Beach party to raise funds for clean water

Water in Chattanooga isn't always as clean as it could be, but water in some parts of the Caribbean is never clean, says Christine Bock.

"There are places on the Tennessee River where you can't eat the fish you catch because the streams are not safe," said Ms. Bock, lead horticulturist at the Tennessee Aquarium and Tennessee River Rescue coordinator.

She and other members of TenneSEA and Caribbean SEA -- the SEA stands for Student Environmental Alliance -- want to raise $20,000 to teach water testing to local students, who'll take those techniques to other parts of Tennessee and the Caribbean.

Founded by local scientist Mary Beth Sutton, TenneSEA focuses on having clean water locally and the other on clean water in the Caribbean.

A beach party-themed fundraiser for the groups will be held from 7 to 11:30 p.m. Friday at the Bessie Smith Cultural Center. Funds raised also will be used to educate people and methods to prevent water contamination and how to improve water on Caribbean islands, organizers said.

"The two main reasons the streams in Tennessee are deemed polluted by the state: one is sewage and one is sediment," Ms. Sutton said. "Those are things we can raise awareness about and do something about. And those are the same two things that are the major problems in the Caribbean."

People don't realize how lucky they are to have water purified well enough to drink out of the faucet and not get sick, Ms. Sutton said.

"We can take a bath or we take a long shower, and there are so many people across the world who don't have that," she said.

Ms. Sutton has taken students to the Caribbean islands of St. Lucia and Dominica in efforts to improve water conditions there. This summer she will take other students to the Caribbean for water testing.

On many Caribbean islands, raising livestock such as pigs, cattle and chickens is a major part of the economy, but the farmers don't always use environmentally safe practices when dealing with the animals' waste, she says. Some islands, for instance, have the waste from as many as 30 pig farms going into the same stream, she said.

"More than 2.6 billion people around the world don't have access to sanitation," Ms. Sutton said. "They don't have a toilet that they can go to, not even a latrine. And every 30 seconds a child dies from drinking bad water, so we're extremely lucky."