Saucon Creek shows some good pollution news
The Lehigh River has clinched seventh place in America’s most endangered river contest, according to American Rivers, a well-respected conservation organization. Furthermore, it claimed second place in a widely cited 2020 national report on the rivers facing the greatest threats to reproduction.
We’ve surely got some serious work ahead, and we must be doing nothing right and everything wrong when it comes to local watershed conservation. That’s the conscientious citizen’s common-sense response, right? Saucon Creek might tell a more nuanced story. The Lehigh’s Hellertown-Lower Saucon tributary boasts its own intricate network of streams, runs and micro-creeks — and an equally complex set of surroundings. Quaint little villages and open fields meet full-fledged industrial sites, waste treatment centers and landfills, and pollution levels spike and wane according to the lay of the land.
That’s what I imagined when I joined the water-testing game in the winter of 2022, as part of a Pennsylvania Junior Academy of Science project. I’d prepared my findings for the state PJAS competition in State College when I tested positive for COVID-19. I missed the event, but there was an unexpected silver lining: A wonderful local organization, the Saucon Creek Watershed Association, took a big interest in my findings. I’ve been collaborating with them ever since and continued testing.
The Lehigh gets that seventh-most-dangerous water somewhere, and Saucon Creek has contributed to it. Armed with my array of testing strips, thermometers, and sampling containers, I discovered in February 2022 that Saucon Creek’s watershed bore some concerning heavy metal concentrations at several points. Sites near Bethlehem’s Wastewater Treatment Plant proved most troublesome in their numbers of lead and zinc.
Lead readings at points not even a mile from the Lehigh proved more disconcerting, with numbers approaching — but not crossing — the EPA’s threshold of chronic toxicity.
“We’re doing OK,” I surmised. But we could do better …
Here’s a little surprise: We did. Saucon Creek’s lead numbers have dropped, I recently learned in new testing. Its East Branch particularly shows optimistic drops in lead content and all other heavy metals — which can devastate aquatic life — diminishing to zero. The Lehigh faces a slew of other threats. Imbalanced pH, nitrate, sulfate, wildfire smoke and scores of afflictions need their own countermechanisms. A waterway is much more than surface water.
A 2011 Lehigh Valley Planning Commission report revealed Saucon Creek’s big problem with sediment. Sediment runs off land frequently enough to impair river ecosystems, creating a situation vulnerable to heavy metals. Heavy metals don’t linger on freshwater; they “sorb to” (i.e., stick to) sediment and remain there, plaguing ecosystems relentlessly.
Consequently, the lead, iron, copper — whatever toxic metals — remain on the surface briefly before integrating with the sediment impairing the creek. The report itself is admittedly dated, but chemical processes’ relevance doesn’t exactly expire. The dangers the Lehigh wrestles don’t emerge spontaneously. Polluted water in Saucon Creek, or any other tributary, is ultimately polluted water in the Lehigh. Toxic metals, while certainly not the overarching issue, don’t help a waterway.
But heavy metal pollution and river endangerment aren’t blackand-white questions of collective good or collective guilt. We’ve obviously done some things right; consistent drops in surface lead content by 0.01 milligram per liter (in the water-testing game, micro-numbers have macroimplications) from February 2022 to June 2023 merit celebration.
It’s time to continue the LVPC’s work below the surface. On the surface (literally and figuratively), we’ve seen a significant heavy metal drop in one of the Lehigh’s major tributaries. In the war for the Lehigh, that’s noteworthy. But we shouldn’t excuse ourselves. It’s time to reevaluate Saucon Creek’s sediment situation.
A 2011 impairment could become a 2023 clearing-up — or we could face a darkening sediment situation with darkening toxicity stats. Hellertown-Lower Saucon’s citizens and corporations may have reduced the surface pollution. But if we don’t strive further — particularly as the Bethlehem Landfill, a worrisome source of pollution, tries to expand — that seventh place could climb toward the foreboding “top five.”
Reducing the Lehigh’s endangerment inevitably means reducing toxicity; that starts with our choices around tributary waterways. Tributaries build rivers; rivers mimic tributaries. Our actions beautify or pollute that reality.