How We Can Make West Fargo Cleaner by Caleb

How We Can Make West Fargo Cleaner by Caleb - May 2019 Scholarship Essay

We can all make a difference. The city of West Fargo has always looked clean, but is it really? If you walk the banks of the Sheyenne River, you will find areas destroyed by flooding. Flooding plays a big role in our community because flooding tends to be an annual disaster we have to deal with. Flooding brings runoff. This runoff causes garbage and many unwanted items to end up in the Sheyenne River. We have the Sheyenne Diversion which diverts water from the river to prevent many areas from flooding in West Fargo, but this causes a possible health risk for the surrounding neighborhoods.

The Sheyenne Diversion gets all the unwanted materials from the river, and many species of wildlife found out in the countryside gain access to the diversion causing a health risk. Also, the Sheyenne Diversion gives off a putrid smell from trash found in the water. This has caused people to get headaches, and in some neighborhoods; people want to stay inside. This problem has even been noticed by the town, but instead of fixing the underlying issue, the city of West Fargo stopped relying on this reservoir for drinking water. The city of West Fargo now gets all their water from the city of Fargo. This has let the trash problem build up and cause our only water supply in West Fargo to be ruined potentially forever.

Here is a possible solution. With the $10,000 grant, we can create a non-profit organization that aims to cleaning up this water. We can start by cleaning the trash found on the side of the river and on the side of the diversion. This will already help a lot of the animals that live on the side of the river. Once the trash is cleaned up, we must make contact with the city of West Fargo; to plan out a proficient way to filter unwanted items from entering the diversion. We don't to make it perfect, we are aiming to create a future that is livable for humans and animals.