Our Water: Raindrop Has One for the Road

By Lois B. Robbins

Yukkk! This time I got in some really toxic stuff. Coming down from the thundercloud I was feeling pretty good, but when I hit your blacktop driveway, I encountered some very nasty chemicals – petrochemicals, I think they’re called. These are the things your car carries, picks up from the road, and sometimes leaks – chloride, motor oil, gas, transmission fluid, - wiper fluid, brake fluid – that kind of thing. It all washed off your car when you washed it in your driveway that nice warm day last week, and was added to the petrochemicals that were already there from your driving in and out a couple of times a day. And there it stayed, until I came along with the thunderstorm. As if that wasn’t bad enough, it all got mixed with the high phosphorus detergent you used to get your car clean. I even detected something volatile from that wax you used the last time you washed your car.

I’m not mad at you. You probably thought you were doing the right thing. Washing the car on the lawn might make the lawn muddy. Your tires might sink into the wet soil and mar your lawn when you drive it back onto the driveway. But here’s something you need to know. Washing your car on your lawn is way better than washing it in the driveway. The lawn, while still somewhat impervious, is spongy enough to absorb the water from your hose after it leaves the car. So all that bad stuff sinks into the ground before us raindrops come along in a storm. Water that has sunk into the lawn as it will do when you’re just washing the car, will take way, way longer to reach a lake or stream, and it kind of gets cleaned up by natural processes along the way. So it doesn’t matter so much what awful stuff you wash off your car, because we raindrops don’t have to pick it up when we all hit the lawn at once during a rainstorm.

If we land on a blacktop driveway where someone has washed their car as I did, however, we have no choice but to go rushing off in search of a ditch, a stream, or a lake, and all that awful stuff gets carried along with us. Then those pesky petrochemicals go straight into the creek, or the lake, depending on where we are, and that’s pretty tough on the aquatic life there..

Now, just for your info, there’s an even better way to get your car clean. THE CAR WASH! Yeah, I know it costs more than washing it yourself. But car washes are actually equipped with special treatment processes that clean their wastewater before it heads out to the creek. They have to. The EPA Clean Water Act says so. So next time your car needs washing (which, if you live in Brandon Township is all the time), treat yourself to a car wash. It’s fun, watching the whirling brushes and blowers, and think how smug you’ll feel, knowing that you’re doing your part to keep me and all the other raindrops clean, before we enter your lake or stream, - or even your drinking water supply. Think about it. Would you want to drink water that came straight off your driveway?

County Line Reminder, 3/17/07