Healing The
Susquehanna
By Bandana Malik
On March 28, 1979 just ten miles east of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on the banks of the Susquehanna River, the United States suffered its worst nuclear meltdown in history. A malfunction in the cooling system at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant allowed the plant’s uranium core to overheat, causing a partial meltdown.

With it, the disaster carried in a whirlwind of worries and speculation. The Susquehanna will be a full-flowing mess of radioactivity, people thought. The banks will be buried under radioactive deposits. The fish and wildlife will all perish. The people of Pennsylvania will be exposed to lethal levels of radiation for generations to come.

Fortunately, the disaster was far less severe than first feared. But the threat of a nuclear meltdown had spurred – for a short time anyway – national concern about the Susquehanna River and communities living on its shores.

While the Susquehanna survived the disaster at Three Mile Island, this year American Rivers declared the Susquehanna the most endangered river in the country. Outdated sewage facilities, nutrient runoff and acid mine drainage are choking the river and poisoning its communities. Ironically, the same water, riverbanks, and aquatic life that survived the country’s worst nuclear catastrophe are now threatened through slower, everyday-type abuses and neglect.
But two Waterkeepers – Paul Otruba, on the Upper Susquehanna, and Michael Helfrich, on the Lower reaches of the river – are working to change the situation and bring the river back to health.

Raw Sewage
Sewage is always a messy situation, but in the Susquehanna it is putting people’s health on the line. Because many sewage treatment facilities along the river were built as early as a century ago, outdated municipal waste facilities release millions of gallons of poorly treated and untreated sewage directly into the Susquehanna. This sewage carries a potent mix of infectious diseases (like hepatitis and dysentery) and pathogens (E. coli and salmonella) into the same river that communities swim in, fish in, boat in and drink from.

In October, Michael Helfrich met with a mother whose son developed a serious infection merely from swimming in Pequea Creek, a tributary of the Susquehanna River. Such stories are not uncommon, especially since hazardous materials like industrial chemicals, hygiene products, medical waste, and stormwater are also included in the mélange.

Not only is public health jeopardized by the excess sewage, but the local economy suffers too. According to Michael Helfrich, the sewage problem has caused severe shortages of fish in recent years. “Such low numbers of fish are being caught in the Susquehanna and the Juniata watersheds that the recreational fishing economy is at an all time low,” he says. If nothing is done to prevent sewage from taking over the river, the fish population will continue to plummet and the local economy will feel the pinch.

According to Helfrich, the excess sewage in the Susquehanna will not be remedied until new infrastructure is put in place. To do this, municipalities must survey homes and business to identify where sewage lines are running. If sewage is being sent into a leaky century-old pipe, it needs to be redirected into new pipe to ensure that it is thoroughly treated.

For Helfrich, talking to municipalities and encouraging them to survey homes and business and replace outdated sewage systems with new, functioning ones, is the first step. The last resort, according to Helfrich, is to confront authorities that are not coming into compliance. In recently years, Waterkeepers in Los Angeles, Atlanta and Milwaukee have filed lawsuits because city governments were reluctant to implement new technologies to keep raw sewage out of their waterways. Helfrich notes that working with municipalities instead of against them is always the number one choice, but if authorities are resistant to installing new infrastructure, such an approach would have to be applied in the Susquehanna.
Nutrient Runoff

Another major threat to the Susquehanna watershed is fertilizer and nutrient runoff from factory farms, cities, suburban homes and golf courses. When microorganisms come into contact with the nitrogen flowing off these surfaces, they convert it to highly-soluble nitrate. Rainwater then soaks up the nitrate and carries it into the Susquehanna, causing algal blooms. In turn, excess algae lower the oxygen levels of the Susquehanna River, destroying its capacity to support aquatic life.

While nutrient runoff is undermining the water quality in the Susquehanna, the most deleterious effects of this runoff are seen beyond the river’s end. With 51 percent of the freshwater of the Chesapeake Bay coming from the Susquehanna, the nutrient load in the river is killing the bay. In recent years, a dead zone has appeared across 41 percent of the Chesapeake. “We’re seeing the effects of this in commercial and recreational fishing, swimming, and our enjoyment of the bay,” says Erin Fitzsimmons, the Chesapeake Bay Coordinator for Waterkeeper Alliance. “Almost half the bay can’t support its fish, oysters, crabs and grasses.” Unless action is taken to decrease the nitrogen in the Susquehanna, the Chesapeake Bay – which was a treasure trove of life when Captain John Smith first sailed through it four hundred years ago – will have an ever-widening dead zone.

