AOPA Pilot Magazine - February 2016 - 74
STEWARDS OF THE
Shedding light on environmental issues
B Y J U L I E S U M M E R S WA L K E R
L
ocals call the river
that runs through
Richmond, Virginia,
"James Brown" when it looks
like this: a slick coffee-witha-little-cream color that isn't
appetizing. Not even Starbucks
could sell it.
When it's not colored by
mud after a major storm, the
James River is a rock star
to this southern city, voted
by Outside magazine as the
nation's best river town. "On
a warm day like this, there are
usually thousands of people out
on the river," says Pat Calvert,
the Upper James Riverkeeper,
whose job it is to monitor the
health of Richmond's river.
Calvert is a member of the
nation's Waterkeeper Alliance,
and he and other waterkeepers-there are about 250 across
the country-call on the help of
groups such as SouthWings, an
environmental nonprofit organization that supplies aircraft
and volunteer pilots to monitor the Southeast's waterways
from the air.
Calvert is looking for signs
of coal ash runoff and livestock
access along the river, which
contribute pollutants "you
don't want in your drinking
water," he says. The volunteer
pilot is Hap Endler, who has
been flying his Cessna Skylane
on SouthWings missions for
P H OT O G R A P H Y B Y C H R I S R O S E
74 | AOPA PILOT February 2016
the past 10 years. Endler is
based in North Carolina, where
riverkeepers look for similar
pollutants, including offal from
chicken farm as well as runoff
from lumber companies and
coal mining, that strip mountains and produce dangerous
sediments in the rivers and
other waterways.
Calvert has Endler fly
along the river near the parallel railroad track. In addition to
possible waste, Calvert would
like to see evidence of trains
bearing crude from the Bakken
oil fields in North Dakota. The
freight companies do not publish when the trains run, and
Calvert sees potential danger in
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