Month: October 2021

Announcing the LRWP’s MS4 municipal stormwater management assistance program

By Anjali Madgula and Heather Fenyk

We are pleased to announce that the LRWP’s MS4 Municipal Stormwater Management Assistance Program has launched via our first municipal partnership with Highland Park!

This new fee-based program is designed to help municipalities in the Lower Raritan Watershed meet their federally mandated stormwater management education & outreach requirements under the Clean Water Act.

THE NEED:

Hurricane Ida told us that we must interrogate our current stormwater management systems, study the effects of stormwater runoff in our local townships, and implement through advocacy, policy, and community discussions, a more sustainable way to prevent stormwater from contributing to flooding or degrading the water quality in our streams and rivers. The trick? We must allow more rain to soak directly into the ground where it falls. There are so many ways to do this: by developing ecologically sensitive master plans for our municipalities, by ensuring maximum protections for our waterways and floodplains, by reducing impervious cover (hard surfaces) in all parts of our communities, by restoring degraded lands to allow for improved porosity, and by making dozens of “environmentally smart” personal choices every day. The LRWP is here to help! Please contact us to learn more!

DID YOU KNOW?

Municipalities can tap up to 25% of their New Jersey Clean Communities allocated funds to support required stormwater education.

THE LRWP’s MS4 MUNICIPAL ASSISTANCE PROGRAM:

Through the LRWP’s Municipal Stormwater Management Assistance Program, we engage multiple forms of community outreach to increase everyday visibility of how our waterways and streetways are connected. 

Here are a few examples of the direct assistance the LRWP can provide:

General Public Outreach (development of stormwater webpages, newsletters, materials sharing in kiosks and municipal spaces)

Target Audience Outreach (demonstrations at municipal festivals and events, educational program development for DPW and other municipal staff, #lookfortheriver community training)

School/Youth Education & Activities (direct engagement with youth via STEAM-based environmental education and programming using the LRWP’s Next Generation Science Standards Project WADES curriculum)

Watershed Regional Cooperation (stormwater management workshops for continuing education credits, programming on stormwater utilities, programming on integrated urban watershed management)

Community Involvement Activities (community clean-ups, stormwater management plan development, rain garden builds, impervious cover removal, and more!)

An MS4 (Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System) is called a separate system because it does not combine with the sanitary sewer system and it is designed to gather water on the streets via storm drains and pipes and release it, without treatment, into local streams and rivers. Poor stormwater management in our communities not only leads to compromised water quality, but also flooding.

HERE’s HOW WE DO IT!

Partnership initiatives with Highland Park for Year One include developing a new stormwater webpage, stormwater newsletter, hosting community clean-ups, conducting water quality monitoring of a local stream, and hosting a “Municipal Actions to Address Stormwater and Flooding” workshop to look at stormwater management from a regional, or watershed, perspective.

Highland Park Stormwater Website 

Highland Park’s new website provides educational resources, graphics, mapping, and analysis for residents to learn about Highland Park’s waterflow and stormwater management system. What’s on our streets enters our local streams that enter the Raritan River eventually connecting to the Atlantic Ocean. Did you know that almost half of the ground in the Boro of Highland Park is covered by buildings and pavements? 

Highland Park Stormwater Newsletter

Stormwater management materials will also reach the mailboxes of Highland Park residents via a new stormwater newsletter! Residents can read the story of how the ecosystem and water cycle of the Borough has changed since we’ve built more pavements and constructions. Check out our “Stormwater Word of the Month” section! 

Special thanks to LRWP StreamKeeper Susan Edmunds for her amazing photography and writing. We encourage you to check out more of her poetic and creative science communication work via her storymap piece Mill Brook: Portrait of an Urban Stream

Workshop on Municipal Actions to Address Stormwater and Flooding October 7th 3 PM
The LRWP is hosting a free workshop to discuss how we can create policies and municipal actions to minimize flooding and improve water quality. This workshop will be informative, engaging, and a great way for community members, educators, local officials, employees, or anyone else to get involved in community stormwater management discussions. Our Keynote Speaker is Rosana DaSilva, Water Quality manager with the New Jersey Harbor & Estuary Program. See you there!

Highland Park Stream Clean Up September 26th

It was a beautiful Sunday morning where LRWP volunteers, Highland Park residents, and Rutgers students gathered on River Road with gloves and garbage bags, ready for a couple hours of hard work. Hurricane Ida had washed trash back onto the floodplains and local trails. Slowly our bags got heavier and heavier until we made our final trip down through Johnson Park to the dumpsters. LRWP intern Jason Acevedo described the experience of looking for trash as investigating a mystery, searching for clues to tell a story, “looking at a crime scene”. We found glass pieces, water bottles, wrappers, plastic bags, and even a pair of pants and a tire. As we encountered them, we wondered about all the possible ways they had gotten there, concluding that there are so many. They could have been left there by people passing by or could have been swept in by the river having entered it from literally anywhere. We are excited to co-host our next clean up which is a multi-site clean up of the Green Brook on October 23rd from 10 AM to 1 pm! 

Can You Imagine an Entire River System?

Article and photos by Joe Mish

An elephant is like a tree, No! an elephant is like a snake, No! an elephant is like a wall. So claimed the three of the six blind men from Indostan, when they were asked to describe an elephant. In this case their blindness is representative of a loss of perspective and in that way, reflects on our nature to define the world into segmented parcels.  

