Jeff Montgomery, and Molly Murray

WIL

2%2C509 - Total stream and river miles



6%25 - Amount of streams and rivers where fish thrive

15%25 - Amount of streams and rivers safe to swim

59%25 - Amount of lakes and ponds safe to swim

Thousands of miles of water run through Delaware, in creeks and streams and rivers and bays, and very little of it is considered healthy. Nearly all of the state's rivers and streams – 94 percent, the highest amount in the region – are so bad that fish can't thrive. In 85 percent of them, Delawareans can't swim. Exempt from these dubious distinctions: the 24-mile Delaware Ocean coast and the Delaware Bay shore. Many days, Delawareans look out over the state's waters and see only calm and beauty. But the problem of dirty water is real, a product of dangerous toxins, unsanitary runoff and destructive deposits creeping in unseen. If left untouched, Delaware runs the risk of endangering its drinking water supplies, leaving fish caught in state waters too contaminated to eat and losing a multimillion dollar tourism industry built on a promise of clean, clear water.

In Wilmington, Ronald Bowers has had more than a decade to watch Delaware's dirty water problem from his third-floor balcony overlooking the Brandywine at Superfine Lane, built atop the foundations of a 19th century flour mill across from the city's water filter plant.

"Let me tell you, on some days I get up and the water just looks bad. You can see stuff floating in it," Bowers said. "Years ago I used to fish there, but not any more. I ask old guys who used to go there and fish and they say, 'Man I'm not eating anything out of that river. It's too dirty.' But you still see people doing it."

Near Dover, Jeremy Drago has followed the catch-and-release custom that has become common among bass clubs fishing in the Murderkill watershed, which drains farm fields as far west as Harrington and dumps into Delaware Bay by Bowers Beach.

For Drago, who fishes ponds and streams across Delaware, there really isn't any other option.

"I have a friend who will tell you not to eat anything out of Silver Lake in Dover at all," Drago said. "But I also have a friend who's been eating Silver Lake fish all his life, and he's still kicking."

Along the Christina River in full view of the Riverfront development, "the boats really do need to be washed every day at this point, especially after a storm," said Meg Carr, manager for the Newport Rowing Center in Newport. "The kids pretty much know that if they can avoid touching the water, they avoid it. We know the water's not clean."

Five weeks ago during his State of the State address, Gov. Jack Markell branded the state's water "embarrassing" and "unacceptable," and vowed to offer a plan to "clean up our waterways within a generation."

Markell, now in his fifth year as governor, is expected to outline the plan this week to finance a program estimated to cost more than $700 million to tackle Delaware's legacy of troubled waters.

His promise to act quickly drew comparisons with neighboring Maryland's decision in recent years to create a new "flush tax" and resident fees to pay for water-quality programs.

Markell's plan will focus on wastewater treatment, water quality needs and protection. On Tuesday, he is expected to propose reducing pollution, erosion and flooding caused by poorly managed stormwater runoff. He also will argue that the plan will create jobs for a state still struggling to recover from the Great Recession.

"The time has come to have dedicated resources over a multiyear plan to actually put the projects on the ground that we know are necessary," said Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control Secretary Collin P. O'Mara, "and then to try to accelerate those projects on a time frame that allows us to see the benefit in our lifetime and also puts a bunch of folks to work right now."

Time to heal

Unless action is taken, generations will pass before some of the state's most-abused creeks heal and toxic pollution levels fall enough to make fish safe to eat freely, state officials have cautioned. Dozens of Delaware's waterways remain under fish consumption advisories, warnings that regularly eating fish caught there increases cancer risk by at least an extra 1-in-100,000, and in some spots 1-in-1,000.

Even without the cancer risks, there is the problem of mercury tainted fish – including big bluefish from the ocean, some ponds and Prime Hook Creek east of Milford. In many of these waterways, state officials recommend that pregnant women eat no fish at all.

The easy fixes to the state's water problems are in place, including removing pipes that once spewed minimally treated sewage and manufacturing process water into rivers and streams.

"There's been enormous progress in what you could characterize as the low-hanging fruit," said Kenneth T. Kristl, director of the Widener Environmental Law Clinic.

"What we're dealing with now are problems that are more subtle, more insidious, more intractable. . . The solutions are much more difficult."

What remains are pollutants that touch waterways across the state. They flow from thousands of acres of phosphorus-enriched farmland in Sussex and Kent counties to nitrogen tainted groundwater south of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal. Bacteria slips into waterways from faulty septic systems, from dog waste left on the curb, from migrating waterfowl, from cattle depositing waste in streams where they roam freely.

