by LRWP Monitoring Outreach Coordinator Danielle Bongiovanni, J.M. Meyer, Jocelyn Palomino

Yesterday, Thursday May 22, was the official start-up of our Pathogens Monitoring 2025 Season! The Lower Raritan Watershed Partnership and Rutgers Cooperative Extension of Middlesex County are so grateful to be able to continue the monitoring program into our now SEVENTH year of data-collection and sharing. This volunteer-based program runs from May to October and takes place every Thursday monitoring along the Raritan River. We collect water quality samples at SIX non-bathing public access beach sites, provide our samples to the Interstate Environmental Commission for analysis in their laboratory, and report the results to the public on Friday afternoons. We are looking forward to sharing our data with the community and our partners to ensure the safe use of the Raritan River for all.

Our lab results for water quality samples taken on Thursday May 22, 2025 show Enterococcus bacteria levels exceeding the EPA federal water quality standard of 104 cfu/100mL at all six of our monitoring sites this week. Problem sites are indicated by red frowns on the map and chart which includes: Riverside Park (Piscataway), Rutgers Boat House (New Brunswick), Edison Boat Basin (Edison), Ken Buchanan Waterfront Park (Sayreville), South Amboy Waterfront Park (South Amboy), and 2nd Street Park (Perth Amboy). Green smiles on the chart and map indicate the sites with bacteria levels safe for recreation, and do not include any sites this week.

Pathogens/Enterococci levels are used as indicators of the possible presence of disease-causing bacteria in recreational waters. Such pathogens may pose health risks to people coming in primary contact with the water (touching) through recreational activities like fishing, kayaking or swimming in a water body. Possible sources of bacteria include Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs), improperly functioning wastewater treatment plants, stormwater runoff, leaking septic systems, animal carcasses, and runoff from manure storage areas.

Our goal in reporting these results is to give residents a better understanding of the potential health risks related to primary contact during water-based recreation. If you are planning on recreating on the Raritan this Memorial Day weekend, make sure to stay safe and wash up after any activities!

This pipe drains into the Raritan River directly from the Route 18 highway at Boyd Park. Hence, the oil sheen is essentially direct wash off from vehicles traveling on 18 parallel to the Raritan River.
Photo credit: Art Allgauer.

John and Ashley drop the YSI sonde into the Raritan River at the Edison Boat Basin while Sofi collects a water sample. Photo credit: Danielle Bongiovanni.

Essay and photos by Joe Mish

At sixty strokes a minute, the paddle leaves a linear series of isolated, expanding ripples, lingering on the water’s surface, appearing like the tracks of a rabbit running in the snow. Photo by Bill Haduch

The low concrete dam spanned the shallow river to create a constant water supply for a long gone 19th century grist mill. Above the dam a placid lake was formed, its surface appeared static and reflective to disguise the current as the determined river flowed from highlands to sea level. The dam caused the river to pause its downstream journey as it pondered its escape from the impoundment. It first attempted to expand its breadth to go around the obstacle. Failing that, the river began to overflow the dam.  The water flowing over the dam was now energized by its escape, and enlivened by the infusion of oxygen from its precipitous fall. The resulting white water was a sign of turbulence and the aeration reduces the density of the water making objects less buoyant.  As the water fell upon itself, the weight of the falling water created a void, filled in by downstream water flowing upstream, to form a horizontal current, spinning parallel the length of the dam, known as a hydraulic.

Dam pictured has claimed lives, though it looks harmless at low water levels.

The spinning action of the hydraulic increased the downstream current’s speed. Over time, debris and sediment accumulated below the dam to force the water into one main channel to create a venturi effect which further accelerates current speed.

Warning sign above the impounded water, and a note left on my truck warning of the danger dams present to paddlers.

A couple hundred yards below the dam, the flowing water surrenders its infused energy to rely on the gradient of the river bed to continue its seaward journey.

On a bright sunny day, after a warm June rain, I decided to accompany the river on its infinite downstream journey. I placed my black carbon fiber canoe a few feet from the sandy shore in about a foot of calm water before I climbed aboard. As the river bed naturally narrowed from the wide funnel shaped expanse created by the dam, accumulated sediment and debris blocked and shifted the main flow to the far shore.   

When I launch at this location, I always do an upstream ferry to experience the free energy the river supplies. A ferry will carry you across a river’s current with hardly any effort. No need to aim your boat far upstream of your intended landing while furiously fighting the current. I eased the boat into the current, bow upstream, to position it parallel to the flowing water, making it essentially invisible to the current. It is possible to sit motionless in fast water, as long as the boat remains perfectly aligned with the flow.  When performing an upstream ferry, point the bow in the direction you want to go, the angle depends on the speed of the current. It feels like magic as you entice the river’s energy to reveal itself and provide a counter intuitive assist to effortlessly cross a strong current.

