By Victor Greto
For the lower Delaware, as it will be for the rest of the river to the bay, the major source of pollution is storm and agricultural runoff, says Ken Najjar, head of planning at the Delaware River Basin Commission. This runoff, he says, is not just from farms or newer housing developments alongside or near its banks; as much, if not more, comes through the river’s major tributaries.
The problem with any kind of development, either agricultural or housing, he says, is that trees and plants are cleared, and are replaced with impermeable surfaces, such as roads and sidewalks.
“So where water once had places to soak into and go, now it goes more directly to the river,” he says. That runoff is tainted by household toxins, fertilizer and pesticides.
Combined sewer and water lines also remain in most older towns, Najjar says. When it rains too hard and the system can’t handle the flow, it dumps storm water and untreated sewage into the river.
“It’s too late to separate those lines,” Najjar says. Cities that have them include Philadelphia; Camden, N.J.; Allentown and Easton, Pa.; and Wilmington.
Even so, the ecological improvements on the lower Delaware have been phenomenal, Najjar says, and the water quality is nearly pristine.
“If you had only seen the number of tanneries and sewage-disposal plants that were here years ago, you’d be amazed,” says the current owner of the Shawnee Inn, Charlie Kirkwood.
Flooding makes for a love-hate relationship
About 30 miles south of the Shawnee Inn, the Lehigh River pours into the Delaware at Easton, Pa.
Here, 183 river miles south of Hancock, N.Y., is where the geology of the river changes from the Appalachian range to the Piedmont plain, becoming broader and shallower.
The Easton area – now home to Binney & Smith’s world headquarters, where more than 1 billion Crayola crayons are molded annually – started as a transportation hub for coal, steel and wood. During its 19th-century heyday, Easton’s five railroads and three canals connected the coal towns to the north, iron works to the west, and Philadelphia, 60 miles south.
Factories that produced dyes, fabrics and iron and steel products also sprouted in the city and along the river. But many of those factories have shut down and are being replaced with smaller, cleaner industries.
It’s this industrial decline of Easton and the Lehigh Valley, including Bethlehem and Allentown to the west, that helped improve the water quality of the Delaware River, Najjar says.
Flooding is now the most dramatic problem in Easton and in the towns and hamlets to its south – including Riegelsville, Milford, Upper Black Eddy, Point Pleasant, Lumberville and New Hope in Pennsylvania; and Milford, Frenchtown, Stockton and Lambertville in New Jersey.
On the first two days of April this year, heavy rain fell throughout the region. The river crested at 25 feet in Trenton, and, on average, it rose more than 12 feet above normal spring levels. The floods displaced hundreds of people, destroyed bridges and caused millions of dollars in damage.
In Easton, logs and branches still poke from one of the older bridges’ steel webbing like toothpicks between teeth.
“If you really love the river, you love and hate it,” says Andy Cain, 44, a house painter who lives in Riegelsville, Pa. “The devastation was incredible. But then, when it’s down, it’s the most beautiful thing in the world.”
April’s flood destroyed an uninsured home Andy and his wife, Wendy, owned in Riegelsville. They used the home as a rental property.
The home where they live overlooks the road that borders the Delaware. The home did not flood in April, or during the biggest flood on record, in 1955.
“The foliage has covered up a lot of the flood damage,” says Wendy, 44, of the damaged islands and riverbanks. “The islands were stripped bare. I’d never seen it so mad.”
Although the landscape is recovering, from the middle of the river the damage is obvious. Huge sycamores have been uprooted and lay in piles in the middle of some islands. Debris, including an occasional washer or tire, and some chunks of lawn, piers and gazebos that bordered the banks lay alongside them in ruins.
The Cains had been renting out the home that was destroyed to a single mother who, fortunately, had been away. Six inches of water spoiled the house’s first floor.
“When it floods, it’s saying back off,” Andy says. “But everyone rebuilds.”
The Cains’ courtship, marriage and now middle age all have been spent on the lower Delaware.
“We met in New Hope,” says Wendy Cain. “I was a waitress, and Andy was building and roofing houses.”
Although they developed their painting business in Doylestown, southwest of New Hope, they came back to the river four years ago.
“Despite how fierce it is, I want to live by the water,” Wendy says.
Hurricane Diane’s fury not enough to keep her away
On Aug. 18, 1955, Hurricane Diane hit and flooded the Delaware River Valley just days after rains from Hurricane Connie had saturated the ground.
Priscilla Linden was 13 at the time. She and her parents were on a camping trip with a church group on Pennington Island, about 10 miles south of Riegelsville.
The waters of the lower Delaware began rising. Soon, an area about the size of a football field was all that was left of the island, Linden says.
Her parents and other church group leaders huddled dozens of children in the mess hall, leading the kids in song to keep them calm until helicopters lifted them to safety.
“They didn’t want us to see the trees and animals that were floating past,” says Linden, now 62.
It was tense, because the helicopters could only take eight people at a time, and all were aware of how quickly the river was rising.
“I went to the door of the copter, dove in and held on,” she says of her turn to be rescued. The entire island was underwater soon after.
Army and Navy helicopters rescued nearly 600 people on Pennington and two other nearby islands during that incident.
Between then and now, Linden has married twice, borne two children and retired from a teaching career. And now, 50 years after the flood, Linden has returned to the river that threatened her life.
After her second husband died last year from congestive heart failure, she sold their large Victorian home in Huntingdon Valley in Bucks County, Pa., and moved near the river.
During his long illness she began visiting the river with him on daylong automobile trips. The area around Washington Crossing became their favorite place to go.
Linden now lives a short hike from Washington Crossing State Park.
“Everything I felt drew me to it,” she says. “It was always a place I wanted to go back to.”
Linden’s 4,000-square-foot home is decorated with 18th- and 19th-century artifacts, pictures and furniture that she and her husband carefully collected over the decades.
A copy of Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s famous 1851 painting, “George Washington Crossing the Delaware,” hangs over the fireplace. Near the Leutze picture hangs a copy of Charles Wilson Peale’s painting of Washington leaning on a cannon after his victory at Trenton. “I’m giving the man his due,” Linden says of Washington and his era.
Every day she hikes the park, passing by Washington’s statue and replicas of the Durham boats that took him across the river nearly 229 years ago.
From the narrow Washington Crossing bridge that arches into New Jersey, she gazes south toward a spot just past a bend in the river where an old pavilion stood. Her mother and father used to take her dancing there during the summer.
You’d never know it for the quiet here, but just a handful of river miles past where the old pavilion stood is Trenton, the place of Washington’s victory.
Past that bend in the river – where Washington’s victory ushered in a more modern America – the river begins its transformation from freshwater river dotted with quaint villages into a tidal estuary and hub of America’s commercial power.