Watershed

Concerns about sewer backups and erosion problems along Muckinipates Creek have prompted a Democratic candidate for state representative to propose a moratorium on development in the watershed areas of the 163d legislative district. Joe Merlino said that if elected, he would call for a halt to development until a state-mandated storm-water management plan has been created for the Darby Creek watershed, which includes the Muckinipates. At his news conference conducted on Monday, Merlino stood in the Brookwood Lane children's park along Muckinipates Creek in Darby Township to point out the erosion problems.

Wintry forests and old trees are some of the landscape themes in American painting. But what about landscape paintings combined with silkscreen that capture a longtime fascination with geology, topographical maps, uplifted geologic plates, and the changing natural world? Philadelphia artist Rebecca Rutstein has pursued new research on the history of a particular Delaware County watershed area. The Crum Woods and watershed are the focus in her current exhibit at Swarthmore College.

Judy Shuler's home - a four-acre swatch along the Middle Branch of the White Clay Creek - typifies the watershed. Her home is history: She lives in a former grist mill that also has been a sawmill, a creamery, and a U.S. Post Office. It is nature: The property is a wildlife refuge, she said. Unusual native plants grow there, and "one of the most beautiful great blue herons you've ever seen" also has taken up residence. It is scenic: She can look out just about any window on the creek side of her house and see the water, a mere 100 yards or so away.

Between 4,000 and 5,000 spectators are expected to arrive in Unionville next Sunday for the 73d annual Pennsylvania Hunt Cup. Proceeds from the Timber Steeplechase race will benefit five local nonprofits, including the Stroud Water Research Center, Brandywine Conservancy, Brandywine Valley Association, Cheshire Land Trust and Natural Lands Trust. "We are extremely enthusiastic about preserving open space and the watershed," said Kathee Rengert, executive director of the Hunt Cup. The Unionville track is on land protected by conservation easements.

After a decade of planning that involved hundreds of meetings and thousands of volunteer hours, the White Clay Creek and its tributaries are on the verge of becoming the first watershed in the nation to be declared a wild and scenic river. A draft of the last of many lengthy reports is being circulated among various federal agencies, and area lawmakers are preparing federal legislation for the final step in the process - approval by Congress and the President. Chuck Barscz of the National Park Service, which coordinates and oversees the process of designating a river, said legislation could be introduced within the month.

A controversial construction project by the Columbia Transmission Communications Corp. remains shut down today as state and federal officials weigh their next steps to prevent long-term environmental damage. The company is installing a fiber-optic cable along a pipeline right-of-way belonging to the parent company, Columbia Energy Group. The right-of-way passes through the Birch Run watershed, which was designated by the state as having "exceptional value" in August 1998. This designation, the highest classification offered by the state and the one that offers the most protection to streams and wetlands, places strict limits on construction activities within these watersheds.

Drive down a New Jersey highway and you are bound to see a sign letting you know you're entering a county or a township. Now, in a bid to raise your environmental consciousness a bit, the state is posting signs at the boundaries of watershed areas under a program involving the Departments of Transportation and Environmental Protection. The Department of Environmental Protection says the big signs, which are blue and white and feature a flying heron, are aimed at increasing awareness about watersheds and water quality.

On a fine spring day, you might find Jim Ryan in the gutter. He'd be armed with a paintbrush, tracing a turtle onto a storm drain near Pennypack Creek. "The storm sewers are loaded with trash," says Ryan. "If it goes into one, it goes into the creek. " Ryan, vice president of Friends of Pennypack Creek, is just adding to the hundreds of anti-pollution signs the group has stenciled on storm drains in the Far Northeast. All across Philadelphia, from the Wissahickon to Cobb's Creek to the Poquessing, citizens and agencies are fighting back against pollution and neglect that have clouded city streams.

THEY'LL JUST ABOUT bend over backwards in public, like a traveling band of Olympic gymnasts, to show people how serious they are now about transparency and honesty. The School Reform Commission, the School District of Philadelphia, the mayor, state education officials - they all say that they understand how fed up people in this city are from the scandals and controversies, from the overwhelming sense that special interests get served first. Ackerman. Archie. Evans.

"The water is 44 degrees, it's not getting any warmer, but the air temp is about 40, so the water should feel balmy. You probably won't want to come out," said Damon Sinclair, tongue placed firmly in cheek, over the loudspeakers at Brandywine Picnic Park on Saturday. Sinclair, the emcee of the Brandywine Valley Association's (BVA) inaugural "Make a Splash Polar Plunge" benefit, gave the 108 plungers a few last words Saturday morning before they charged down the sandy hill and into the chilly Brandywine Creek.

Open-space preservation groups are celebrating the imminent completion of a $7.5 million deal to conserve 1,800 acres in Jackson Township, one of the fastest-growing areas of New Jersey. The area is in the Pinelands and encompasses the headwaters of the Toms River, which drains into ailing Barnegat Bay. And it is just beyond the end of a runway increasingly being used for combat training at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, Ocean County's largest employer. As such, the deal touches on many of the state's major issues - sprawl, water quality, the economy, and military readiness.

