Time is always an important and challenging factor in a research project. Especially in a partnership that brings multiple people and organizations together, researchers need to be open and adaptable about when things happen, in what order, and for how long. Some contexts, however, have timelines of their own that cannot be ignored. In the water quality photovoice project, conducted in partnership with Orange County Environmental Justice and Orange County Coastkeeper, our timing was determined by additional factors that none of us could control. No matter what was convenient for us, the bottom line was that we had to plan our calendar around the water.
The start of our project was delayed by some logistics, which meant we could not begin in earnest until the start of 2021. Just as we were getting going, our partner at OC Coastkeeper pointed out that if we wanted to catch the remaining rain events of this year, we had to start collecting photos right away. Being a native of the northeast, I was unaccustomed to the idea of a rainy season and a dry season, but rainfall in southern California is a strictly seasonal affair. The urgency of getting started, as each passing day decreased the likelihood that we would have rainfall to document and analyze, catalyzed our initial volunteer recruitment and training. Our original strategy involved a stage model in which we would recruit volunteers, train them, and then have them collect data. Based on the timing, we shifted our approach to a rolling series of volunteer trainings. By doing so, we got an initial group of volunteers into the field as soon as possible, while we continued to train the next group and recruit more volunteers. Even with that adaptation, we missed some opportunities for data collection that would not reoccur until next year; the week before our first volunteer training was unusually rainy, and we were unable to include that event in our project.
The challenge of capturing these unschedulable events continued even when we had committed volunteers in the field. Within the rainy season, we were asking people to go out and collect data when there was a rain event. Of course, that is hard to predict more than a few days out, and even with a weather report the timing can be uncertain. The truth is that there is no way to make rainfall fit with people’s schedules. If it rained while people were at work, or at night, that felt like a missed opportunity, and all we could do was encourage our volunteers to be adaptable and respond to the circumstances as best they could.
As our project continued, we arrived at the end of the rainy season and the dynamic changed again. At one weekly check-in meeting, our volunteers reported that they had not really seen anything at the sites they were monitoring. We realized that we needed to give the volunteers supplemental training about what to look for in this season, because dry-weather runoff looks different from rainfall runoff and it creates different issues. The training we had provided was for a different time, and we had to plan and implement a new iteration of training meetings with content that fit the season.
Moving into the dry season meant we were not as reliant on the weather, but timing still proved to be a challenge. Misaligned or broken sprinklers are a major source of dry weather runoff, but sprinklers tend to run at night. Especially at commercial or industrial areas like office parks, there may not be anyone around to see and report that outside of business hours, so it continues. If restaurants are washing out mats in the alley, which also contributes to runoff and contamination, it tends to be after closing time when people are not around to see it. It was certainly not feasible to ask our volunteers to wander industrial parks and alleyways in the middle of the night. Instead, we focused our supplemental training on recognizing the signs of past runoff, like stains on the pavement or trails of debris, and tracing those signs back to their sources. That allowed volunteers to document water waste and contamination issues without upending their lives to fit the timing of water use.
Ultimately, these challenges fit with the nature of water: it doesn’t behave according to our structures and timelines, it just flows where the landscape leads it. In California, water is always challenging to plan around and is particularly time-bound. The rainy season is short, but it has implications for the whole year, as the rainfall we get in January determines the severity of the fire season in August. The creeks that spread across the region are seasonal and ephemeral, many remaining dry for most of the year. Lawn irrigation washes fertilizers from grass and oils from pavement into waterways that supply everything from drinking to recreation and which deserve our protection and care. If we aim to understand the role of water in our communities and improve how we manage it, we have to be willing and able to move with it, to follow it where and when it flows.
Ethan Rubin is a PhD Candidate in the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine. He was a 2020-2021 Newkirk Fellow with the Research Justice Shop. For more information regarding the Research Justice Shop please visit the website or contact researchjustice@uci.edu or follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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