Being gravity bound to the earth provides a limited view and so, it makes sense to parse the world via man made contractions. For instance, take a local county road, built to traverse through several counties, towns and cities. To ensure continuity it was given a numeric designation. County route 514 is an example. However, as it crosses geopolitical borders it gets christened with a local name. Amwell Road, Hamilton Boulevard, Woodbridge Avenue and Main Street, etcetera, collectively are the same road, county route 514.  

It is human nature to tease out pieces of the whole to better grasp an extensive subject. Our education system has honed specialization of studies to create unique disciplines and professions, each treated as unrelated kin. 

Over time we have lost perspective of the whole and dismantled the larger puzzle into its component pieces, forgetting that all disciples are related and taken together, are additive and complementary. Formal education has handed each disciple of its hallowed halls a critical piece of the puzzle. Much like a treasure hunt, where a map is torn into pieces and handed out to individuals to ensure all participants must bring their scraps of paper together to find the hidden gold.  

When we look at rivers, our earth bound position shapes our view. We see the north branch of a river apart from the south branch, each stream that feeds into a larger waterway gets a name. As a watercourse passes a political jurisdiction, that flow of water may, in some unusual cases, get a name change, not unlike our numbered county routes. Trace a stream back to its source and discover it doesn’t get a name on a map until it crosses a roadway. 

I had the opportunity at the invitation of No Water No Life founder Alison Jones to accompany her and Lower Raritan Watershed Partnership president, Dr Heather Fenyk on a complimentary flight provided by LightHawk to photograph the entire Raritan watershed from its two main sources all the way to Raritan Bay and Sandy Hook. 

The transition from a ground dweller to eagle was as breathtaking as it was revealing. Instead of only seeing puzzle pieces, the entire picture of the watershed miraculously appeared. Each segment lost its defined edges as the resolution increased; as if going from a pixilated image to a crystal clear picture. 

Though intimately familiar with each section of the river, I was lost when asked where we were at any given moment. I tried to rely on referencing the last known position but the speed at which we travelled, and the new cloud high perspective was surprisingly disorienting. It takes about an hour and ten minutes to drive to Sandy Hook from the point of the confluence of the Raritan and its main branches, it took only a few minutes to fly there. That alteration of time and distance also serves to overcome the linear relationship of diminishing interest over increasing distance, a lingering, innate human survival mechanism focused on serving the moment to save the day.      

The value of gaining a new perspective, where the threads reveal the weave of the cloth, provided an avenue for a holistic approach to temper human impact on the watershed as an entity. A change to any geo-politically defined segment must now be considered as systemic rather than an isolated local impact. Impervious surfaces increase upstream from housing developments and parking lots to flush more water into the river and exacerbate extreme weather flooding. Crops planted in the flood plain right to the edge of the river, cause erosion and silt build up to force flood waters further from the main river course.  

A good lesson to remember is the literary relationship of the word river to rivalry. The word for people drinking from the same stream or river was rival in French and rivalis in Latin.  When a downstream village’s drinking water was contaminated by the village upstream, it created a rivalry. Even in early times, the wisdom of what flows downstream was well ingrained in riverine communities, a lesson somewhat lost today. 

In lieu of boarding a plane, fire up your imagination. Imagination is a magic carpet that transcends available opportunity, bad weather and poor visibility to deliver needed perspective. Imagine if you can the water in the entire Raritan River watershed replaced with blue injection molded latex as a giant hand reaches down and grabs the main trunk of the Raritan River, pulls it from the earth, and holds it aloft as if it were a giant oak tree, its crown represented by the ocean. The fine mass of hairy threads leading into primary roots and finally forming a main trunk.  See the river as a tree, its form and function more similar than different.

River’s watershed or tree, both a conduit for flowing water, perhaps an alternative way to grasp the concept of the extent of a watershedOverlay this image on a land map to visualize a watershed, whose dimensions are typically presented in incomprehensible numeric values. Original artwork by Richard Reo

Loss of perspective is a demon that transcends all issues and stunts efficient problem solving, leads to false conclusions, lost time, and energy.  

Perspective may be gained in several creative ways, though it takes imagination and an open mind to intellectually take flight to see the whole picture. Once we realize our world is one entity and the smallest change has a cascading effect far downstream beyond where we figured the ripples terminated, we are better prepared to approach business, technology, relationships, education and nature while promoting the sage advice of ‘first do no harm”.

New York City as seen from the lower Raritan river begs a hand to reach out and touch it, as opposed to driving for hours on congested toll roads and across bridges. When distance and time reduced, it brings a new perspective and increased interestFlight compliment of LightHawk and No Water, No Life.

Author Joe Mish has been running wild in New Jersey since childhood when he found ways to escape his mother’s watchful eyes. He continues to trek the swamps, rivers and thickets seeking to share, with the residents and visitors, all of the state’s natural beauty hidden within full view. To read more of his writing and view more of his gorgeous photographs visit Winter Bear Rising, his wordpress blog. Joe’s series “Nature on the Raritan, Hidden in Plain View” runs monthly as part of the LRWP “Voices of the Watershed” series. Writing and photos used with permission from the author. Contact jjmish57@msn.com.