Once there was a town, with the idyllic name of Fruitvale.  The town had a school, a park, some farms, an agricultural chemical company, a dry creek bed, and a problem.  Some of the wells, used by only a few families, may be contaminated. Finding out if they are contaminated, and what they are contaminated with, is one problem.  Finding out how far the contamination has moved and deciding what to do about it, is another problem.  We’ll be trying to solve all those problems over the next class periods.

Contamination or pollution can fall into two general patterns.  Area source pollution covers a wide area, but in a very diffuse, dilute or thinly spread out way. Point source pollution follows a different pattern.  If the pollution comes from one point, that usually means there has been a spill of some type.  The contamination has high concentration at the spill and the concentration becomes less as we move further from the spill.  Another feature of a point source is that the contamination may only move in one direction, while area sources often seem to have no particular direction.

Some classes had time to draw contamination plumes on maps to compare the two types.  Other classes will do this in the next lab.

Earlier in the week, the 8th grade presented their fabulous mult-genre projects about a crop plant.  On a day when the weather threatened, and some students went home early, we had a cozy group in the middle school learning commons, presenting the work they created over the past few weeks.  Both science and English teachers were very pleased with the outcomes.