Photos and article by LRWP Board President Heather Fenyk
The LRWP and EARTH Center of Middlesex County monitors for Fecal Coliform and Enterococcus at six non-swimming public beach access sites along the Lower Raritan during the warmer summer months. Fecal Coliform and Enterococcus are indicators of disease-causing bacteria in our waterways.
The EPA recommends that a single Enterococcus sample be less than 110 Colony Forming Units (CFU)/100mL for primary contact. 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 fishing and swimming in a water body. 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. Enterococci levels are often high after heavy or consistent rainfall.
Briefly, our Sayreville, South Amboy and Perth Amboy sites are looking good this week! Please note that these results for August 20, 2020 are preliminary and awaiting Quality Control.
Field Notes
Yesterday was an exquisite day for sampling the Raritan!
Summer 2020 Lower Raritan Monitoring Sites
The New Jersey state Department of Environmental Protection and Middlesex County Health Departments typically monitor at sanctioned public swimming beach sites. They do not monitor the water quality for pathogens at public access non-swimming beach sites along the Raritan, despite regular use of these areas for primary contact (fishing and swimming) by members of our urban communities.
The LRWP works with in partnership with the Interstate Environmental Commission for lab analysis of our samples. We have a Quality Assurance Protocol Plan (QAPP) approved by the federal Environmental Protection Agency. We work to report our results as soon as lab analysis is completed.
The LRWP commits to educating ourselves about historic and system racism, supporting those who are imagining a new path forward for our state and nation through structural change. Please consider joining us in following these important environmental justice advocates, environmentalists of color and other leaders we are listening to on twitter and Instagram.
TWITTER
Jersey Renews. @JerseyRenews. “We want environmental justice, clean renewable energy, good jobs, and protections for workers and communities.”
NJEJA. @NJEJAlliance. NJ Environmental Justice Alliance is a coalition of NJ-based organizations and individuals committed to working together to create just & healthy NJ communities
The Ecologist. @the_ecologist. The Ecologist – setting the environmental agenda since 1970. Environment, social justice, activism & ethical living. Now part of The Resurgence Trust charity.
Robert D. Bullard. @DrBobBullard. Scholar, lecturer, policy expert, award winning author of more than 18 books, and father of environmental justice.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright. @rgunns. Ms. Gunn-Wright is lead policy architect of the Green New Deal designed to tackle climate change in a way that delivers justice and jobs.
Tara Houska. @zhaabowekwe. Ms. Houska is an attorney who fights for Indigenous rights and justice and serves as the national campaigns director of Honor the Earth, a US-based non-profit that campaigns for Indigenous environmental justice.
WE ACT for EJ. @weact4ej. WE ACT for Environmental Justice has been combating environmental racism and building healthy communities for people of color since 1988.
Registration is now open for the LRWP’s first “Watershed Highlights and Hidden Streams” walking tour of 2021!
Join us on Saturday July 24, 10-noon as we visit one of the northernmost areas of the Lower Raritan Watershed and explore the Watchung Reservation’s Blue Brook and Lake Surprise.
The walk, guided by our own David Tulloch, will help our hikers begin to discover this massive Olmsted Brothers-designed park. With help from a few maps, Dr. Tulloch will talk about the context of the park within the watershed as well as the context of this culturally-significant historic landscape within the surrounding communities of Union County.
We will be meeting in the Watchung Reservation at the area called The Loop (Some park signs point towards the Loop and its playground). At 10am our group will depart on foot from the building (with bathrooms) shown with the red marker below (40.687, -74.374).
Estimated 4 miles of walking.
Registration required. Please check the LRWP website for updates, especially in the case of inclement weather.
The Watchung Reservation is in Scotch Plains, NJ 07076
The LRWP and South River Green Team are co-hosting this hour-long public discussion, sponsored by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, to capture stories about the different ways water matters to New Jerseyans.
Participants will have the opportunity to contribute their water story to a statewide public archive documenting personal connections to water and waterways in New Jersey. No prior preparation is needed to attend, and all are welcome to share or listen.
