What is the CAPABLE program?
The Cheat Aquatic Pollution And BaseLine Ecological (CAPABLE) Monitoring Program is a volunteer initiative to collect vital statistics on the health of the Cheat watershed in streams that are at risk for impacts and watch for illegal activity that could pollute our streams. The program can be compared to a neighborhood watch program. FOC provides equipment to volunteers and trains them to take conductivity and pH readings, record stream and water quality observations, and equips them to take water samples to send to a certified laboratory for analysis if necessary. The volunteers monitor their site(s) as available, with a target frequency of once every two weeks.
Historically, the CAPABLE program has also deployed continuous data-loggers in streams around the lower Cheat River watershed that take temperature and electrical conductivity readings every 15 minutes around the clock.
The CAPABLE Volunteers
The CAPABLE program is supported by 9 volunteers from throughout Preston County who share an interest in protecting the water quality where they live. Volunteers monitor streams and tributaries near their homes every two weeks, year round. They also report any potentially harmful activity to FOC for further investigation. If you are interested in participating in the CAPABLE program, contact Madison Ball, the Volunteer Monitoring Coordinator at FOC (Madison@cheat.org).