Thanks to Delaware Gov. Jack Markell, it's still safe to drink the water in the Philadelphia region - for now, at least. The First State leader fortunately put the brakes on the likely lifting of a moratorium on natural-gas drilling in the Delaware River watershed, which quenches the thirst of 15 million people. Markell's announcement that Delaware would join New York in voting against ending the moratorium, only days before a scheduled meeting of the multistate agency that has jurisdiction over the watershed, led to the Delaware River Basin Commission session's being scrubbed abruptly.

THEY'LL JUST ABOUT bend over backwards in public, like a traveling band of Olympic gymnasts, to show people how serious they are now about transparency and honesty. The School Reform Commission, the School District of Philadelphia, the mayor, state education officials - they all say that they understand how fed up people in this city are from the scandals and controversies, from the overwhelming sense that special interests get served first. Ackerman. Archie. Evans.

Amid the preparations for Hurricane Irene, scientists are scrambling, too. But while most people are dreading the storm, the scientists are also on a geeky high, seeing it as a huge data-collection opportunity to better learn how to predict and withstand future storms. Rutgers University has two underwater vessels, stuffed with sensors, that will be sending back temperature, turbidity, and other data from far below the surface off the coast of New Jersey. At Temple University's Ambler campus, environmental science professor Laura Toran will be logging storm-water data, watching to see if parking-lot catchment systems do their jobs.

CAIRO - Bedridden and dressed in prison whites, gray hair poking through his familiar jet-black dye job, the 83-year-old ousted president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, made a stunning court appearance here Wednesday to answer charges of corruption and plotting to kill protesters who demanded his resignation. "I totally deny all charges," Mubarak said through a microphone. It was a watershed moment in modern Middle Eastern history: a seemingly invincible man who epitomized a generation of Arab autocrats, a stalwart U.S. ally who ruled unchecked for nearly 30 years over the most populous Arab nation, wheeled into a steel defendants' cage in a makeshift courtroom at a police academy that once bore his name.

SCRANTON - An energy company is on track to drill the first natural gas production wells in northeastern Pennsylvania's Wayne County. Drilling in the Marcellus Shale formation is banned in nearly all of the county because it lies within the Delaware River watershed. The Delaware River Basin Commission recently declared a moratorium on drilling in the watershed, citing concerns that it will threaten drinking water supplies. But Hess Corp. has permits either pending or recently approved for at least six wells along Wayne County's northwestern border, just outside the watershed boundary.

YORK, Pa. - Pennsylvania environmental officials say about 1,400 gallons of milk from a storage tank leaked into a central Pennsylvania creek. Department of Environmental Protection officials say the milk leaked from a storage tank at Rutter's Dairy in Manchester Township, York County, into a nearby stream on Monday. Department spokesman John Repetz said that no aquatic organisms were found dead in the waterway and that the milk dispersed by natural means. Repetz said a weld split open on a 30,000-gallon storage tank, and about 14,000 gallons got through foam insulation around the tank.

A New Jersey Assembly committee voted yesterday to shorten a proposed delay on water-quality rules that has irked environmental groups. The amended bill would give counties until next year to finish drafting a plan for limiting the zones in which sewer-line extensions will be permitted. The bill would suspend rules regulating, for the first time, how densely septic systems may be installed. The original bill and a Senate version had put the deadline in 2012. Environmental groups say the rules, approved in 2008, are needed now to protect the state's watersheds and control sprawl.

New Jersey environmental groups' celebration over new protections for water quality has turned to outrage as the Legislature considers a bill to delay new rules until 2012 or beyond. The state was working to put in place a comprehensive plan to protect water quality and regulate development in sensitive areas of watersheds - 15 years after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ordered it to do so. But a proposal introduced this month in the Legislature, one that environmental groups say plays to developers, could postpone that plan by at least two more years and possibly thwart it altogether.

LITITZ, Pa. - More than a decade ago, tiny Lititz Run in Lancaster County was a ribbon of fetid water that was too hot, too slow, and too poisoned by agricultural runoff to support trout for more than a few weeks. Then the community embraced its revival. Neighbors re-created wetlands. Farmers changed time-honored ways. Today Lititz Run is a rarity among waterways: a year-round trout stream that has won national accolades and been cited as a model. But as a tributary in the Susquehanna River watershed, Lititz Run still isn't clean enough, and it adds to the pollution that the Susquehanna sends downstream to the nutrient-choked Chesapeake Bay. Pennsylvania bears a huge responsibility for the despoiling of the bay. The Susquehanna, which drains half the state, pumps in 40 percent of the bay's nitrogen, largely from agriculture, and a gusher of its two other major pollutants - natural sediment and phosphorus from fertilizers and detergents - abetting the decline of the Chesapeake's celebrated fishing industry.