WASHINGTON—“Well, it starts with rain,” says Mara Moran, 12, a Girl Scout with Troop 1706 in Cheverly, Maryland. “My teacher says that the water we drink is the same water the cavemen drank.”  “Yeah, people think you can make water, but you can’t,” says Deirdre Harder, 9, as she helps Mara push a big plastic barrel.

“It doesn’t regenerate,” adds Emily Castelli, 13, who is tugging at the same barrel. “It’s the same water over and over we get from rain filling the rivers and lakes and things.”

“We have to learn how to keep that water clean,” pipes in Helen Marie Castelli, 11, Emily’s cousin.

A GROUP of Maryland Girl Scouts learned about the environment by learning about rain barrels. Graphic shows how a simple rain barrel works. Graphic by Bill Webster

That’s what brought them and four other scouts to Bladensburg Waterfront Park on a recent Saturday: to learn about the environment by learning about rain barrels.

The workshop took place beside the Anacostia River, which flows past the US Capitol and the new Washington Nationals baseball park, before joining the Potomac River across from Reagan National Airport.

The Anacostia is said to be one of the dirtiest rivers in the country. By learning to make rain barrels, the scouts were working on their water badge and helping the river at the same time.

The Anacostia Watershed Society, which organized the workshop, says the biggest threat to the Potomac and Anacostia rivers is runoff after a big rainstorm. The water surges down sidewalks and across roads and parking lots, taking with it the pollutants from millions of vehicles and the fertilizer from thousands of acres of lawns. It then dumps it all into creeks and streams that feed both rivers.

“Those little raindrops are something,” says Jim Connolly, who heads the watershed group and has a rain barrel at home in Arlington, Virginia. “Just an inch of rain—which is a good-size summer storm—falling on the roof of an average house around here will collect about 1,200 gallons of water. Imagine what a shopping-mall parking lot or highway collects!

“The problem is that it rushes all kinds of bad stuff—trash and grease and fertilizers and chemicals—into the river quickly, killing the fish and vegetation, and eroding the shorelines. We don’t have factories or farms in Washington polluting our rivers. It’s this runoff rainwater.”

Last year Maryland began requiring that new and renovated buildings have a way to catch rainwater, Connolly says. Someday, Connolly says, “all new homes and commercial buildings...will have to save rainwater because it’s the simplest and cheapest way to protect the rivers. If we capture the storm water—using it to water our gardens or just drain it out a few days after a storm—the rivers know how to clean themselves.”

But you don’t have to wait to have a rain barrel, says Barry Chenkin, who runs the Anacostia workshops and started a company called Aquabarrel.

At the workshop the scouts attended, several adults wanted to buy barrels and other equipment from Chenkin. A lucky few got free barrels that the scouts assembled, gluing in spigots and flow pipes that connect to a home’s downspouts.

Each of the 55-gallon barrels, which once held products such as salad dressing or tomato sauce, can collect about 1,300 gallons of rainwater during the summer, Chenkin says.

When Mara told her science teacher and classmates about the barrel project, “everybody thought it was cool,” she says.

“Now we think we’re going to make one for our school,” she adds proudly.

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Saving water and having a barrel of fun

WASHINGTON—“Well, it starts with rain,” says Mara Moran, 12, a Girl Scout with Troop 1706 in Cheverly, Maryland. “My teacher says that the water we drink is the same water the cavemen drank.”  “Yeah, people think you can make water, but you can’t,” says Deirdre Harder, 9, as she helps Mara push a big plastic barrel.