Water Quality

The Downingtown Borough Council has taken steps to deal with chronic problems with water-quality and parking on Manor Avenue. During its work session Wednesday, the council took preliminary action to ban parking on the busy street and voted to add a chemical to the borough's water that will cut down on a rusty sediment that is especially prevalent in Manor Avenue homes. The vote on water quality came after months of complaints from residents of Manor Avenue that their water often was a rusty brown.

In the latest salvo over Marcellus Shale gas drilling in the embattled town of Dimock, a natural gas company on Tuesday alleged that federal regulators had cherry-picked old test data to distort the amount of contamination in drinking-water wells. Cabot Oil & Gas Co., whose drilling was blamed for the pollution, said that the drinking-water tests the Environmental Protection Agency used to justify its Jan. 19 order to deliver fresh water supplies to four Dimock houses "do not accurately represent the water quality" and are inconsistent with the body of data collected at the residences.

A year after setting up a small laboratory to study the water quality in streams, lakes and ponds here, the township has a verdict: The water is fine. The township's environmental commission, with the help of a $5,000 grant from the Delaware Estuary Program, planted 13 testing stations in half a dozen tiny tributaries such as Mantua Creek, Big Timber Creek and Stevens Run last year. Then it took two readings at each site and analyzed them for levels of dissolved oxygen, iron, sulfate, ammonia and other substances.

It may go down as the Great Gloucester City Water Crisis of 1993. In late June, a sudden outbreak of bacterial growth in the water supply, which manifested itself through foggy water and the rotten-egg smell of hydrogen sulfide, turned one of life's simple pleasures - taking a shower - into a nauseating experience. "You smelled . . . because the water had an odor to it," Mayor Walter W. Jost remembered. "There was nothing the matter with drinking it, if you could get it past your nose.

The ocean water quality off the Jersey Shore has been "tremendous" this summer after a season that saw the fewest beach closings in at least a decade, local officials and environmental groups said yesterday. "I believe our ocean and beaches in Atlantic City and throughout New Jersey are cleaner now than at any time that I remember," Atlantic City Mayor James Whelan, a former lifeguard, said at a news conference at the Beach Patrol Headquarters at South Carolina Avenue. Atlantic City has not had a beach closing because of ocean water quality since 1995, officials said.

No other state acts more forcefully than New Jersey to protect swimmers from polluted beach waters, according to a study of 10 coastal states released yesterday. "Only New Jersey mandates that beaches close if tests indicate that the bacterial concentration standard has been exceeded," the Natural Resources Defense Council said. More than 228 New Jersey beaches, mainly in the north, were closed last year due to high concentrations of human and animal fecal bacteria in the water, the group said.

THIS JUST IN: Rivers often cross state boundaries. In fact, some rivers actually are state boundaries. So if hazardous waste were dumped into the Delaware River in, say, Trenton, some of it would almost certainly find its way to Philadelphia. And we likely would have a problem with that. When it comes to water quality, we're all in this together. That's why the Clean Water Act - which sets and mandates the enforcement of national standards for water quality - has been essential to protecting the environment for nearly four decades.

The Delaware River has become a much better place to swim in the 30 years since Burlington resident Mike Edwardson took his first dunk. Edwardson, 38, a member of Burlington City's Endeavor Emergency Squad, said the Delaware has better visibility than most of the other waterways in Burlington County. He can now see things six feet away in the Delaware, in contrast to places like Sylvan Lake in Burlington Township, where the visibility is about six inches, Edwardson said. "The river's the best around," he said.

Caught on the defensive after the release of a federal report indicating poor water quality in some Chester County streams, county commissioners pledged yesterday to increase efforts to improve stream water. At the weekly commissioners' meeting, county water authority officials gave a sobering overview of stream water health in a county known for its commitment to conservation. In Chester County, 276 of 1,300 total miles - about 21 percent - of streams do not meet state water quality standards, officials said.