Join us Saturday February 8, 1:30-2:30 pm at the South River Public Library 55 Appleby Ave, South River, NJ 08882
Workshop Overview
This workshop creates the space to talk about meaningful water sites and sources for individuals and communities in New Jersey. Stories from consenting participants captured from this event, and others throughout the state, will be part of a public archive and digital exhibition that creatively visualizes, interprets, and maps New Jersey water stories and the waterways that inspired them. After capturing water stories in each county over the next year, project coordinators will curate a digital exhibition (website) to interpret, display, and share water stories.
In the opening scene of Mark Ruffalo’s devastating new true-story legal thriller Dark Waters, released this week in New Jersey theaters, we watch as a car travels rural roads to a swimming hole. In the dark of night three teenagers exit the car near a “no trespassing” sign, jump a fence, and dive in. The camera pans to signs marked “containment pond,” where chemical byproducts of Dupont’s manufacturing plants – specifically Perfluorooctanoic acid or PFOA – are ostensibly “contained”.
The year is 1975. PFOAs are unregulated. Things end badly. We soon learn that PFOA is related to an abundance of health risks. The film traces a decades-long corporate cover-up of these risks, as well as loss of life and tremendous suffering. The film also makes clear how exceedingly difficult it is to contain toxic pollutants.
The issue of historic pollutant containment is the focus of a report released last month by the US Government Accountability Office that identifies the nation’s Superfund sites deemed most “at risk” of climate crises including flooding, coastal inundation, and wildfire. Of the 945 sites on the GAO list, 24 are in our 352-square mile Lower Raritan Watershed. That’s an incredibly disproportionate 4% of the most at-risk toxic sites in the United States. Our almost 900,000 watershed residents don’t have to travel rural roads to encounter pollutant hazards, they are proximate to where we live and work. More info on the GAO report, and a list of these sites, is on the LRWP website.
Of course the GAO only looks at Nonfederal Superfund sites. Here’s a map of all Known Contaminated Sites (KCS) in the watershed, many more of which are likewise at risk.
Not surprisingly, the concentrated band of sites that runs through the middle of the watershed traces along the Raritan River and feeder waterways. Our challenge will be containment of hazards impacts, particularly tough when stilling ponds and uses are proximate to flooded waters.
Some 30 tires are stuck on the river bottom near Highland Park’s Donaldson Park. The LRWP and our Central Jersey Stream Team friends have wanted to get in there all year. Saturday October 26 is our last chance for a super low tide in 2019, and if the weather holds out we should be able to wrestle these guys out of the muck.
This will be a VERY muddy clean-up, requiring muscle and perseverance. There are few small items to collect in this area it is mostly buried tires.
Registration starts at 12:30pm, we want to get out onto the mud flats quickly to take advantage of the low tide at 2:11pm. We expect to have things wrapped up by 3pm.
Please wear appropriate clothing and footwear that can get wet and (VERY) muddy.
Please park by the basketball courts, we will fan out onto the mud flats from there.
Registration requested. This is a “shine only” event, and we will not hold the clean up if the water is high because of recent rain. Please be sure to check our event page for updated information.
On the second Monday of 2019, LRWP Board Member and Rutgers Professor David Tulloch welcomed me to his office at the Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis lab (CRSSA). Giant maps on the lab walls hint at what Professor Tulloch does at Rutgers. His research focuses on a mixture of landscape architecture and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Professor Tulloch received a Bachelor’s degree in Landscape Architecture at the University of Kentucky, his Master’s in Landscape Architecture at Louisiana State University, and PhD in Land Resources at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has now lived and worked in the Lower Raritan Watershed for two decades. He enjoys exploring our area on foot, urban hikes, and trying to connect pieces of landscapes that a lot of people overlook. These interests led him to create an interactive google map that explores various features of the Lower Raritan Watershed. The map will soon be a supplement for Professor Tulloch’s “Watershed Highlights and Hidden Streams: Walking Tours of the Lower Raritan Watershed,” which kicks off on Sunday March 16.
TaeHo Lee: Where are you from in the LRW, and in your time in the watershed, how have you engaged in/explored the watershed?
