Salado Creek Foundation

After The Spill

Jun 26, 2004

Just days after a catastrophic sewage spill Salado Creek, Bexar County's last, best, wild waterway, is already working to repair itself.

Thanks to round the clock efforts by SAWS, the flow has been staunched. The creatures killed by the spill have been hauled to a garden center where they are being made into fertilizer. Watching and listening at stream's edge at the pristine Los Patios compound, it's obvious that nature is busy.

While a whisper of sewage scent occasionally drifts on the breeze, the cicadas sing.

A turtle, as large as a dinner plate, swims upstream in the still-clearing creek toward the scar of the spill. Perhaps he is a pioneer, filling the void left in the wake of a current of death.

An anole, brown like the bark of the Live Oak trunk on which he sits, puffs up his throat in the tattered sunlight filtering through the dappled canopy.

Hummingbirds talk with one another about high level territorial issues.

Learning to forage, a teenaged grackle follows close behind his mother. They are looking for lunch while white-winged doves in the treetops look down on them without comment.

A patch of sunlight brightens somehow when as electric blue damselfly stops for a moment of reflection, and two whistling tree ducks with white wing patches flashing sail downstream on currents of summer-heavy air.

And now, the anole is no longer brown. He is green and sitting on the broad leaves of a loquat tree, still showing his red throat while a lone mosquito races by.

Obviously, dumping half-a-million gallons or more of waste into a natural waterway is always a really bad idea. Still, this resilient sacred space continues to nourish creatures great and small. This invaluable wild resource pulses with life while struggling to recover.

Because this emerald necklace flows through almost 40 miles of our territory, linking rich and poor in the north and south, and because it renews our souls, we all need to help Salado Creek come back.

The infrastructure that is crumbling beneath our feet may be out of sight but it cannot be ignored. Salado Creek is a gift we have received from the ages. We must deliver it to the future!