Creek water quality is difficult to characterize and understand. To address this, the National Sanitation Foundation's (NSF's) Water Quality Index (WQI) was used to determine a measurable level for water quality. The purpose of the WQI is to provide a means to conduct a site-to-site comparison and create a baseline of water quality within a watershed. The WQI is, a unitless number ranging from 1 to 100 calculated from nine parameters (Hallock, 2002). The higher the number, the better the water quality, with the values generally scored as 90-100 being excellent, 70-90 as good, 50-70 as fair, and 25-50 as poor.
