From the timesleader.com
http://www.timesleader.com/news/Tapping_its_potential_10-11-2009.html
By Rory Sweeney rsweeney@timesleader.com
Staff Writer
WILKES-BARRE – Around 9 on a late September night, five friends are still fishing at the River Common park. Though the park is officially closed, darkness isn’t about to stop their semi-daily ritual.
And they’re not alone: Lights and motors reveal about nine water craft skimming up and down the Susquehanna River. There was a time not too long ago that fishing was unheard of on the river in the Wyoming Valley.
Now, however, George Yanchuk, Kenny Kalinay, Rob Crossley, John Scafidi and Carl Bartizek – the college-aged friends who are from the Back Mountain – say the on-water activity is fairly common every night.
The fishing? A bit uneventful, to be honest, but that doesn’t matter because one thing’s certain: No one’s going home with their catch.
The boys agree the fish seem healthy, and eating one “is not gonna kill you,” says Kalinay. “I think people hype it more than they have to.”
“Doesn’t mean I’m gonna try,” responded Yanchuk.
In 2005, the environmental group American Rivers named the Susquehanna “America’s Most Endangered River,” ostensibly because of sewage flows into the river and reduced funding to address the nutrient overloads.
The same year, Bassmasters Magazine named the Susquehanna one of the five best smallmouth rivers in the country, right up there with the prolific Columbia and Snake rivers out west.
The condition of rivers has been a national environmental issue. The Susquehanna has its own problems – waste disposal and runoff—and qualities – recreation and natural resource. Rivers such as the Susquehanna mean different things to different people and have value to everyone.
That’s why their health is important. “Judging a river’s health can inform the public and policy makers on the appropriate uses of a river,” Wilkes University professor Dale Bruns said. “It can also help the community market the river as an asset.”
But to market anything requires a public perception, and the Susquehanna’s in decidedly mixed.
Highlight positives
River commission and environmental officials acknowledge the damage, but prefer to highlight the positives. “That (the degradation) doesn’t affect the fish very much, and, overall, the river’s still very clean,” said Norm Gavlick, a commissioner with the state Fish and Boat Commission’s board and president of the Wilkes-Barre-based Suskie Bassmasters tournament fishing group.
The late mayfly hatch this year was a prime example, covering the River Common so completely it was nearly impossible to walk without crushing a few. “It was like a snow blizzard out on the river, and that’s an indication of a very healthy system, so I think it’s doing very well,” Gavlick said.
Waterways don’t have a specific overall measurement system, which might explain some of the confusion over the river’s quality. The Fish and Boat Commission designates waterways on their habitat, while other agencies rate them on scientific factors.
For a report it plans to release in 2010, the Susquehanna River Basin Commission is focusing on seven characteristics: water use and development; flooding and drought; storm water; mine drainage; sediments and nutrients; human health and drinking water protection; habitat and aquatic resources.
The SRBC’s 2008 water quality survey for this region concluded that the river is in decent shape and isn’t getting worse. It measured from Towanda to Sunbury.
“Overall, the majority of the streams in the Middle Susquehanna … were good with non-impaired and slightly impaired (biological) ratings assigned to 74 percent of the sites sampled. There were also numerous extremely degraded streams, mostly impacted by” acid mine drainage, the report said.
Wyoming Valley area
But in the Wyoming Valley specifically, the study found less positive signs. Of the 18 sampling sites in the river and tributaries around Wilkes-Barre and Scranton, only three had unimpaired biological conditions, and two of those were in the rural headwaters of the Lackawanna River.
Seven sites had the highest rating in water quality, and five had “excellent” habitat conditions.
Four sites had “severely impaired” biological conditions and five had the lowest level of water quality, almost all thanks to mine drainage. The only site in the survey with “non-supportive” habitat conditions was on Toby Creek upstream of Route 11 in Edwardsville. It had lots of sediment and poor stream bank conditions, plus it lacked riffles and cover in stream.
Ken Klemow, a Wilkes University biology professor, called the creek “a perfect example of mismanagement.”
On the river itself, no sample site scored the highest marks in all three categories because all nine were middling water quality. Most, however, weren’t impaired biologically and had supporting or better habitat, including sites in Wilkes-Barre and Shickshinny.
But whatever the river’s current condition, it’s not getting worse.
A comparison to a nearly identical survey completed in 2001 indicates similar conditions, however, all levels of biological impairment decreased and unimpaired samples increased 7 percent.
The SRBC keeps long-term trend data for seven sites, the closest of which downstream is in Danville. While flow has remained constant since 1984, the SRBC reports that total nitrogen, phosphorous and sediments suspended in the river water have decreased in concentration.