The problems also include aging and outdated water systems, storm drains, ponds holding runoff from neighborhoods and ditches, a legacy of toxic pollutants, runoff from urban and suburban development and farm fields, and increasing strain on headwater habitats as stream banks erode, trees topple or vegetation is removed.

Currently, creeks supplying 70 percent of northernmost Delaware's drinking water carry levels of bacteria, chemicals and fertilizers too high to meet federal Clean Water Act standards, creating a need for industrial-scale treatment before the water is suitable for public consumption.

And south of the canal, the groundwater is often tainted with nitrogen at levels at or approaching the federal Safe Drinking Water Act maximum of 10 milligrams per liter of water. High levels of nitrogen can interfere with oxygen in the blood stream among infants and the elderly.

In some spots above and below the region's largest drinking water intakes, contaminated industrial land bleeds polychlorinated biphyenyls (PCBs) that were banned in the 1970s and other toxic chemicals into damaged tidal creeks and the Delaware River itself.

Shared struggle

Part of the problem, Kristl said, lies in the Clean Water Act of 1972 – the law that allowed a comprehensive cleanup of municipal and industrial sources of water pollution. The act gave federal officials and states the authority to regulate water pollution at the discharge pipe. But it stopped there, with states and counties having few means and little authority to address broader pollution problems such as leaking septic systems and unchecked runoff from farm fields and developments.

That point was driven home when DNREC attempted to curb pollution that could not be linked to a single source, such as runoff from fields and yards.

Around the inland bays, state officials tried to get control by barring development in narrow buffer strips around the bays and streams that feed them. Sussex County and local developers had the state rules struck down in court, pointing out that land use is a county power.

Four decades after passage of the Clean Water Act, much of the nation – especially the long-settled industrial northeast – is still struggling to restore its waterways to "fishable and swimmable" status.

Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania all report better water compliance, but big gaps, with tens of thousands of stream miles not yet evaluated. Delaware has checked virtually all of its more than 2,500 miles of rivers, streams, creeks and ponds.

Shawn Garvin, the federal Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator, said Delaware has done such a good job assessing the condition of its streams, creeks, ponds and estuaries that at one time observers could look at a stream that started in Pennsylvania and it was listed as not polluted but once it entered Delaware it was.

Knowing where the problems are is a first step, Garvin said. But "a lot of these things are going to require investments on the ground."

In some parts of Delaware, water problems have become grotesque.

During the mid-1990s, people who lived and boated along Rehoboth Bay put up with an overgrowth of Ulva lactuca – sea lettuce – an algae that looks like neon-green leaves of kale. It clogged the bay shore for several hundred feet, suffocated creeks and lagoons, and as it decomposed, it kept people indoors because of the stench.

The decomposition also produced hydrogen sulfide at levels high enough to corrode bolts on the keels of sailboats and discolor metal in nearby homes. These days it has virtually disappeared but no one is certain whether it left the bays because of the massive harvesting effort or because of a change in water quality.

Big polluters

So far, Delaware officials have seen no cases of human illness at ponds, but several have been posted with warning signs – often at the boat ramps where people launch to fish for bass, sunfish and crappie.

Visitors to Delaware's inland bays are warned against swimming in the same waters where they are encouraged to rent sail boards, boat and fish, and where maps of shellfishing beds are stained bright red in large areas because of dangerous bacteria levels. High levels of nitrogen and phosphorus fuel a chain reaction of supercharged aquatic plant growth and decomposition that sucks the oxygen from the water in the bays, producing massive fish kills that serve as a calling card of the degraded environmental conditions.

Around Wilmington, research has shown that some of the region's top industries also rank as some of the worst water polluters in the 13,000 square mile Delaware River watershed, and significant contributors to toxic contamination that led to fish consumption warnings.

During the past decade, studies tagged Amtrak's heavy locomotive shops in Wilmington as the far-and-away largest source of PCB contamination from stormwater runoff. The same research tagged the now-bankrupt and abandoned Standard Chlorine Metachem chlorinated benzene plant near Delaware City – once the world's largest producer of some pesticide and insecticide ingredients – as the top discharger of PCB-laced wastewater.

Other plants, including DuPont's Edge Moor pigment factory, also were found to be PCB culprits.

