making the creek and bayou more accessible to the public.

"Carpenter Creek and Bayou Texar have a unique place in the history of Escambia County. We want to capture that history, and the experiences of people who have used and still use that waterway," Lee Altman, senior associate with SCAPE, said in a press release announcing the meeting. "We want to collect those stories and learn from them as we develop a holistic plan to restore the environmental, economic, and cultural health of the watershed."

As part of research for the plan, the project has uncovered historical accounts of the creek, including a colonial-era British mill on the creek and a swimming hole that was used by children of all races, despite the segregation in place everywhere else across the county at the time.

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After a century of mostly unrestricted development, the creek has lost much of its original appeal, but the goal of the restoration plan is to restore the water quality of the creek where it can become enjoyable for citizens again.

As part of the tour, Szafraniec noted that as the creek moves farther downstream, it is fed by more and more stormwater, often from systems built before regulations required treatment, and the flow of water outpaces nature's ability to clean it.

At one location off of Shiloh Drive in the Oakfield area, a simple metal drainage pipe feeds a tributary of the creek, and the flow of untreated stormwater has scoured a deep drainage ditch filled with bacteria that feeds on iron and robs the water of oxygen.

Szafraniec said while the habitat looks the same, she would expect to find none of the indicator species there because of the poor water quality.

"What we're trying to do with Wood is to actually provide recommendations for best management practices that would actually treat the water before it gets into the creek system itself," Szafraniec said.

For more information on the project, visit RestoreTheWatershed.com

Jim Little can be reached at jwlittle@pnj.com and 850-208-9827.