Delaware County Fair

[Gale]

We here at the Delaware County Soil and Water Conservation District
have just finished a long week of demonstrations at the Delaware
County Fair, in New York State. The fair is a predominately
agricultural fair, along with the usual trinket vendors. We ran
demonstrations every 15 to 20 minutes for 12 hours each day, Monday
through Saturday.

The demonstrations included channel straightening, spot gravel
removal, whole stream dredging, in-stream structures (i.e., culverts,
straight vanes, cross vanes, riprap, sheet piling), floodplain
filling, and building setbacks.

The demonstrations were really well received, and that says a lot for
an area that has seen 3 major floods in 3 years. There are still a
lot of people that want to dredge every stream in the area, but after
seeing our demonstrations, they realized that the banks would become
more unstable. Contractors and lifelong residents, who remember
“cleaning” the streams in the past using “recreational bulldozing”,
received a better understanding of why these practices can be
dangerous.

The in-stream structures portion of the demonstrations was used to
show how the stream adapted to structures, and how this affects the
rest of the stream. The main lesson that we were aiming to teach was
that what we do to one portion of the stream affects the stream
upstream as well as downstream. Jessica Rall put together a wonderful
display of our projects that reflected what we were showing people on
the Emriver model.

We received a lot of positive feedback on the visualization of the
processes. Having real life examples of the processes that we
demonstrated helped to seal the deal with everyone that we talked
with.

We learned that talking for eight hours a day 6 days in a row takes a
toll on the throat and the brain, but it was worth it to see the
expressions of realization on the people’s faces. Multiple presenters
is key to a good week, and making sure that the presenters convey the
same information saves on confusion if people stop back to see it
again and again, as many did!

I have included pictures of the Emriver model, and the display. You
will probably note that we have a “sneeze guard” attached to the model
because of the thousands of hands that were at the fair. Everyone
wanted to play in the sand box!

Gale A Neale, EIT
Delaware County SWCD, NY
"Echo"