endy Aycoth has a dream: Clean water in all the creeks, streams, rivers and ponds in Delaware. The long-time Killens Pond resident has been a Stream Watcher for years, regularly looking for signs of pollution in the Murderkill River watershed in which she lives and reporting her findings to the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control. When she learned last spring that the agency was putting together a Tributary Action Team to assist in developing a Pollution Control Strategy for the watershed, she was one of the first to sign up.

Janet Baldwin is assistant principal of Silver Lake Elementary School in Middletown, in the heart of the Appoquinimink River watershed. “We have been excited about the way the Tributary Action Team has welcomed student involvement and the partnership that has evolved between the school district and the team,” she says. “Our students are learning firsthand that they can make a difference in their community and that their efforts will go a long way toward preserving the environment for themselves and future generations.”

After vacationing in coastal Sussex for more than 20 years, Buzz Henifin and his family built a home on Little Assawoman Bay four years ago. The waves lapping gently on the shoreline haven’t deposited the dead fish and rotting seaweed that the other Inland Bays --- the Rehoboth and Indian River --- have had to deal with, but the handwriting is on the wall. “We need to get something started to clean up the bays, to improve the water quality,” he says. The “or else” goes without saying.

Delaware has many picturesque bodies of water, like Kent County's McGinnis Pond, but many still do not meet the "fishable, swimmable" goals of the Clean Water Act. TMDLs — a total maximum daily load for each pollutant causing a body of water to be impaired — are powerful tools, because they deal with both "point" and "nonpoint problems.

The retired Navy submariner, who did graduate studies in oceanography, has been contributing his expertise, energy and time to the Inland Bays Tributary Action Team since it was formed. “It’s been a fantastic education,” Henifin says. “It took months of training and brainstorming to identify priorities for cleaning up the bays. Then we had to whittle the list down to those we feel are the most urgent. I think the team feels pretty good about the job we’ve done so far.”

Henifin is optimistic but realistic about the future water quality of the Inland Bays. “It took years for the bays to reach their current state of pollution. It’s going to take a long time to see any results of cleanup efforts. That’s why it’s so critical to get started.”

Reinhold Betschel is assistant director of Kent County’s Public Works Department, which manages a large wastewater treatment plant that sends its treated effluent into a small gut that flows into the Murderkill River. He is also an active Tributary Action Team member.

Betschel knows all too well that before the federal Clean Water Act was implemented in 1972, uncontrolled sewage and industrial waste from end-of-pipe points of discharge, such as wastewater treatment plants, factories or combined sewers, were the major cause of water quality problems. He likes to point out that stringent regulations and advanced technology have changed that, proudly noting that the Kent County plant hasn’t had a violation in six years, a record that won a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wastewater operation and maintenance excellence award. “Put a glass of our treated effluent and a glass of drinking water side by side and you can’t tell the difference,” he says.

While wastewater and other so-called “point sources” have hogged the water pollution spotlight for years, it’s now the “nonpoint sources” that are the largest and most elusive sources of pollution. Seepage from septic systems, sediment from construction projects, excess agricultural chemicals and fertilizers and motor oil leaked on driveways all can make their way into Delaware’s waterways and eventually into the bays.“A big part of the problem,” Betschel says, “is that too many individuals don’t know how much impact their actions can have on a watershed. You don’t have to live right next to a stream or river to have an effect on water quality.”

Katherine Bunting-Howarth, the Division of Water Resources environmental planner who coordinates Delaware’s Tributary Action Team Program, seconds the notion. That’s one of the messages she and her colleagues frequently repeat to the state’s 100 or so Tributary Action Team members --- citizens, farmers, business leaders, government officials and scientists --- who have been meeting regularly in each of Delaware’s four major watersheds to learn about water quality in Delaware and to provide input to DNREC on how to address local water quality problems.

She gazes out her office window at the heavy rain pelting the pavement below. It races along the curb toward storm drains, picking up oil, dirt and debris as it goes. “Rainwater washes all the stuff off our lawns, our roads, our parking lots, our golf courses and our farm fields and into our waterways,” she says. “Runoff comprises a huge percent of the state’s water pollution but, unfortunately, the sources are difficult to pinpoint and difficult to control.

“We have to make people understand that water pollution begins on the land. That everything we do, from building housing developments, shopping centers and roads, to the way we care for our lawns, to the way we grow our food can affect water quality.”