WASHINGTON - The Republican-controlled House passed a bill yesterday that would sharply curtail the federal government's role in protecting waters from pollution by barring the Environmental Protection Agency from overruling state decisions on water quality. The bill passed on a 239-184 vote. Sixteen Democrats joined the majority of Republicans in supporting it. The White House threatened to veto the bill, saying that it "would roll back the key provisions . . . that have been the underpinning of 40 years of progress in making the nation's waters fishable, swimmable and drinkable.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Friday it would not take any action in response to tests of 16 more drinking-water wells in the embattled natural gas-drilling town of Dimock, Pa., and one resident whose well showed elevated levels of carcinogenic arsenic declined the agency's offer for alternative water. The test results largely reinforced findings the EPA released recently on its tests of 31 other residential water wells in the Susquehanna County township, where opponents and supporters of Marcellus Shale natural gas development have clashed.

In the latest salvo over Marcellus Shale gas drilling in the embattled town of Dimock, a natural gas company on Tuesday alleged that federal regulators had cherry-picked old test data to distort the amount of contamination in drinking-water wells. Cabot Oil & Gas Co., whose drilling was blamed for the pollution, said that the drinking-water tests the Environmental Protection Agency used to justify its Jan. 19 order to deliver fresh water supplies to four Dimock houses "do not accurately represent the water quality" and are inconsistent with the body of data collected at the residences.

In the latest salvo over Marcellus Shale gas drilling in the embattled town of Dimock, a natural-gas company on Tuesday alleged that federal regulators had cherry-picked old test data to distort the amount of contamination in drinking-water wells. Cabot Oil and Gas Co., whose drilling was blamed for the pollution, said that the drinking-water tests the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency used to justify its Jan. 19 order to deliver fresh water supplies to four Dimock residences "do not accurately represent the water quality" and are inconsistent with the body of data collected at the residences.

TRENTON - Gov. Christie signed a bill Tuesday that aids land developers in the state by delaying antipollution efforts, a move environmentalists said would mean further deterioration of New Jersey's water quality. At issue are sewer-service designations, or areas of the state approved to someday have sewer service. The sewer boundaries are important because they determine where large-scale development can take place. Under current rules, county governments can protect land from development and reduce dirty storm water and sewage overflow from entering waterways by removing the property from approved sewer-service areas.

Long-awaited revisions to the Delaware River Basin Commission's proposed rules that would govern natural-gas development in the watershed were released Tuesday. The highly technical document of 100-plus pages would permit only 300 wells to be drilled until a reassessment is done after 18 months. The rules also call for more water monitoring, more water-use restrictions, and more money to be set aside for remediation. Observers on all sides said the rules were too complicated to assess quickly.

MIDDLETOWN, N.J. - Thursday was shoving-off day for 3,600 baby oysters that were enlisted in a revived science project intended to help clean the polluted waters off a Navy pier. The NY/NJ Baykeeper environmental group transplanted the oysters from its research facility in Highlands to waters surrounding the Earle Naval Weapons Station in Middletown. The pier's heavily guarded perimeter was the key to rescuing the project, which the state Department of Environmental Protection scuttled last year.

CAPE MAY - The heavy shipping that produces urban pollution in the Delaware River near Philadelphia usually isn't a problem downstream, at the mouth of the Delaware Bay. But scientists want to know how other activities - including species habitat destruction and overfishing - may be affecting the vast estuary, and how the exchange between the two waterways affects the quality of brackish flow. This summer, a research team from the University of Delaware's College of Earth, Ocean and Environment installed a data-collection device aboard the Twin Capes, one of the vessels of the Cape May-Lewes Ferry, operated by the Delaware River and Bay Authority.

BARNEGAT, N.J. - Appearing at a site that has become a symbol of pollution and overdevelopment in New Jersey, Gov. Christie cleared the way Thursday for almost $650 million in low-cost and no-cost loans for water-quality and protection projects. The bipartisan legislation Christie signed at Barnegat Bay will make $400 million available for projects that clean up water used for fishing and swimming. An additional $250 million will be available for drinking-water projects. Cities, counties, and utilities across the state have already submitted more than 170 applications.

In another potential roadblock to natural-gas drilling in the upper Delaware River basin, a consortium of environmental groups filed suit in federal court Thursday seeking to delay the adoption of regulations until environmental impacts are studied. The groups contend that the Delaware River Basin Commission, which governs water quality and withdrawals, is subject to federal rules requiring environmental reviews of major projects. The commission "has acknowledged the value of it, and they have simply chosen not to do it," said Maya van Rossum of the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, one of the groups that filed the suit.