By Victor Greto
PHILADELPHIA – It’s peculiarly soothing for Rickey Clarke: the distant blare of ship and car horns; the sound of rubber rushing across the grates of the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge; the slick, murky water, scattered bottles and flattened paper cups along the shoreline.
He leans over the edge of a pier at the Palmyra Cove Nature Park as the Tacony-Palmyra opens wide, allowing one of the nearly 800 oil tankers that go through the area annually to make its way south toward Center City.
“I love to watch the ships go by,” says Clarke, a 41-year-old carpenter who comes here after work to relax. “It’s peaceful here.”
Clarke learned to fish with his brother while growing up in Fishtown, a north Philadelphia neighborhood just a few blocks from the river. After he married six years ago, he moved to the Rhawnhurst section of the city, a handful of miles north from where he’s standing.
“I had many happy times fishing on the river,” he says. “We’d have picnics and barbecues, and when we got to be of age, we’d drink beer, and fish, day or night.”
Catfish, bass, perch, carp.
Here, in and about Philadelphia, the Delaware River is vastly different from the nearly 200-mile freshwater river that meanders south from Hancock to Trenton.
South of Trenton, the Delaware River is affected by the tides of the Atlantic Ocean more than a hundred miles south and is mainly a tool of commerce and industry, not a venue for recreation.
Geographically, the transformation begins just north of Trenton, where the earth changes from the consolidated sedimentary rocks that characterized the Piedmont plain into the gentle, looser sedimentary rocks of the coastal plain.
From Philadelphia to New Castle, the river has been commercially successful for centuries, beginning with its role as a distribution point for food grown inland. Thriving shipbuilding industries grew in Philadelphia and in Wilmington beginning in the 18th century, and steamboat lines ferrying passengers up and down the bay came of age in the 19th century.
But it was the development of the oil refinery business during the 20th century that has powered the region’s importance to new heights. Of the 2,637 ships that plowed through this part of the river last year, 764 were oil tankers; the second largest number of ships, 435, carried fruit, a third of which goes through the Port of Wilmington, the busiest terminal on the river.
In this part of the river, states still battle over how much industry the Delaware can handle.
New Jersey recently asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stop Delaware from standing in the way of plans by New Jersey and BP Crown Landing LLC to build a liquefied natural gas import terminal in Logan Township, across the water from Claymont.
A boundary quirk from Colonial days gave all of the waterway from Claymont to the northern tip of Artificial Island to Delaware. Because most of the proposed 2,000-foot delivery pier at the LNG site would stand in Delaware, the state has argued the LNG project would violate its Coastal Zone Act ban on new bulk delivery docks in the river.
If built, the terminal would receive up to three tankerloads of LNG weekly, each carrying as much as 50 million gallons of the superchilled fuel. The terminal would be capable of storing enough natural gas to meet the daily energy needs of 5 million homes.
This section of the Delaware is home to the worst pollution on the river, and has for centuries swallowed and, over time, digested human sewage and detritus.
Refineries, complete with their crowded pipe-like towers belching smoke and flame, dot the banks of the Delaware and its main tributary, the Schuylkill River, for miles. These refineries handle more than a million barrels of oil a day.
“When you look at the 2,600 ships that come up the river yearly, about 900 are carrying chemical- and petroleum-related cargoes,” says Dennis Rochford, president of maritime exchange for the Delaware River and Bay. “We’re able to bring those ships up safely on a regular basis.”
But inevitably, something goes wrong.
During the evening of Nov. 26, 2004, the single-hulled Greek Athos I oil tanker, streaming north with the current, began to make a 180-degree right turn so it could dock against the current at the Citgo Asphalt Refinery near Paulsboro, N.J. As it turned, it twice struck a rusting ship’s anchor, spilling 265,000 gallons of heavy crude oil into the water across the river from the Philadelphia International Airport.
The oil spread north to the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge, and as far south as Pea Patch Island near Delaware City.
Although the situation was dire and took months to clean up, it was handled and coordinated well by the U.S. Coast Guard, Rochford says.
