Irvine Ranch Water District will host a cleanup site at San Diego Creek for the 13^th consecutive year on Saturday, September 21. Drop by the site on Riparian View, just off Michelson Drive, to do your part in helping the environment.

The site is one of 23 such sites that span the foothills to the coast. IRWD joins forces with Trails 4All, which conceived the idea of Inner-Coastal Watershed Clean-Up Day in conjunction with Coastal Clean-Up Day 17 years ago.

Over the years, more than 28,000 volunteers have participated in cleaning up one million pounds of trash and recyclable materials.

Nearly all of inland Orange County is covered, much of the Coyote Creek Watershed along the Los Angeles and Orange County border, and expansion continues upwards along the greater Santa Ana River Watershed.

While Coastal Clean-Up Day focuses on cleaning trash from the beach, Inner-Coastal Watershed Clean-Up Day concentrates on getting trash out of the tributaries before it hits the beach. Trash dropped on the street ends up in storm drains and eventually finds itself on the coastline.

IRWD’s site will be located off Michelson Drive on Riparian View, adjacent San Diego Creek and the San Joaquin Marsh. Please wear closed-toed flat shoes, hats, sunscreen and insect repellant. The entire family is invited to learn about environmental stewardship and students can receive community service hours for their participation.

More information on IRWD environmental programs is available on our website.

IRWD has added more tools to its emergency response toolkit – two 2,000-gallon potable water trailers that may be hauled to wherever there is an emergency or water outage.

“This project was two years in the making,” said John Dayer, IRWD Fleet Services Manager. “We were involved in helping to write grants and work on the specifications.”

The 2,000-gallon polyurethane tanks are mounted on heavy duty trailer chassis and contain 10 spigots for filling containers from water bottles to buckets and jugs. Of the 12 that were delivered to cities and county water agencies that requested them, IRWD received two.

“That’s because of our size – we stretch from the foothills to the ocean,” Dayer said.

The Municipal Water District of Orange County received a $431,000 Department of Homeland Security Urban Area Security Initiative Grant for the purchase of equipment to improve retail water agencies capacity for response to major disasters. A panel of representatives from most of the water agencies in Orange County, including IRWD, determined that the acquisition and strategic distribution of potable water distribution trailers would enhance local agency response in case of temporary interruptions in the potable water supply.

One of the trailers will be placed in the Santiago area, while the other will remain at the Michelson Water Recycling Plant, which is a central location.

The purpose of the trailers is to act as a stop gap measure between residents’ own resources, the District’s ability to restore distribution, and the time it takes for outside resources to arrive at the site of a major disaster.

All residents are encouraged to store a minimum of three to five days of disaster supplies, which includes the water needed for drinking, cooking and cleaning from such sources as toilet tanks, water heaters, and cases of bottled water.

The potable water trailers are one method of many possible ways to bring drinking water to the public. IRWD will be able to use already treated water from reservoirs and tanks to fill the trailers and deliver water to public points of distribution.

Interesting trailer facts:

• Why 2,000 gallons – that’s one day’s minimum recommended emergency water sup0ply of drinking water for 2,000 residents
• Agencies hosting the trailers will be registered through the Food and Drug Administration as Licensed Water Haulers
• The trailers will be stored empty to ensure that the freshest water is used for distribution to the public
• Each trailer full of water weighs just under 24,000 pounds – 16,660 of that is water weight
• In addition to providing water for emergencies or outages, the trailers can also provide water supply for minor hazardous material incidents where water decontamination shower units may be required to ensure the health and safety of responders in the field
• The trailers are a mutual aid resource that will be shared between the water ut9lities within Orange County.

Tree Swallows like to build their nests in the cavities of trees, but if there are no trees, where are the swallows to go? This was a problem looking for a solution at the Irvine Ranch Water District San Joaquin Marsh in the late 1990s.

“There wasn’t a lot of vegetation at the Marsh to support nesting tree swallows,” said Christine Tisher, volunteer with Sea and Sage Audubon Society and program manager for the nesting box program. “So we started off with about 30 boxes in 1998.”

Tisher, a wildlife biologist by profession, was taking a class on birdcalls from Audubon at the Marsh, when she learned that the new nesting program needed a manager. She raised her hand and has overseen the program ever since.

The little nesting boxes mounted on metal poles are easy to see along the trails through the Marsh. The numbers of the boxes grew over the years to more than 100. A dedicated group of monitors formed under Tisher and they began a regular program to monitor the boxes in 2000.

Tisher has kept copious notes on the nesting box activity over the years. From the years 2000-2012, 3,743 swallows have fledged, 6,734 eggs were laid and 3,779 birds were banded for tracking their movements. Each nest has an average of four to six eggs and four to five actually hatch and survive.

Volunteers monitor the boxes on a weekly basis during the breeding season March through July. They count the number of nests, eggs, chicks and the number of chicks that fledge, or leave the nest. They also ensure that the boxes are in workable condition, trim vegetation from around the boxes, protect the birds from ants, mites and other predators, and record banding information.

One young volunteer learned about the program on the internet and thought it would be a great volunteering opportunity. Joanna Paik, 15, will be a sophomore at Beckman High School in Tustin. She moved to the area last year from Chicago.

“I thought this would be great to help the environment,” she said. “I will do this again next summer.”

Prior to this year’s nesting season, all of the boxes were removed for rehabilitation. The original boxes were all painted light blue. The rehabilitated boxes were repainted red, tan, mustard and blue.

“The style of these boxes is the same that’s used by the western bluebird,” Tisher explained.

There is a protocol for monitoring the boxes. Each box is numbered and volunteers are equipped with clipboards and lists with the numbers of the boxes. If the support pole has a red ribbon tied on it, that means there are older chicks inside ready to fledge. Those boxes are not disturbed.

Swallows aren’t the only species that have called the nesting boxes home. In 2003, one pair of bluebirds successfully nested and fledged three young during the first nesting periods. Two pairs of house wrens and one pair of western bluebirds occupied three boxes during the first nesting period in 2008. One box supported a pair of house wrens during the first nesting period and tree swallows followed in the same box during the second nesting period in 2009.

While it is exciting for the volunteers to see other species using the boxes, it’s the tree swallows that matter most, Tisher said.

“In the 1990s, there were none to be found in Orange County,” she said. “There were some unverified reports from the UC Irvine portion of the Marsh. This program has been successful in getting the tree swallows back to Orange County.”