![]() ![]() Subscribe to the E360 Newsletter for weekly updates delivered to your inbox. The act provided the federal government, for the first time, with the legal framework to regulate pollution and the funding to help states build wastewater infrastructure that would lead to the rapid improvement of water quality in the Delaware and in the scores of other water bodies that had become the waste receptacles of the Industrial Revolution. Chief among this string of key environmental legislation was the landmark Clean Water Act of 1972, which was enacted 50 years ago this month. rivers, lakes, and coastal waters that had also become so toxic they were unsafe for fishing and swimming. Sparked by the burgeoning environmental movement, the federal government began passing a series of laws that would help bring the Delaware back from the brink, as well as the estimated two-thirds of U.S. The dead zone effectively rendered their ability to move upriver impossible - and made any direct human contact with the river dangerous.īut, just as Meserve was learning how to set and haul shad nets as a boy in the 1960s, a historic intervention was in the making. Robust DO content was crucial to the survival of the shad, as well as other aquatic species like sturgeon, striped bass, and oysters. The Lewis Fishery was located in Lambertville, New Jersey, not far upriver from what came to be known as the “dead zone,” a 27-mile urban stretch of the Delaware, between Philadelphia and Chester, Pennsylvania, where point source pollution was so acute that the water’s dissolved oxygen (DO) levels were often zero. ![]() “And in my youth, in the 60s, there were more jokes about getting sick by swimming in the river and drinking the water.” “My grandfather, Fred, would joke that we would catch a car a year with all the parts that turned up in the nets,” said Meserve, who took over the family fishery in 1996. But, soon enough, Lewis discovered that he had gotten into the business just as the river - along with the species it supported - was entering a period of catastrophic decline.įor two centuries, factories and cities on both sides of the Delaware had been indiscriminately dumping trash, raw sewage, and industrial chemicals into the waterway. At the time, the Delaware’s shad fishery hauled 3 to 4 million of the hard-fighting fish from the river and its tributaries every year. When Steve Meserve’s great-grandfather, Bill Lewis, started the Lewis Fishery in 1888, it was one of dozens of commercial outfits scattered up and down the Delaware River that seined for American shad during the spring spawn. ![]()
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