Barely an hour after sunrise, the morning is already warm and muggy as a heat wave sits like a wet blanket over a parking lot near the Chechessee River. Courtney Kimmel loads up the back of her truck with a cooler, a clipboard and dozens of small brown bottles. As the director of conservation at the Port Royal Sound Foundation, Kimmel has a mission to understand the health of the waters that have long been this region’s lifeblood. The foundation has embarked on a project that will collect more water quality data from sites beyond what the state’s Department of Environmental Services is able to reach. Researchers from the group plan to make their findings from this survey and others available quickly to local governement officials to help shape environmental policies. According to the information available, the Port Royal Sound is relatively healthy. It’s also sandwiched between two of the fastest growing counties in the state, where rapid development can spell trouble for the wellbeing of the creeks and marshes. The threats to a heathy watershed is runoff from impervious surfaces like parking lots and roads and other factors coming from rapid population increases. Measuring things like dissolved oxygen and salinity often only excite the most dedicated of environmental enthusiasts. But by dutifully tracking this data, experts can identify problems early enough to reverse course. Scientists can then use the information to better inform local governments as they enact policies that shape development and environmental protection. But before any council can take action, the quest begins with an unassuming brown bottle. Kimmel hops in the truck and heads north, through Snake Road and turns onto SC-462 through the proposed Euhaw Overlay District, the subject of ongoing debate regarding how to regulate growth in the largely rural and environmentally sensitive area. Kimmel turns down another road. Tickton Hall, the site of a proposed development with almost 5,000 residential units, 580,000 square feet of commercial space and 75 docks sits to the right. The boat launch sitting at the end of the road is where Kimmel readies her gear, heads to the dock and drops a probe into the murky waters of Euwah Creek. The equipment captures metrics like the temperature, salinity and amount of dissolved oxygen in the water. She adds the information to a specially designed app before dunking two brown plastic bottles into the water and pulling out the samples. Later that day, she will send them to a lab at the University of South Carolina-Beaufort for further testing. In order to ensure the information collected is high enough quality to bring to local decision makers, her team, with assistance from DES, took nine months to develop the protocols for collecting the water quality information and to complete the training of volunteers who collect the data. When she’s talking about the comprehensive methods needed to make the project a success Kimmel said, “I like to take crazy ideas and make them operational.” Kimmel makes her way though the rest of the day’s scheduled trips, “the north loop” though Jasper County. One site is a remote dock where she’s pulling up a bucket to collect water as a man pulls a blue crab out of a hoop net further down the dock. Others are fresh, black water rivers fed by swamps, accessible only by culverts at the side of busy highways. With today’s testing and measuring behind her, Kimmel will head back to her air conditioned office before the temperatures climb near triple digits. In two weeks she’ll be dockside in the early morning again with her brown bottles and clipboard. This story was originally published July 31, 2025 at 3:04 PM. Try 1 month for $1