Drought continues to take its toll
Spring Creek stopped running, again
by MCL staff writer

The only thing running in Spring Creek is when someone in the city flushes the toilet.

Spring Creek has officially stopped running around the Colquitt area mainly due to the continuing drought sprinkled with a bit of "dumb" on the parts of those agencies who stopped local agencies from clearing the logs and debris from the stream bed.

Several years ago, the county entered into a project to remove some of the logs and debris from Spring Creek to allow the water to flow freely and have some type of creek bed for water to flow. The hurricanes, tornadoes and normal erosion for poor stewardship had made the creek bed a wet weather stream instead of a clear, viable stream that it has been for the past several hundred years.

For the first time ever, Colquitt, and many areas of Miller County were flooded in 1996 when Spring Creek could not carry the flow of water as it had in the past due to too many logs and too much silt and debris that had been allowed to fill the stream bed. After the flooding, a time of stream restoration took place, and things were looking better until the tornadoes came through this area and filled the creek with logs and more debris and silt.

When the county went back to remove some of the logs and debris, the Department of Natural Resources stopped the project, fined the county for removing the logs and trash and directed them to place the logs back into the run of the creek. This was all done to keep from damaging the habitat of some mussels.

With the exception of a few pot holes of water that were cleaned out and possibly dug out to get a little stream depth, there is no running water, no fish, no aquatic life, and no mussels. On the other hand, there are multiplied tons of logs, mostly cut and thrown in the creek, plus millions of tons of silt that has flowed from fields into the bed of the creek, making it a swamp instead of a spring fed running stream, the last one in this county.

The drought does not help this situation, but it is not the main cause for Spring Creek going dry. Not too many years ago, Spring Creek was one of the clearest streams in the nation. It was fed primarily by millions of underground springs. Over the years, the debris, silt and poor stewardship have filled the stream basin and covered the springs that kept it clear and running.

We just might have allowed, or caused, our greatest natural resource to be destroyed by poor stewardship and by allowing some governmental agency to stop progress of correcting our mistakes to saving a dead mussel.

It doesn't take too much intelligence to see that we could use the only stream going through this county for a possible human water supply in coming years.

You can bet that the city and the county will never attempt again to try and save Spring Creek with our state and federal agencies waiting to swoop down like buzzards to fine us for trying to save a great natural resource that might just save human lives in the future.