Keeping Sleepy Creek healthy is the cornerstone of our area's future

The Sleepy Creek Watershed Association wishes to honor Kristine O'Brien as Volunteer of the Year for 2005. She has been a member of the SCWA since its inception in the spring of 2000 and served as the vice president of the board of directors from 2002 to
2005.

She has chaired the stream monitoring program for the Sleepy Creek Watershed Association since 2002. She has organized periodic stream monitoring sessions along Sleepy Creek to help determine the health of the stream and to send important data to the West Virginia Save Our Streams Coordinator for statewide analysis, More importantly, she has been instrumental in involving the youth of Morgan County in the stream monitoring program by teaching stream monitoring skills to home schooled students and to science classes in Berkeley Springs High School. She led the effort to include Morgan County students from the secondary Environmental Science classes in participation on Worldwide Water Monitoring Day in October 2004.

She, with her husband David O'Brien, helped organize the first cleanup of Sleepy Creek along River Road near Sleepy Creek Village. She obtained landowner permission for volunteers to wade the creek and along the roadside to gather old tires, discarded furniture and appliances, and bags and bags of trash and recyclable cans and bottles. The O'Briens hauled all the recyclable plastics, which cannot be recycled in Morgan County, to the facility in Martinsburg, thus eliminating additional trash in the soon to be
overflowing landfill.

Moving to Morgan County from Baltimore, Md. in 1988, she with her husband, purchased property on Cherry Run. They are the proprietors of Cabins by O'Brien, and ecotourism establishment which offers guided nature walks for guests. She is employed by Washington County, MD public schools to work with severe behaviorally disturbed special education students. She is active in the Morgan County Master Gardeners, Travel Berkeley Springs, Eastern Panhandle Native Plant Society, past president of the Potomac Valley Audubon Society, and on the board of directors of the Ecology Coalition of Morgan County. She leads nature walks for county visitors and residents several times a year in the Berkeley Springs State Park. She can always be found assisting at several booths during the Apple Butter Festival and the Morgan County Fair.

The Sleepy Creek Watershed Association is pleased Kris O'Brien was chosen to use her valuable time on the SCWA Board of Directors and in working to protect the Sleepy Creek watershed for all Morgan County.

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Sleepy Creek Watershed Association
P.O. Box 991
Berkeley Springs, WV 25411