The Athos spill brought the river needed attention, says Kathy Klein, executive director of the Partnership for the Delaware Estuary, a nonprofit preservation group based in Wilmington. The attention, though, faded too fast.
“It’s fallen off the radar screen,” she says.
Minor chemical and oil spills occur all the time and pollutants make their way to the river – from the person changing his car’s oil to someone dumping household chemicals on pavement.
What’s worse, no one knows what the long-term effects of the spills may be, says Danielle Kreeger, science coordinator for Delaware Estuary Program.
“We are the second-largest oil port in the nation, and there is no continuous monitoring program looking at the effects of hydrocarbons and oil,” she says, “even though there are small spills all the time.”
One problem gone, another appears
Despite the Athos spill, the quality of the water in the Delaware has
improved. Many who have lived along or worked on the river say it’s cleaner than it has been in decades.
Out on the river north of Chester, Pa., by the former home of Scott Paper, Hickman Rowland, a 30-year veteran of the river, can see the improvements.
“Years ago, you could tell what color toilet paper Scott was making by the color of the water here,” says Rowland, owner of Wilmington Tug. “One day it was pink, the next blue.”
Now, it’s more often than not a dependable murky gray, speckled with gulls, herons and osprey.
The worst period for pollution in the river was during the 1950s and 1960s, says Tom Fikslin, a water-quality scientist with the Delaware River Basin Commission.
“Much of the cleaning up required upgrades of sewage-treatment plants,” which had been spewing raw sewage into the river for decades, he says.
Levels of fecal coliform bacteria, the presence of which indicates that the water has been contaminated with the fecal material of people or other animals, dropped dramatically in summer samplings of the river in Philadelphia in the past 35 years. Fecal coliform levels dropped from more than 20,000 organisms per 100 milliliters in 1965 to nearly zero today.
As levels of this bacteria dropped, oxygen levels in the water, radically low in the mid-1960s, have risen dramatically, allowing fish to breathe.
But the return of fish brought a new problem to light.
PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, are highly toxic synthetic materials used mostly in electrical insulators. Although the Environmental Protection Agency banned PCB production in 1979, a lot of usable equipment still contains them.
“When the fish came back after we cleaned up the river, we found they were full of PCBs,” Fikslin says.
PCBs build up in the environment, usually sticking to soil or sediments and remaining there for years. They have been found in the air, water and food and get into fish through contaminated water, sediment or food eaten by the fish. These PCBs build up in the fish and can reach dangerous levels.
In March, the Delaware Division of Wildlife issued a ban on eating fish caught north of the C&D Canal because of the presence of PCBs and other chemicals, including mercury. From the canal to the bay, it issued more limited warnings about striped bass, catfish, American eel, white perch and bluefish, also because of PCBs.
But it’s not just industry’s fault.
For sources of river pollution, industry has become second to stormwater runoff, Fikslin says.
To put it simply, Fikslin says, there’s no place for the increased storm runoff from development upstream to go except into the tributaries and the river.
“The water quality has improved,” Klein says. “But there are many problems, and water in the tributaries is getting worse.”
‘Look at what we’ve done to our waterfront’
Contaminants in the fish have reduced the number of fishermen who cast their lines into the water. Even Rickey Clarke, an avid fisherman, hasn’t put a line in since the oil spill.
But there’s something even more insidious than that to Dave Carter, 43, who grew up around the river and marshes in New Castle during the 1960s and 1970s.
Carter is especially bothered that most people do not interact with the river at all anymore.
“Look at what we’ve done to our waterfront,” he says, pointing at the business park on Lukens Drive in New Castle. Warehouses and businesses border both Broad Dyke and Buttonwood marshes, as well as the Delaware River.
“Forty years ago, people didn’t want to be close to the river because it was so polluted,” Klein says.
True, Carter says, but in the growing suburbia of the 1960s, boys hunted, carried their shotguns through mushrooming developments, and fished and trapped on the marshes and river. You will not see that today.
Carter, an environmental program manager with the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, grew up in the Van Dyke development, the first housing that bordered the 210-acre Broad Dyke marsh.
Every season on the tidal wetland was open season, and it was an education that shaped his life.
