SPANISH FORT, Ala.— Wyland’s Clean Water Challenge made a stop by Five Rivers Delta Resource Center in Spanish Fort before departing to another city yesterday.

Tuesday, students from Cathy Walley’s fourth-grade class at Gilliard Elemenatary School in Mobile explored the 1,000-square-foot ‘water on wheels.’

The students entered the exhibit and found out their job for the day was to be ‘clean water agents’ and help determine what they could do to keep watersheds—a region that drains into a body of water—healthy.

During an eight-minute video upon entering the exhibit, visitors learned what happens to stormwater and how it picks up contaminated materials before it reaches the ocean, lake, stream or river. 

The students learned in the video that even snow atop a mountain melts and picks up waste on its way down before it flows into a watershed.

Waste such as gasoline, oil and fertilizers are picked up by rain and melted snow and rush into a body of water. Unlike water that goes down the sink, it isn’t filtered before entering the water.

If waste enters water, the fish could die and people wouldn’t have a safe source of water. When asked what would happen to people if this happens, the fourth-graders said together “We would die.”

As ‘clean water agents,’ the students learned how to protect the ‘rainforests of the sea,’ or living coral reefs. The reefs house one out of every four species of marine life and is needed to keep the diversity of the ecosystem in the ocean.

Students raced to arrange tabs in a scaled-down version of a city to send rushing stormwater down each open drain then have it reach the river’s end.

The lesson taught with the demonstration was to remind people that they can use less water to minimize the problem. One good example to save water is to turn off the water while brushing your teeth, according to materials inside the exhibit.

While some students   raced to send stormwater in the right direction, others examined macroinvertebrates under a microscope. Different slides showed the different health of the wetlands the slide came from.

“I liked it because it teaches how to keep water safe,” fourth-grader Kholbe Coleman said of the water challenge. “It was fun for me.”

Wyland, a world-renowned marine life artist from Laguna Beach, Calif., is also an advocate of keeping the planet a clean, safe place to live.

Wyland out-painted the competition when he painted a mural in Destin, Fla., that spanned more than seven acres and beat  the previous Guiness Record. He is on a mission to paint 100 murals around the world, the site said. 

Some ways Wyland discusses to promote clean water around watersheds is to use a vegetable-based dish soap, find a shorter song to sing in the shower, use non-toxic household cleaners, use a refillable water bottle and know where and how to properly dispose of garbage, the site said.

Wyland is an advocate for marine resource conservation and is a painter, photographer, scuba diver, writer and sculptor who has traveled the globe to capture Earth’s natural beauty.

Since 1993, Wyland has sponsored many conservation programs  and created a series of  about 91 life-size murals in four continents and 12 countries. An estimated 1 billion people view his work each year, the site said.

For more information on Wyland’s Water Challenge, visit the official Web site at www.wylandoceanchallenge.com.