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Water warriors
United Creeks Council quietly fights to bring streams to light
Katherine Redding, Special to The Chronicle
Friday, April 4, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback

In a small office in West Berkeley, a nonprofit has quietly proved that natural streams are less expensive and more sustainable than concrete culverts and channels. It has transformed the way the Bay Area thinks about water -- and the world is watching.

Urban Creeks Council was founded 20 years ago in the wake of the Bay Area's first creek restoration -- Berkeley's Strawberry Creek.

Steve Donnelly, co-director of UCC, explains that Strawberry Creek was once buried in a culvert beneath an empty lot. Bringing a culverted creek to the surface is called "daylighting."

"This was really the first daylighting project in California," he says. He says some people argue that Napa Creek was the first daylighting project, but he disagrees with them because, "all they did was take the top off a concrete channel."

Working under the revolutionary principle ...

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