"It was three years ago when the Langdon, N.D., native started what he figured would be a simple project for his environmental policy class. ... Call the guy persistent or stubborn or even obsessive, but he's still at it. The coulee transformed from class project to hobby to calling."
That passage about UND student David Barta ran in the Herald in 2007.
Now it's 2010. Three more years have passed.
And Barta, now a graduate student, is still at it.
But there's a difference, because this year -- after all that time -- Barta's efforts at last could pay off. The English Coulee very likely will be much better off as a result.
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And if that's the case, then UND and Grand Forks will owe Barta a tremendous debt of thanks. Because of his hard work, the quality of life on campus and throughout the community will have been noticeably improved.
Barta first took on the English Coulee cleanup the way a young man might tackle an Eagle Scout service project: That is, he thought it would be a meaningful but limited and temporary effort.
As mentioned, the cleanup simply was a effort he undertook for a class. But "by the end of the project, he'd discovered that if cleaning up the coulee were so simple, somebody would've done it a long time ago," Herald staff writer Tu-Uyen Tran wrote in 2007.
Barta's project had him doing more than standing on a bridge taking field notes. "The job is not for the easily disgusted," Tran noted.
"When he's made the ice hole big enough, Barta slides in, the water up to his hips. To be more precise, there's two feet of water and a foot and a half of what can only be described as raw muck. Muck, as the dictionary says, is a mixture of mud and decaying vegetation, and it smells as bad as it sounds.
"Every week for two months, Barta has gone to the coulee to take samples at seven different locations throughout the city. The goal is to figure out just how much dissolved muck is in there and how much it might cost to clean it up."
A lot of those questions now have been answered; and as a result, Barta believes a solution could be at hand.
Basically, the English Coulee suffers from too many nutrients, chemicals and garbage and too little flow. It's rated as unsuitable for swimming or any other recreational use.
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What it needs is movement: water movement, that is, to oxygenate the water, remove toxic gases and boost the Coulee's ability to break down nutrients. Lifting up all of Grand Forks from the west would increase that flow. But since that's not possible, the next best thing likely will be to install aerators, pumps that boost oxygenation exactly like the aerators in an aquarium.
A $2,800 grant from UNS Student Government will pay for a research team to study that option. If the study gets good results, then Barta and others will approach City Hall, UND administrators and others for money for a network of aerators.
With vision and purpose, one person can make a difference. That's the lesson of Barta's long and exceptionally dedicated work.
And as Grand Forks residents may soon see, on the day when -- after a hundred-plus years of algae blooms and rank stagnation -- the English Coulee at last smells fresh and runs clean, it's a lesson that never fails to inspire.
-- Tom Dennis for the Herald