Lower Susquehanna Riverkeeper Michael Helfrich warns that because the nutrient situation is so complicated, with runoff streaming from so many sources, the solution will be just as complex and will require a multifaceted approach. For the nutrient runoff from suburban lawns, education programs would be effective in encouraging people to apply fertilizer during appropriate times. (Contrary to popular belief, applying fertilizer during rainfall doesn’t mean your grass will grow better—it just ends up in the river.) Similarly, for nutrients coming from farm fields, using “cover crops” would reduce nitrogen and phosphorus runoff almost three-fold. Another approach might be to lobby local governments to install denitrification and dephosphorization technology, where microorganisms would feed on the nutrients filtering into the river. In almost all cases, the source for these nutrients will have to be addressed before we start to see results in the Susquehanna and the Chesapeake.

Acid Mine Drainage
One of the darkest dilemmas the Susquehanna faces today is acid mine drainage. From the 1800s through the mid-1900s, Pennsylvania’s coal seams, located mostly in the northern reaches of the Susquehanna watershed, fueled our industrial economy. While many of these mines are now deserted, the tunnels dug by miners still remain. When rainwater runs through these abandoned mines, sulfuric acid and iron dissolve into the runoff, eventually draining into the Susquehanna. Acid mine drainage has increased the acidity of the river, lowered oxygen levels, suffocated aquatic life and turned entire streams in the Upper Susquehanna orange with iron.

Helfrich notes, “Although the sources of acid mine drainage are mostly scattered through the northern portions of the Susquehanna, it accounts for 45 percent of the impairments to the Lower Susquehanna.” In the northern portions of the river this pollution is visible to the naked eye, but in the Lower Susquehanna, the increased acidity is still quite damaging.

The problems with acid mine drainage today are rooted in early industry’s influence on government. Paul Otruba, the Upper Susquehanna Riverkeeper affirms, “The mines were never properly reclaimed, even though they should have been by law.” Because coal mining had been a major economic force in the region in the 19th and early 20th century, industry was able to walk away from the open, dismembered mines without penalty. And since most of the companies that mined these lands are no longer around today, it’s difficult to hold anyone accountable for the damage. Grassroots organizations and the government must step in.

Paul Otruba recommends that these organizations and the state invest in total reclamation of these sites. “We can no longer just put in temporary, tenuous treatment systems. We need to treat these areas as Superfund toxic sites and clean them up using sound scientific methods,” he says.

Otruba sees three essential ways to accomplish this. First, he believes that public education is necessary so people understand the problems with coal mining and industrial waste. Secondly, local communities and grassroots organizations needs to work together to demand total reclamation of these sites from government authorities. And finally, people who understand the science behind acid mine drainage engaged in the decision-making process on their behalf. Paul Otruba says, “In two counties and forty municipalities in Pennsylvania, a system called home rule allows people, rather than representatives, to vote on such issues and affect the policies that are implemented.” All of these efforts, according to Otruba, will prevent the acid mine drainage situation from reaching irreversible levels.

The Upper & Lower Susquehanna Riverkeepers
While both the Upper and Lower Susquehanna Riverkeepers are relatively new on the job, they are intent on finding solutions to these problems.

Otruba is developing a mobile laboratory to do onsite environmental testing and analysis. The laboratory will also be an educational classroom and will have the tools to film documentaries on environmental issues related to the Susquehanna. He believes the most far-reaching approach is to develop environmental solutions by pulling together think tanks and research and development groups. Next summer Otruba is interested in training the first environmental emergency response team.

While Michael Helfrich just joined the Waterkeeper Alliance early this fall, he is a busy man. Each day, he is planning how he will tackle some of the worst problems of the Susquehanna, attending educational seminars, meeting with families and patrolling his waterway. In the next year, Michael Helfrich will make efforts to lower the water temperature in the river so it isn’t a breeding ground for disease and to reduce nutrient loads by working with public officials in agricultural and suburban areas to ease pollution.

For Paul Otruba and Michael Helfrich, the dangers facing the Susquehanna today are quite real and require the same kind of immediate response as Three Mile Island. To them, having been declared the most endangered river in America is a loud enough alarm bell.

“For our children’s children, the responsibility for healing the land and the water is ours. We need serious volunteers and financial sponsors for this journey of healing the Susquehanna. The journey is the way of the water,” says Otruba.