"If we do nothing other than what we're doing now, our models predict it will take another 40 to 50 years for PCB concentrations in the sediments to drop to the level that it doesn't result in fish contamination, where we need fish consumption advisories," said Richard W. Greene, watershed assessment scientist for the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control.

A quicker fix

Greene was one of the leaders of pioneering state and Delaware River Basin Commission research on "fingerprinting" PCBs and tracking down sources, which eventually led to adoption of a new multistate PCB pollution standard for the Delaware River and Bay last year. He also led development of a new cleanup strategy, called the Watershed Approach to Toxics Assessment and Restoration or WATAR, that has become part of Markell's water strategy.

DNREC and Markell's administration are hoping that WATAR offers a quicker fix for the state's most-toxic waterways.

The process relies in part on locking up contamination in sediment and water. Small black granules of activated carbon, not unlike those found in drinking water filters, are sprayed across contamination zones. The carbon, scientists say, binds strongly with pollutants like PCBs and chlorinated pesticides, locking up the contamination and becoming buried over time.

Interest in the WATAR approach grew rapidly last year after it was used to control runoff from an oil- and PCB contaminated site near Elsmere. Plans for a flood-control project along the same Mill Creek waterway threatened to send the pollutants into the Russell Peterson Wildlife Area marsh in Wilmington.

"Here we were making big investments in trying to enhance that marsh for purposes of ecological function, and we had an active release of petroleum and PCBs coming in a short distance above it," Greene said. "We were able to identify that, using advanced chemical fingerprinting techniques, and then fast-tracked a remediation project" that removed the worst pollution concentrations and stopped the movement of what remained.

Hidden sources

Tracking down sources can be complicated and frustrating.

Just off Georgetown's Circle, somewhere around the Delaware Court of Chancery parking lot, there is a dividing line for three lower Delaware watersheds. Look slightly north and east and the runoff from this parking lot and the land beyond it, drains to the Delaware Bay and tributaries.

Look slightly south east, and the water flows to the Inland Bays. Face west and the water flows to the Nanticoke River and on into Maryland and the Chesapeake Bay.

Drainage is so complicated in Delaware that some residents may not have any idea what watershed they live in or the impact they may have on it. John Schneider, the state's watershed assessment manager, said by the time land is subdivided into lots, it forces regulators to talk with hundreds of individual land owners rather than just one large property owner.

And when those hundreds of properties change hands every few years, a new round of education must start from scratch.

In about one-third of Delaware, everything ends up in some form in the Chesapeake that's put on the land, roads, parking lots, lawns and farm fields – from leaking crankcase oil or antifreeze, to cigarette butts, or stale coffee.

"You can't point fingers at somebody else and say that is where the pollution is coming from," said Beth Wasden, with the Nanticoke Watershed Alliance. "The pollution in the Nanticoke does start in Delaware"

Big costs

Delaware's known wastewater needs now total about $500 million, O'Mara said. Another $200 million is needed for flooding and stormwater control problems, with another $75 million required just to deal with the worst toxic pollution affecting state waterways and fisheries.

Annual wastewater treatment needs are running at about $10 million to $12 million annually, according to Jeffrey M. Bross, chairman of Delaware-based Duffield Associates, a regional engineering and consulting firm.

"I think we've made some strides in the last 10 or 15 years in improving waterways, but improving them is one thing and getting them to the point of being fishable and swimmable is another, and we're not there yet," Bross said.

Bross noted that New Castle County, DelDOT and several municipalities are under EPA mandate to improve their stormwater management, but state reserves for the effort have dried up. Few gains have been made in removing or easing health advisories on fish consumption.

"I can remember taking my children fishing and they'd ask "Can we eat this fish?" Bross said. "I'd tell them that it was fun fishing but 'You have to throw it back.'"

Lorraine Fleming, a longtime Delaware Nature Society board member and statewide advocate for conservation and environmental programs, said that one of Markell's challenges will be creating political will and public backing for new public fees for water quality amid turmoil over his proposed 10-cent gas tax increase.

The size and complexity of the problem will make it even tougher.

"It can be discouraging when you consider the billions that have been spent across the country to improve water quality," said Fleming, who once took part in a study that found only a kind of "sewage fungus" living in a portion of a now cleaner Red Clay Creek. "It's hard to feel that it's not two-steps forward and one step back.

Contact Jeff Montgomery at 463-3344 or jmontgomery@delawareonline.com and Molly Murray at 463-3334 or mmurray@delawareonline.com