Tim Wanner may never look at the Ephrata Fair in the same way.

Wanner was among the Ephrata High School students in Josh Shortuse's environmental science class who attended the borough's annual festival of food, agriculture and games Wednesday.

While enjoying the goodies — Tim quaffed down two cheeseburgers, two lemonades and an ice cream sandwich — the students were there to find out what happens to the used paper cups and plates, the dirty water and the spent cooking oil and cleaning solvents that are daily byproducts of the fair.

They interviewed stand workers to learn what they do with their waste and took note of how much of it ended up on Ephrata's streets.

"I was (at the fair) Wednesday after the parade and saw all the trash in the street," the 17-year-old junior said. "It made me think — all that's going to go into the creek and our water sources and eventually into the Chesapeake Bay. It's just building up and building up."

That concern for his hometown environment is exactly what Shortuse hopes to instill in his students, who have spent hours sloshing through and around Cocalico Creek, collecting samples and identifying bacteria to gauge the creek's health.

The fifth-year teacher's course has earned him $12,000 in state grants, including a $2,000 Department of Environmental Protection grant last month.

The course also has earned Shortuse and his students the respect of borough officials, who published the students' creek findings in the borough newsletter.

"It all comes back to the creek," Shortuse said. "This is their town and their creek, and hopefully students will learn how to preserve it."

Since last year, juniors and seniors dressed in hip waders and armed with water test kits, collection nets and digital microscopes have gathered water samples at three places: upstream of the municipal drinking water intake; at Ephrata Park, near the high school; and at Nissley Park, downstream of the wastewater treatment plant.

The students have been collecting macroinvertibrates and other parasites and testing the water for phosphates, nitrates, acidity, alkalinity, conductivity and turbidity.

"Everything we did was based on scientific research," Steven Allocco, an 18-year-old senior who took the course last year, said. "By categorizing parasites, we were able to determine how clean the water was because certain parasites can only survive in a certain level of acidity."

The students concluded the creek is relatively clean, but the temperature is too high and there are too many nitrates and too much sediment in the water.

They recommended that borough officials, residents and businesses take several steps to improve water quality, including:

• Eliminating the excess application of fertilizer on farms, lawns and gardens.



• Planting trees on creek banks to lower the water temperature to levels more conducive to aquatic life.



• Diverting rainwater runoff from residential properties to cut down on sediment.

Shortuse decided to expand the scope of his course this year to include the Ephrata Fair, a weeklong event that brings thousands of people — and their trash — to the borough's streets.

"We wanted to look at the big picture," he said. "What are we doing with the street fair, and how does it affect the creek?"

To find out, his students last week interviewed fair-stand operators about their waste-disposal methods and witnessed their practices — both good and bad.

Wanner said he saw a hose running beneath several stands draining dirty water into a storm sewer. Other students saw evidence of fryer grease being dumped into the street, Shortuse said.

The class also witnessed how runoff from the streets drains into storm sewers that discharge into the creek and examined the natural buffers along the waterway that help filter pollutants from the runoff. They plan to research borough regulations on waste disposal at outdoor events like the fair.

To provide the scientific data to back up the students' observations, Shortuse collected creek water samples near the storm-sewer discharge pipe before and after the parade, when a rainstorm had flushed debris into the sewers.

"I'll show them what happened to the water before the fair and after the fair," he said.

Students will evaluate those samples and include the data in reports about runoff from the fair. They also may recommend to fair organizers ways to reduce what ends up in the creek, Shortuse said.

"It all comes back to the creek," he said. "This is their town and their creek, and, hopefully, students will learn how to preserve it."

Throughout the year, the class will continue to take biweekly creek samples and tour the borough's wastewater and drinking water plants to see how creek water is treated before and after it reaches consumers.

Wanner said he isn't usually fond of science, but Shortuse's class is different.

"It's a lot more hands-on," he said. "This is more of a real-world, right-now kind of thing.

"I feel like I can actually use this today what I'm learning in his class."

E-mail: bwallace@lnpnews.com