Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 15 · column 4 of 7 · from the scan, no model involved
gathers pollutants along its way downhill to the streams. That polluted water goes directly to the streams and damages fish and other aquatic life downstream. The pollutant you can easily see in a stream after a rainstorm is sediment - tiny particles of soil and dirt that make the stream look muddy. Runoff water collects sediment most easily when the ground and vegetation has been disturbed. Sediment clogs the gills of fish and other aquatic animals and kills them.
Nutrients are a type of pollutant you don’t see at the time of the rainstorm but is equally damaging to water quality. These nutrients - primarily nitrogen and phosphorus — come from a wide variety of sources including the atmosphere, chemical fertilizers, animal wastes, mowed grass, damaged septic systems and soil. If a stream is not protected by an adequate buffer area vegetated with tall grasses, shrubs, and trees, then the runoff deposits these nutrients directly to the stream’s surface water. Excess nutrients in surface waters cause an imbalance of plant life, which in turn starves the water of oxygen, ere
89.2%