Water level determines the downstream course. At low levels, winding channels in the river bed own the navigable water. This day the higher water left many options.

The sleek black canoe appeared as a dark shadow on the river bed, its passage as silent as its shadow, neither left a trail or a trace.

Where the river makes a bend, the water downstream, pools, as the flow crashes headlong into the river bank. Below each significant bend, a shoal will be formed with channels generally situated tight along either shore.

Immediately after one sharp bend, marked by a high red shale cliff, a navigable narrow passage runs very tight along the right steep shale bank, shrouded by overhanging branches. At lower water levels this channel is like running a gauntlet, though preferable to dragging the boat over the protruding shoal.

When the river passes under one old steel truss bridge, the river course is such that the main current bounces off the angled bank, causing an eddy of circulating water to form on both shores. An eddy shaves flowing water from the main course and the bow of a boat can suddenly be held still by the eddy and simultaneously the stern is swept downstream to overturn the canoe. Eddy turns are a basic maneuver a paddler should master, especially in high water where an eddy is not normally formed at lower levels. Get caught by surprise in an eddy in high water or off season will make you a believer in reading a river. Find a place where eddies form at lower water levels and learn the basics of fluid dynamics and effective paddle strokes and downstream braces.

On any given day the river can deliver a surprise that was not there the day before. Specifically, strainers, treetops which fall across the river blocking passage are especially dangerous. This is where a ferry can come in handy when you round a bend and see it blocked by a fallen tree. Tangled in branches with a water filled boat or current pressing you against an immovable object is a death sentence. Water weighs a pound a pint, and a boat full of water is beyond the strength of the most fit paddler to lift.

This is where a draw comes in handy. Kept the boat upright with a desperation draw.NEVER stop paddling, keep your paddle in the water!

Obstacles avoided; a stretch of open water begs the black canoe to be pushed to the limit of its design. The paddlers fitness and form are the rate limiting factors to speed the canoe’s shadow along the light tan river bottom.  At sixty strokes a minute, the paddle leaves a linear series of isolated, expanding ripples, lingering on the water’s surface, appearing like the tracks of a rabbit running in the snow. 

The black canoe is the cursor I used to help read the river’s mood and understand its personality. It was a good read with many twists and turns, the imagery impressive and maybe the best never ending story ever told.  

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.

2025 marks the LRWP’s 10th year as a non-profit. Our dedicated board has worked hard to implement a strategy to ensure we can continue watershed stewardship for the next 10 years. We look forward to sharing more on what our stewardship vision looks like in coming months. For now, we are pleased to share a snapshot of recent grant awards and partnerships we look forward to building on:

• The Borough of Highland Park renewed our lease for the 101 Raritan Avenue Boat Shop through the end of December 2027. This extended lease lends certainty to program delivery, and we will soon revamp the space to accommodate a greater variety of activities.
• Environmental Endowment of New Jersey granted $7,000 to support “Advancing Climate Vulnerability Assessments at Superfund Sites for the Lower Raritan Watershed.” This will allow us to improve Community Right To Know (CRTK) outreach regarding environmental hazards in our communities.
• Mohawk Canoe Club granted $10,000 to support development of a Raritan River Access Guide and to expand our paddling program. In addition to FREE public paddles scheduled June 14, July 3, and August 30 we will host on-water events for Highland Park Summer Camp and “pop up” paddles on hot summer nights. Stay tuned!
• New Jersey Department of Education granted $15,000 to support delivery of Professional Development for K-12 educators, focusing on place-based and case-based watershed curriculum. This grant, through the Climate Change Learning Collaborative, will allow us to share lessons in how to conduct eel and stream habitat assessments, water quality monitoring and more with teachers throughout New Jersey.
• Arts Institute of Middlesex County granted $5,000 for EcoArts programming.
• Arts Institute of Middlesex County granted $20,000 for “Heritage Hydrology Mapping & Research for the Lower Raritan Watershed.” This will support archive and annotate historic map sources that show streams/hydrology in six Middlesex County municipalities to better understand transportation and other infrastructure failure risk related to buried and culverted streams.
• New York/New Jersey Harbor & Estuary Program granted $3,000 to support migratory eel monitoring. Our last monitoring session for the year will be May 10, 1pm – join us!
• Co-hosting a June 2025 Conference for Mayors focused on the New Jersey State Development and Redevelopment Plan – in partnership with the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, the New Jersey State Planning Commission, and the New Jersey Conference of Mayors.