David Tulloch: I live in Highland Park near the Mill Brook, and I have lived there for nearly 20 years. I am within an easy walk to the Raritan making it hard to ignore the connection of the landscape and its watershed to the river. I’ve gotten to know the watershed as I explored it not only as a person who is curious about the large landscape. But also, as a benefit of my job, I have what amounts to two decades of mapping and design projects in different parts of the LRW and the larger Raritan River basin. Student research projects and studios have helped me get to know the watershed in ways that now are quite helpful in ways that, at the time, I didn’t always appreciate. My favorite thing to do in the Watershed is just to get out and walk it. I will look through historic maps or various air photos and look for hidden connections to explore. But there are also plenty of marked trails within the Watershed that I have yet to walk.
TL: As a parent, how do you want your kids to engage in/with the watershed?
DT: Well, I want my kids, like so many people who have grown up here, to really treasure this as a special landscape and see that it is both a special landscape and a singular, very large landscape. It has a fascinating history that we don’t talk enough about: American history, Revolutionary War, World War II, and an industrial history which is really significant as it impacted people around the world but also has impacted the river and our communities pretty dramatically. There are interesting educational and cultural histories for example, a colonial college right on the banks of the river in New Brunswick, the old proprietary house in Perth Amboy, the Monmouth Battlefield. So many things have marked this landscape. Additionally, its nature is incredible: Bald eagles, peregrine falcons, sandhill cranes, all within a few miles of us. And the landscapes that make up the Watershed are amazing: Mountains to marshes with really special spots within the Watershed like Duke Farms, Watchung Reservation, and the Rutgers Ecological Preserve. I really hope that my sons are coming to see the place not just as memorable but as incredibly special and something to treasure, even if they end up in another part of the world in the coming years.
TL. What, in your view, are the primary issues that need to be addressed in the watershed?
DT: The first for me is clearly the need to improve resident’s awareness of the Watershed and its issues, and their understanding of how both natural and policy processes within the Watershed work. I think one of the real challenges for us, an issue that affects ultimately the quality of water of the river, is encouraging our population of something like 800,000 residents to understand that the watershed is so much more than the river, and more than just the river valley. Most people associate the watershed with Donaldson Park, Johnson Park, Duke Island, or Duke Farms, and they can see those as areas that are associated with Raritan River. But we need to help them understand that in a 350 square mile watershed places like Freehold, Scotch Plains, and Bridgewater are all contributing to the water quality and the experiential quality of the watershed. And with a growing awareness and understanding, comes an appreciation of how much we still don’t know and how we need to enlarge our understanding of the river.
The other issue that
really stands out to me is the land use of the watershed. It covers 350 square
miles and includes 50 municipalities, each making their own independent decisions
about land use with very little coordination, and we share collectively in the good
and bad outcomes of these decisions. I live in one of those municipalities and
work in another, but in between projects for work or taking my kids to
different events I spend lots of time in other watershed towns experiencing the
results of those independent decisions made in 50 different borough halls, city
halls, and township halls. A really important step is to begin to monitor land
use choices, and to examine them in terms of how they impact the watershed. We
need to help the different people involved with the LRWP connect with those
processes and see them in a more serious way.
TL. What is your vision for the LRWP?
DT: One important thing as a young organization, part of the shared vision we all have, is that as a growing organization it needs to be nimble enough to adjust to not only the changing needs of the Watershed but also the changing understanding of what the organization can become. Through listening and learning and reshaping itself, we all come to a new understanding of what the Lower Raritan Watershed as a community, as a physical landscape, and as a place with changing pressures on it, is.
Having said that, three
areas are really important for us. One is appreciation. I don’t just mean that
in the broadest sense, not just appreciating the place, but appreciation based
on increased understanding. That’s getting more residents out on cleanups so
they can see the problems themselves; getting as much as we can out of the
research at Rutgers and the NJ DEP and from others working along the river so
that our appreciation of those problems are also based on something serious.
Second is advocacy. My
vision for LRWP sees it as a voice for the river and the Watershed that can
really advocate for needs that often don’t have a strong voice.
Third is action. Turning
the appreciation and advocacy into action. This includes small steps like
cleanups, but some of the actions we take overtime can become more dramatic. Appreciation,
advocacy and action, I think, together really represent a forward looking
vision for the Watershed and the Partnership that could engage a very large
number of residents and not just the usual suspects.
