Lehigh River (23-July-2015)

Two bags of plastics today, a whitewater paddle and a backpack full of non-recyclables. I worked on cleaning up a flood plain just down stream of the turnpike bridge. Recent high waters have left a good amount of debris piled up and I worked mostly on pulling the plastics out of these piles.

Debris piles such as this can be dangerous, especially if you decide to walk on them. They are not stable and often there will be weak spots in which your foot will go right through. They often have metal and plastic items in them that can be sharp and could leave you with a nice gash if you end up falling on them. Wasps and bees also can nest in these piles and a wrong step can lead to a multitude of stings. I have never had a problem before, but I have fallen through them, seen sharp objects and have seen at least vespid wasp nests in them. I would like to point out too that this is a small pile. On larger rivers, such as the nearby Delaware, debris piles can be over twenty feet high and over thirty feet long after a good flood.

This photo shows a good example of point source pollution. After pulling this paddle out of this debris pile, I could see the blade had a stamp of the whitewater business that once owned it. Therefore I know exactly where this trash came from and there is someone to blame for it, that makes it point source. Non-point source is almost everything else I find on the river, bottles, cans, random plastics and styrofoam. These items can not be traced back to a business or person who threw them into the environment. 

This is another item that I find a lot of in the upper Lehigh and it comes from the same source as the paddles. These buckets are given out to patrons on whitewater trips for splashing each other. Lots of them end up in the river and washed up on the shore. There really should be accountability for organizations that make money off of our shared resource and at the same time leave things like this behind.  

This was an older debris pile on a higher section of the flood plain. The water was extremely high when this was deposited. The bottles you see left behind in the after photo are glass. I was really trying to work only on plastics today.

Both of these Nalgene bottles were in debris piles. They aren't cheap! I suggest if you decide to do a river trip with one that you tie it into your boat. 

At one time a child probably loved this football. Then it ended up in the river. 

This is just a shot of the non-recyclables I deposited outside of the wastewater treatment facility. It was mostly styrofoam and the football is in there too.