Spreading that message as well as helping DNREC determine practical and feasible strategies to reduce pollution from residential and commercial land use are the challenges that have been given to the Tributary Action Teams. The highly charged issue of controlling nutrient pollution by agricultural runoff has been assigned to the state Nutrient Management Commission.

“Since established nonpoint source pollution limits will not be achieved without everyone chipping in and changing their behavior, ensuring public support is imperative,” says Bunting-Howarth.

Mallards mingle at McGinnis Pond, in the Murderkill watershed. Preserving habitat is an important part of the watershed management equation.

DNREC has long sought the involvement of Delawareans in water resource issues, from workshops and public hearings to citizen monitoring programs. Stream Watch was started in 1985 by the Delaware Nature Society in cooperation with DNREC. The Inland Bays Citizen Monitoring Program was established in 1990 as part of the Inland Bays Estuary Program. The Nanticoke Citizens Monitoring Program was founded in 1991 by Seaford residents in cooperation with DNREC. The Adopt-a-Wetland program was initiated by the Division of Water Resources in 1993 and is now run by the Division of Fish and Wildlife’s Aquatic Resource Education Section.

Tributary Action Teams, the new kids on Delaware’s natural resource management block, are important components of the state’s efforts to develop water pollution control plans unique to each watershed, its population and its land-use patterns. “This is a unique way of doing environmental business in Delaware,” Bunting-Howarth says. “DNREC is trying to put the public first in policy formation and in return we are asking for a huge commitment of their time and energy. This is real and important work.”

The federal Clean Water Act --- which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year --- has dramatically increased the number of U. S. waterways that are once again safe for fishing and swimming. Despite past progress in reducing water pollution, however, almost 40 percent of the nation’s waters --- including many of Delaware’s creeks, streams and rivers --- still do not meet water quality goals.

The 1972 act required each state to identify waters not meeting water quality standards and to establish a pollution “budget” --- or a Total Maximum Daily Load --- for each pollutant causing a body of water to be impaired. The TMDL provision is a powerful tool because it deals with pollution regardless of its source. Until the early 1990s, however, both EPA and the states emphasized technology-based pollution control programs and put a lower priority on the water quality-based TMDL program. Relatively few TMDLs were developed and many state lists of impaired waters were incomplete and not submitted to EPA in a timely manner.

Several years ago, grassroots organizations across the country began legal actions against EPA to speed up the development of TMDLs. Delaware is one of 39 states in which lawsuits have been filed. Brought against EPA by Widener University’s Environmental and Natural Resources Law Clinic on behalf of the Sierra Club, the American Littoral Society and the Delaware River Keeper, the Delaware suit was settled in 1996 when DNREC agreed to a 10-year schedule for identifying and setting pollution limits for impaired waters.

Since then, the Division of Water Resources has been working diligently to meet the deadline. To date, TMDLs have been established for the Appoquinimink River, the Christina River Basin, Red Clay Creek, White Clay Creek, the Murderkill River, the main stems of the Nanticoke River and Broad Creek and their ponds and tributaries, Indian River, Indian River Bay and Rehoboth Bay. Work is on going in all of the state’s 45 watersheds.

Almost half of scenic Little Assawoman Bay's shoreline is protected by the Division of Fish and Wildlife's Assawoman Wildlife Management Area and Fenwick Island State Park, which helps keep the area wild and undeveloped.

Once TMDLs are set --- for excess nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, PCBs, zinc, dissolved oxygen, or harmful bacteria, among other pollutants --- the Tributary Action Teams participate in determining how they are to be implemented.

“Public support at the local level is critical,” says Bunting-Howarth. “Team members use their local knowledge to design a Pollution Control Strategy that their community can accept. Through educational resources, they become familiar with the issues and the potential solutions before defining them in terms that their friends and neighbors can relate to. They hold public forums to generate common ground. Then they write a plan that is submitted to DNREC for technical review. The process not only makes the public a partner in the effort to reduce pollution, it brings communities together to deliberate issues that may impact them personally.”

The Tributary Action Teams in the Inland Bays, Appoquinimink, Murderkill and Nanticoke watersheds welcome new members. As TMDLs are established in other waterways, new Tributary Action Teams will be formed. Anyone interested in participating or learning more about protecting watersheds can contact Katherine Bunting-Howarth or Lyle Jones in the Division of Water Resources’ Watershed Assessment Section at 302-739-4590. To subscribe to an electronic newsletter, email Jones at ljones@state.de.us.

“Don’t miss this opportunity to speak up and let your government know how to best handle pollution in your backyard,” Bunting-Howarth says.

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