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Plaster Creek is located in Kent County, Michigan. The stream extends for approximately twelve miles, with the drainage basin covering fifty-seven square miles, all within the Grand Rapids metropolitan area. Plaster Creek originates in quickly urbanizing rural areas south of the city airport, grows as it moves through suburban Kentwood, continues to flow northwest into the Grand Rapids, gathers more water from the creeks and streams in the city of Wyoming, then runs through inner city areas such as the Burton Heights neighborhood, and finally discharges into the Grand River one mile south of city center. Thus is cross through a range of land use zones, from agricultural to industrial and through a broad range of neighborhoods of different income levels from some of the highest to the lowest in the metropolitan region. Municipalities within the watershed include Grand Rapids , Wyoming , Kentwood , and East Grant Rapids and the townships of Gaines, Caledonia, Cascade, Ada , and Grand Rapids .
Plaster Creek is a spawning ground for Lake Michigan salmon. Each fall large salmon (2-3 feet long!) are seen upstream in the Ken-O-sha Park and beyond, perhaps as far as the Christian Reformed Recreational Center on Schaeffer Avenue.
The Plaster Creek corridor is home to a diverse community of plants and animals. It is the only place in Kent County where the state-threatened Beak Grass ( Diarrhena americana ) is known to grow ( Kent County is only one of six Michigan counties to be home to this rare species). Although many of the plants mentioned in Grand Rapids Flora (1901) are no longer present in the Plaster Creek corridor, several rare species have persisted during the last 100 years - Pawpaw, Bladdernut, Green dragon, Redbud, Blue cohosh, and others. The stream has also become home to a number of aggressive non-native plants species. Among the most abundant and problematic are Garlic mustard, Japanese knotweed, Glossy buckthorn, Tartarian honeysuckle, and Purple losestrife. The Plaster Creek corridor is home to turkey, deer, red fox, muskrat, mink, crayfish, heron, and trout. However, fish and macroinvertebrate communities are rated poor (Michigan Department of Environmental Quality Surface Water Quality Division, June 2002, 1).
The water quality of Plaster Creek has declined to the point where there is a state-issued warning that its waters are not safe for even partial immersion. The levels of bacteria in Plaster Creek are among the highest of any stream in the Grand Rapids area. Monitoring data collected in 2001 by Michigan Department of Environmental Quality documented exceedances of the Water Quality Standards (WQS)—elevated levels throughout the 12 mile reach of the Creek (Michigan Department of Environmental Quality Surface Water Quality Division, June 2002, 1).
Monitoring data indicated consistent exceedances with storm water runoff as the major contributor to E. coli. Consistent results throughout the sampling period indicate a constant source (Michigan Department of Environmental Quality Surface Water Quality Division, June 2002, 2-3). Sources are typically associated with urban and suburban runoff as well as illicit connections. One hundred and six storm water permits have been issued in the Plaster Creek Watershed Sixteen additional permitted discharges to the Plaster Creek Watershed are allowed, eleven covered by general permits of which seven are wastewaters associated with gasoline and/or related petroleum products and the remaining four are noncontact cooling water discharges. Five individual NPDES permits—four of which do not involve human sewage so can't be source of E. coli and the fifth is the GR Waste Water Treatment Plant. GR has a combined sewer overflow system and is authorized to discharge combined sewer overflows at four locations—two to be eliminated by the end of 2006 and two by the end of 2019. Also has emergency bypass (Michigan Department of Environmental Quality Surface Water Quality Division, June 2002, 3).