By Danielle Bongiovanni, LRWP 2025 Science Communication Intern

The Lower Raritan Watershed Partnership (LRWP) is overwhelmed with gratitude for everyone who helped raise over $3,500 at the “Run Off” 5k on Saturday, March 29 at Washington Memorial Park. Whether you were one of the 108 registered racers, bought tickets for the gift basket raffle, or simply came to learn the importance of keeping the Raritan Watershed clean, we were happy to have you there.

The “Run Off” would not have been possible without sponsorship from NJ American Water, Crunch Fitness of Green Book and the Borough of Dunellen. The Middlesex County Office of Emergency Management, Dunellen crossing guards, and volunteers from SEWA Central New Jersey and the LRWP ensured the event’s safety. 

Grant funding was provided by the Middlesex County Board of County Commissioners through a grant award from the Middlesex County Cultural and Arts Trust Fund. For information on events, go to MiddlesexCountyCulture.com.

“The Lower Raritan Watershed Partnership has been a grantee of ours through our program grants for arts, history and culture for years, doing either an arts project or a history project and intersecting that with the environmental issues they work on through their nonprofit. They’re one of a few environmental groups that receive arts, history and culture funding, so we love getting involved with them,” said Manda Gorsegner, the Division Head of Visual and Performing Arts at the Arts Institute of Middlesex County.

The Institute assisted with event planning by rallying visual and performing artists to bring attention to conservation through creativity. Gorsegner said, “Using arts, history, and culture to engage the public in environmental and social issues is really impactful and a unique way to talk about these stories and the importance of how we all intersect culturally and socially.”

Such conversations abounded as attendees visited tables set up by event partners. Spectrum for Living, a non-profit serving people with developmental disabilities, provided googly eyes, fake feathers and colorful paper squares for decorating wood cutouts of green herons. Crafters took home a reminder of who else depends on clean watersheds.

Independent artists Kate Eggleston and Lisa Bagwell repurposed litter into art supplies. Eggleston created plates for collagraph printmaking, while Bagwell used it as filling for a sculpture of a glass eel, a juvenile stage of the American eel.

Bagwell was in her element. “I do a lot of cleanups on my own, so making a sculpture out of collected trash is what I do,” she said. The completed sculpture will be toured across schools by the Hudson River Foundation’s NY-NJ Harbor & Estuary Program to raise awareness of waterway pollution.

Music poured from the pavilion, courtesy of the talented New Jersey Brass Band, part of the New Brunswick Jazz Project, and by jazz vocalist Audra Mariel.

One performer took his music to the streets instead. Dave Seamon, better known as the Trash Troubadour, performed his song “Miracle Mile” as he led attendees favoring a slower pace on a “Trickle” from the park to the Green Brook. There, LRWP Board Member Anton Getz and LRWP Community Outreach Coordinator Dr. John Meyer discussed the litter trap and the eel monitoring program.

The litter trap, nicknamed Bandit, was installed in the Green Brook as part of the Cornell-Dubilier Electronics Natural Resource Damage Assessment and Restoration (NRDAR) Restoration Plan. The Cornell-Dubilier NRDAR Plan is an example of how the nation’s strong Superfund Laws truly hold polluters accountable for environmental damages in our communities. Cornell-Dubilier Superfund Site Trustees include the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. The location of the litter trap, almost exactly at the intersection of Union, Middlesex, and Somerset Counties, is a pertinent reminder of how polluted water flows without regard for man-made borders. When the Dunellen Department of Public Works empties Bandit, Dunellen is not the only community benefitting.

The beneficiaries are not limited to humans! Getz recalled discovering a three-foot-long American eel hiding inside a tire during a cleanup of the Green Brook. “Those chemicals are leaching into its water, leaching into its environment, so it needs to find a better hideaway,” he said.

Meyer assured attendees that the litter trap did not hinder migrating eels. Bandit’s buoyant arms catch floating trash, but fish can easily swim beneath.

Back at the park, Green Brook Middle School students presented posters created in collaboration with the LRWP and New Jersey Watershed Ambassador Brianna Casario. They shared facts about the American eel’s life cycle and discussed the importance of citizen science.

The event concluded with the winners of the gift basket raffle, whose prizes were generously donated by local businesses. Congratulations were also awarded to the fastest 5k runners.  Dunellen residents took first in the male and female divisions, with Matthew Clemente recording a chip time of 21:27 and Lisa Shultz recording 27:16.

At the core of the “Run Off” 5k was the theme of connection. Attendees from across New Jersey supported conservation through the arts, sciences, and athletics. It proved how, regardless of your preferred discipline or your location, there is an opportunity for you to fight for healthy watersheds, and the LRWP would love to help you find it.

