On Sept. 22, the PHS Environmental Club stood before the Municipal Water District Board and urged them to take action against the wildfire that the club claims has already destroyed 257,000 acres of the Mokelumne Watershed, the Bay Area’s primary source of water.

Not only does the fire bring a potential hazard to the residents nearby, but the club claims that it presents a serious risk to the contamination of the water itself.

“The water is going to start becoming more polluted,” the club’s vice president senior Onyx Yskamp Long said.

Long also said that if the fires continue burning at an extremely fast rate, and the Mokelumne River may become too contaminated to provide potable water any longer.

The board has recognized this, and has reverted to taking water from multiple other sources.

“That’s why the water here has been tasting different, because we are getting our water from places that aren’t nearly as clean as the Mokelumne,” the club’s president senior Megan Wilensky said.

On top of being a primary water source, according to the Sierra Nevada Conservancy (SNC), the Mokelumne River also has numerous other benefits to the environment, and the Bay Area as a whole.

The government-run organization which follows the topic closely and keeps viewers updated, said clean water enables the river to “provide valuable goods and services, including but not limited to forest and agricultural products, hydropower energy, recreation, wildlife habitat and carbon sequestration.”

These benefits are likely to be diminished if water contamination continues to increase at the rate that it currently is.  Yskamp Long and Wilinsky made this clear at the board meeting.

“We told them that it was their responsibility to do something [improve forest health], and that if they weren’t going to then no one would,” said Yskamp.

In the end, the board was open to the idea of investigating ways to improve forest health, but suggested that the students review the regulations for ways to allow them to take action more efficiently. The students knew going into the meeting, that they would not get a direct answer but were overall pleased with the feedback. Club advisor and history teacher David Keller said he could not have been more proud of them. He said they did amazing considering the amount of pressure they had on their shoulders.