TL. You are a Professor at Rutgers. What is your role there? Can you provide insights into how we can best bring the resources and attention of the University to address the needs of the LRW?
DT: As a faculty member of Rutgers, I have formal roles. I am Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, Associate Director at CRSSA, and lead the GeoHealth lab. A lot of the things that I do at Rutgers are as an integrator, as someone crossing over between different kinds of activities. So I work as an educator, and in landscape architecture I teach design, I teach planning, I teach what we call geomatics. But I’m also a researcher here at the center. We are looking a lot at the ways that the landscape is shaped and affects human health and our lives.
In my role as an
integrator, I bring research into the classroom, and draw students back into
the research. In the same way, I am now really interested in integrating the
experiences with the watershed into the different activities that I have in
Rutgers, as well. As part of my research 20 years ago or so, I visited and
interviewed NGOs all over New Jersey, looking at their use of GIS and mapping. The
groups that most caught my attention at the time were primarily watersheds.
Many of them were brand new and in that way, for me, it was the first chance to
learn and explore New Jersey’s landscapes. This forced me begin to confront the
potential that Watershed organizations have as advocates for pieces of the
landscape across municipal boundaries. I also began to see a role for
integrating science and education and policy.
One of the other roles
that I have at Rutgers is interacting with students. I get to know a lot of
students as they first come to Rutgers. A role for me with students who are not
from the area is helping them appreciate what a special place this is, getting
them hooked on the River, and sharing Rutgers’ long relationship with the river.
After all, it’s mentioned in the school song. In the broadest sense, to answer your
question, we are so fortunate as a watershed organization to have a University
like Rutgers in such an integral relationship with the river and the Watershed.
But, with the many research and outreach programs that Rutgers has, one of my
ongoing roles is going to be bridging the two and helping make connections with
those activities and helping be a voice for the Watershed as well.
TL. I understand you are planning a series of “Walks in the Watershed.” Can you tell me more about this opportunity? What is your goal with the walks?
DT: Part of this goes back to simply trying to help all of us improve our appreciation and understanding of the watershed in little and big ways. But the walks are a very special way to connect the abstract places that we’ve all seen on maps with very real experiences on the ground. The goal with the “Watershed Highlights and Hidden Streams: Walking Tours of the Lower Raritan Watershed” is to help reveal connections across landscapes of the Watershed that are often hidden in plain sight, but also to help us explore some connections, like hidden streams, that are truly invisible.
Over time we will try some walks that explore the outer edges of the Watershed – Beyond the banks of the old Raritan – but at the start, we’re going to take walks that explore connections of important pieces of land to the river and, where possible, look into the streams that make those connections. So, one of the first walks, on March 17, is going to be close to the Rutgers campus here where we’ll be looking at the connections between Buell Brook and the Raritan by taking a walk that connects Johnson Park and some of its history and Raritan Landing with the Eco Preserve. Many people visit Rutgers’ Eco Preserve and don’t think, even when they are only hundreds of yards away from the river, don’t think of its connection to the river. The walks will look more at the connection and what it means. Walking also just reveals some other patterns and some hidden features along the way. I hope to be as surprised as the other participants. A second walk this Spring, scheduled for May 18, connects the old constructed landscapes of the canal at Duke Island County Park through a new greenway that has been developed along the Raritan and crosses over into the Duke Farms properties. I think a lot of the residents in that area are familiar with individual pieces. Fewer have made the walk to connect them all. We hope to make the walks a regular experience.
TL. Is there anything else you want to add?
DT: When you asked about what I do at Rutgers and how this helps make connections for the watershed, let me mention one more example. I think that as I teach planning students and geomatics students and design students who make some connection with the place, that the Watershed as a whole also is benefiting from those who stay here. An interesting example of that is Daryl Krasnuk, who I taught as an undergraduate student. Daryl has continued to volunteer and make maps both for the LRWP’s general education efforts and specifically for the State of the Lower Raritan Watershed report. It’s exciting to see the students that I taught now sharing their passion for this special place and finding ways to help up us to improve that landscape over time.