Essay and photos by Joe Mish

Warehousing, apartments, shipping centers, federal highways changed my world. It was a natural world I discovered that was available to everyone, with few takers, now lost to the ages. Whether warehousing or condos, both are poison pills being offered as a palatable option.

The end of my world began when President Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Bill on June 29, 1956, three months short of 100 years after Henry David Thoreau left his footprints along the north shore of the lower Raritan River. 

My world began at the end of my dead-end street and the Lehigh Valley Railroad tracks which bordered the vast abandoned clay banks, dotted with flooded clay excavations, swamps, streams and woods stretching to the Raritan River. The railroad tracks were my equivalent of the St Louis Gateway arch, a monument to the westward expansion of the United States into the unexplored territory stretching from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean.  

Like the early days of frontier travel, the tracks and clay banks were said to be fraught with existential danger. Bums and hobos were the hostiles parents warned about, if that failed there was the quicksand and bottomless mud which would swallow a kid, never to be found. The real threat was from the ‘big kids’, defined as any kid who was bigger than you. Often, they would intimidate younger kids to extort any change they had, or otherwise physically intimidate them. So, the rule was, you saw a big kid, you ran away as fast as you could. And then there were the trains. The tracks stretched perfectly straight for a mile of more, so you could see it coming a long way off. Problem was if a kid was so occupied, the train could easily sneak up on him. 

We learned that if you went deeper into the wilderness, there were rarely any human encounters, as the travel was difficult and muddy and held no specific area of interest. Forays into the wild were pure exploratory expeditions or in my case, a safe place to shoot my bow and arrow.  High banks of soft clay let the wooden arrows live longer. The real beauty was the ability to draw back the bow and aim at the sky to see how far an arrow can fly. There was something about watching the arrow ‘escape the surly bonds of earth’, as you became the arrow. Surely some paleo bowman was inspired by his arrow’s high arc to imagine the possibility of human flight. Inspiration to fire the imagination was everywhere you looked. 

Being a transition zone, many plants typically found in south Jersey could be identified, sheep laurel, green briar and odd oak species. Spotted turtles were quite common and gray fox dominated the area. There were American bittern, gallinules, night hawks, rose breasted grosbeak, indigo buntings, rufous sided towhees, brown thrashers, short eared owls and even a rare Boreal owl, native to the arctic regions was documented.  The variety of colorful bird life brought my Golden Guide Book to Birds to life as the birds seemed to fly off the pages into the surrounding trees.

A short eared owl sits on a vent pipe in the area seen on the cover image. A boreal owl, native to the arctic region, was documented in the dame area. Its presence validates the importance of the Raritan River off ramp of the Atlantic Flyway.

The event of that June day in 1956 had no direct impact on my wilderness until the late 60s when flimsy tan stakes, flagged with orange ribbons, started to appear throughout my territorial claim.  

The clay banks marked the reach of the ancient sea floor, characterized by sandy, clay soil, interspersed with smooth cobble, that stood in sharp contrast to the dark brown soil and New Brunswick shale found across the tracks and up-river. This land was caught between the terminus of glacial expansion and the reach of prehistoric seas. 

The intersection of soils, blessed with a marriage of fresh and salt water, set along the Atlantic flyway, an ancient bird migration route, and the presence of a major inland river off ramp, makes this area one of the most environmentally diverse, along the east coast. The bay and river are a gathering place for migrating striped bass, shad and alewives, who have retained evolutionary migration patterns to conquer time and impediments, to fulfill their ancient upstream journey.

Before long, the significance of the flagged stakes driven into the heart of this unique parcel was realized, as machinery began to carve paths and straightaways to accommodate interstate 287. Eventually all that remained of the clay banks were a gulag of islands interspersed among the on and off ramps, dominated by sweet gum, pin oaks and green briar. An apartment complex replaced the small isolated cattail swamp which supported a population of black muskrat.  

Aside from the overflowing natural treasures, are the memories of freedom and seemingly unrestricted travel and discovery which led to a lifetime of curiosity of all things wild. Even though the change was personally disruptive and unwelcome, the clay banks served their purpose to set a course through life that never wavered from the affiliation with the natural world. Good for me, sad for future generations who will never share that experience.

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.

The Raritan River is a constantly changing feature of the landscape of New Jersey. As a tidal river, it changes daily. As a geologic feature, it changes its channel with erosion and accretion. The watershed that drains into the river continues to develop, changing the stormwater runoff that fuels the river as engineering simultaneously mitigates and worsens the impacts. Thinking of the Raritan as a static or fixed feature ignores its realities.

In this video clip, Rutgers Landscape Architecture Graduate School student Ana Maria Oliynyk works with AI to mine historic images of the Raritan River at New Brunswick, and engages AI to imagine the future for the Raritan.