CENTRAL — The Clemson Cooperative Extension and more than a dozen partners have scheduled the first of several stakeholder meetings for the Twelve Mile, Eighteen Mile and Golden Creek Watershed Plan, which is being devised to clean up bacteria pollution in three major Pickens County watercourses.

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The public is invited to the meeting, which will be held from 6-7 p.m. on Thursday at the Bryant Lodge on the campus of Southern Wesleyan University.

Through a combination of onsite visits, spatial data analysis and laboratory research, the plan’s developers have been studying ways to improve the water quality of the well-known creeks, all of which have been found to be impaired by monitoring agents with S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control.

“We all want better quality water resources,” said Cal Sawyer, associate director of the Center for Watershed Excellence at Clemson University. “By attending and actively participating in the upcoming public meeting, local citizens can help improve the accuracy of the information we’re compiling and engage in the process of solving the persistent pollution problems in the affected watersheds.”

The agenda will include an introduction by Rocky Nation, professor of biology and chair of the Science Division at Southern Wesleyan. This will be followed by overviews of the watershed planning process by Sawyer and cohort Jeremy Pike, associate scientist in Clemson’s College of Agriculture, Forestry and Life Sciences. There will also be a question-and-answer session, and refreshments will be provided.

The Twelve Mile, Eighteen Mile and Golden Creek watersheds, which eventually drain into Hartwell Lake, comprise more than 69,000 acres in the Piedmont area of South Carolina. Development of the plan began in September and will continue through August. It will take subsequent years to implement it.

For more information, visit sites.google.com/site/clemsonwatershed.

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