The marsh borders the Delaware River, beginning north of New Castle’s historic district, meandering under Del. 9 behind New Castle Middle School and draining through Wilmington Manor, across Del. 141 from William Penn High School.
Nearby Buttonwood Marsh starts farther north and in part drains through the historically black Buttonwood neighborhood north of the city limits.
Back behind the middle school off Del. 9, Carter and his older brother John rode their bikes along train tracks, now gone, through the marsh to the Christina River to fish.
But more often than not, they hunted, trapped and speared fish on the two marshes.
The muskrats they caught were not just about fun. They needed the money, especially when their father lost his job at the Electric Hose and Rubber Company in Wilmington during one year in the early 1970s.
Black muskrat pelts sold for $11 each, the brown pelts for $9. “That Christmas, they paid for all our presents,” Carter says, after the two reaped a couple of hundred bucks from the pelts.
During the summers, the boys commandeered abandoned metal tubs once used to mix concrete and drifted on them, shooting arrows to kill carp for crab bait.
When they speared enough fish, early the next morning, they’d sneak out of the house at 2 a.m. to go crabbing from the Battery Park pier, before anyone else got up. They’d sell the crabs they caught for up to $2 a dozen. “That paid for a lot of water ice,” Carter says.
But it was on the Broad Dyke and Buttonwood marshes where the main part of Carter’s education took place. “This is where I learned about wetland ecosystems,” Carter says.
The boys rode bikes and walked the trails throughout the Buttonwood Marsh, just south of the old Brandywine Rod & Gun Club, now gone. Today, this is part of the Lukens Drive business park. When the club released quail and pheasant, it was good shooting, as the boys waited for the birds to escape the club’s own shooters.
The boys also rode north toward the Buttonwood neighborhood, where they’d wave to residents who tended extensive gardens filled with tomatoes, peppers, corn, okra, cantaloupe, collard greens and black-eyed peas.
Some people still tend their gardens nearby.
One man, T.R. Carter (no relation to Dave), tended his garden with his fiancee during a trip Dave Carter took through the marsh last month. Although he lives in Wilmington, T.R. says he gets out to pick and care for his vegetables as much as possible. “I live in the city, but I’m a real country man,” he says. “But there’s not much left.”
Centuries of misuse catch up with the marshes
Just like the river, 30 years ago, the marshes were in trouble after three centuries of misuse.
The New Castle marshes probably were one of the first land reclamation projects done in the bay.
Here, in the mid-1600s, the first Dutch settlers did what they did so well back in Holland: diked the marsh so some of the land could be used for farming. Later that century, English settlers judged the marsh to be of no value, and supervised further reclamation. Despite that, marsh life continued.
Conflicting management of the wetland alternately produced floods or drought conditions. Some flooding, whether from the river or rainfall, also produced mosquitoes.
“The marsh survived because it was too hostile an environment to run equipment or work on it,” Dave Carter says.
By Carter’s teens, the marsh was surrounded on three sides by housing, schools and businesses.
By the time Carter learned to drive, he and his friends had left the marsh’s declining fowl and fish populations to do their hunting, fishing and trapping farther south on Del. 9.
After graduating from high school, Carter majored in biology at the University of Delaware, dropped out for a while, then returned to school and spent a semester in Central America studying rain forests. He graduated in 1986, about the time the business park was developed.
Fresh out of school, he got a summer job with the state, and then got a full-time job overseeing mosquito control for New Castle County. And with that job, he returned to Broad Dyke marsh, this time to help the county and the state remake it.
Better water management allowed the marsh to flood and drain with the tides. The systematic destruction of a reed called phragmites, which has choked many of the marshlands along the bay, also helped the marsh slowly come back to life.
Several years ago, Carter moved farther south on Del. 9 at Taylors Bridge, an area on the Blackbird Creek still untouched by many of the changes brought by growth along the river. He has become an activist intent on preserving the land around his 40 acres.
“Taylors Bridge is what New Castle was to me when I was a kid,” he says.
Despite being across the river from the Hope Creek Nuclear Power Plant in Salem, N.J., Carter has a view he wants to keep forever – a view of the marshes and of the Delaware Bay.