Iron pollution
“The Northern Anthracite Field, which surrounds the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre area, may be one of the largest sources of iron pollution in the entire Susquehanna Basin,” SRBC spokeswoman Susan Obleski noted in an e-mail relating comments from the commission’s mine-drainage expert Tom Clark.
The mine outfalls are often close to the river, Klemow said, “so the creeks don’t have that much opportunity to clean themselves up. … As a result the river itself is impacted.”
Beyond that, cracks in the ground allow the water to leak into underground cavities left by mining, leaving streambeds dry. “So what you have then is a length … where there’s no water flowing in the stream channel … (and it) comes back up in a polluted form,” he said. “It’s sort of like a double whammy.”
To address the issue, he suggests preventing the water from getting contaminated in the first place. By sealing off the cracks and making it easier for rainfall to percolate into the groundwater or be evaporated, he said mine pollution in the river could be avoided altogether.
“If you do a quality restoration project miles away from the river, that could actually have really good impacts on the water quality itself,” he said. “What people do in their own back yards … that’s going to make its way, eventually, into the river.”
• Aside from mine pollution, the river is threatened by releases from combined-sewer overflows, a century-old design that sends excess storm water into the river – along with the raw sewage mixed with it. Late last century, sewage authorities began the tedious and expensive work of digging up the combined sewers and separating them so that sewage isn’t released. A separation project to Ross Street in Wilkes-Barre has been ongoing since it was announced in 2002.
There are more than 50 such overflows needing separation in the Wyoming Valley Sanitary Authority’s service area, for which municipalities are responsible for finding the funding to fix them, according to Rob Krehely, the WVSA’s director of administration and planning.
Slowly, they’re doing just that. Pittston and West Pittston each recently received more than $9 million in state PENNVEST money for separation projects.
Effluent discharges
Sanitary authorities have their own discharge challenges to meet. A state program to reduce nutrient flows into the river calls for point sources like the WVSA to meet effluent limits designed to restore the Chesapeake Bay.
Bernie Biga, the WVSA’s director of operations, said the first compliance year begins next October. The authority, because it is already removing about 60 percent of the phosphorous and nitrogen from its effluent, is far closer to meeting its limits than other facilities. Krehely estimated that the upgrades would cost more than $7.5 million, but some of that might be offset in later years by selling nutrient-trading credits. If the authority can keep its discharges below its cap limits, Biga estimated it could have as much as 200,000 pounds of credits to sell.
Values won’t be known until the market exists.
As problems are addressed, though, others continue to pile up. With a new demand on water for natural-gas drilling, water consumption has increased. At the same time, so, too, have demands on the river’s ability to dilute pollutants. At least two proposed facilities have asked the state Department of Environmental Protection for permits to dump treated drilling wastewater into the river.
But there are responses under way. The Fish and Boat Commission discussed the river’s condition at its quarterly meeting last week and is working to classify waterways by their aquatic bounty so that the DEP has a guideline, Gavlick said.
“If the streams aren’t classified, DEP doesn’t have any guidelines and they pretty much assume nothing’s there, so they permit things,” he said. “The drilling’s not going to stop; it’s going to go on. We’re just trying to do what we can do from our perspective.”
Gavlick said the commission is gathering money to fund biological assessments led by colleges along the river. The SRBC is working with Bucknell University to create a “State of the Susquehanna Report” due out next year, Obleski said.
Beyond a cleaner river, Gavlick said the goal is to return some of the treasures that have been lost, such as a robust shad run in the spring.
“If we bring that shad run up to Wilkes-Barre, that shad run will do more to provide a huge economic impact to that valley than just about anything you can do there,” he said, envisioning a festival tied to the annual event. “There won’t be enough parking in Nesbitt Park.”
But first, he acknowledged, the problems have to be addressed. “That basically goes back to the sewage overflows, the mine overflows and the farm runoff,” he said. “We know they’re all bad; we just don’t know which one is worst.”
Watching the river flow
The axiom is “the solution to pollution is dilution,” and that’s often exactly the process regulators follow. But just how much water is left for dilution? According to the SRBC’s estimates, a peak day in July, with all facilities and users operating at capacity, consumptive use – water that’s taken from and not returned to the Susquehanna River – would approach 135 million gallons per day in the Wilkes-Barre area, said Drew Dehoff, a water resource engineer.
That represents as much as 20 percent of the total river flow during a severe drought. However, peak usage doesn’t actually occur, and 85 million gallons in a day is more realistic, he said. That’s about 12 percent of the flow during a severe drought.
Use levels are significantly lower outside June through August, he said, but noted that, thanks to grandfathering of centuries-old water-use rights and the fact that the SRBC ignores uses below a certain threshold, only about half of the use is accounted for in this region.
