This story comes from WVIA News.
Bernie McGurl remembers his mother cutting the stopper off the bathtub when he was about 3 years old.
“I asked her, ‘Mom, where does the water go?’ I wanted to know where the water was going,” he said.
He explained that the water went down a drain pipe to his basement and then into a sewer pipe on the street. Eventually, the water flows into the river Lackawanna. Su mother, Jane, added that the Lackawanna flows into the Susquehanna River and then into the ocean.
“So when I was 3 years old, I knew we were part of the Chesapeake Bay watershed, because of my mom,” she said.
For more than a century, the Lackawanna River has been polluted by mining, sewage, and waste. In the late 1980s, a first edition of the existing Lackawanna River Conservation Association (LRCA) was formed to replace this. From 1991 until last December, McGurl, a Dunmore native, led the company as chief executive. He now holds a part-time position, passing on the legacy of maintaining clean water and land in the region.
WVIA News spent time with McGurl as fall turned to winter and his tenure as director came to an end.
He was a carpenter, worked on the railroad, and owned a business. He started nonprofits in the area, adding a fitness food co-op that would later become a local fitness food store, Everything Natural. and was involved in the beginnings of the Steamtown National Historic Site and the creation of the Lackawanna Heritage Valley Authority.
Bernie is also a poet. He helped promote the Mulberry Poets in the late ’70s.
“I’ve done a few other things,” he said. I’ve lived. . . probably nine cat lives. “
In the mid-1980s, he found himself in a new organization whose goal was to do something surprising: clean up the long-polluted Lackawanna River.
In McGurl’s three decades of involvement with the LRCA, attitudes have changed, and so has the river.
He’s 70 years old and has gone from cutting tires and washing machines from a 42-mile river to executing plans for a riverside park, new construction for the organization, and finally cleaning up a primary pollutant of the Chesapeake Bay, the Old Forge.
On New Year’s Day, after 33 years of service, he took a part-time position as senior assignment manager. And Tara Jones, a local from Scranton with a strong connection to the river, as executive director.
Jones feels Bernie is staying with the organization.
“Their expertise is greatly appreciated,” he said. Having Bernie as a mentor to advise me is invaluable. “
Jones returned from Long Beach, California, in 2022, where he earned his bachelor’s degree.
“I wanted to come back and with my degree I was looking to make an impact, a genuine impact,” he said. “I care a lot about this area. . . I met Bernie and he took me to the field. “. And it’s very exciting.
Bernie said Jones is in a position to pass it and that she passes to make a difference.
“People are listening a lot,” he said. I don’t want to be here anymore. . . That makes me feel good. “
Jones first arrived in February, when sediment from dam construction polluted Roaring Brook and the river.
McGurl considers it one of the worst contaminations he has noticed in the river in his 33 years as director.
The Lackawanna River and today’s perceptions of the environment are very different from when Bernie was growing up in Dunmore and Scranton.
“Everybody’s turned their backs on him for a hundred years,” he said.
Coal corporations dumped fabric from their crushers into the river and sewage lines ran down the hills to the canal, he said. Slaughterhouses dumped animal entrails into the river, and the city of Scranton operated a waste incinerator for decades along the river before the fashionable landfills were built. .
“This terrible black smoke comes out of there,” Bernie recalls while at Sweeney’s Beach.
The LRCA has improved the coastal resources of Poplar Street in Scranton for the past 10 years. It’s a distant autumn day. The sun is setting, crickets are chirping, and Bernie is talking to a top-notch student organization. He’s leaning forward with his cane (he doesn’t hold it in his hand, but he regularly pulls it closer) and stands next to what looks like a giant. rock.
“Part of this hill is a residue from the burning of the city’s incinerator,” he told them. “So that’s it, a big pile of burnt material. “
McGurl remembers driving in the back of his aunt’s Buick over the Market Street Bridge. It was a dry year and the river stank.
“Most of the river water had gone through someone’s bathroom. And I was miserable,” he said. That’s how it’s playing out here. »
People were used to it, he said; It’s like that.
“But the instigator of the organization’s team spirit, a guy named Len Altier,” McGull said.
In a June 1987 newspaper article, Altier quoted, “I wish I saw something nice happen along the Lackawanna River instead of having a culvert go through our town. “
Altier was encouraged to go on vacation with the National Park Service to New England.
In the late 1980s, the domain worked to attract more tourism. An organization of locals was already applying to move the Steamtown USA collection to Scranton at the same time that then-Congressman Joseph McDade was collaborating with the National Park Service, which later after creating the Steamtown National Historic Site.
Altier traveled to Lowell, Massachusetts, to learn more about his former national park. In that same 1987 newspaper article, Altair said he was informed how the city had bulldozed the nearby Merrimack River area.
He learned that the other people at home could enjoy his river.
“If we don’t do it ourselves, no one will,” he states in the article.
At this point, the Lackawanna starts to go blank, McGull said.
In the 1950s and 1960s, advocates pushed municipalities to create sewer systems. This was what was expected of them, according to the Pennsylvania Clean Currents Act of 1937.
Scranton designed a sewage treatment plant in 1944, McGurl said, but it wasn’t built until 1966.
The mining industry had also completely disappeared. McGurl said the government may no longer use industry and the river’s constant pollutants as an excuse to build the plants.
The first Canoe-a-Thon on the Lackawanna River was held in 1973. McGurl wasn’t one of them, but he was very happy to see other people come down the river. He rowed the following year and a few more in the late ’70s.
Over the past three decades, the river has become much cleaner than it was when Bernie was a kid. He gives credit to those who came before him and worked alongside him.
Patrick McKenna, the Times-Tribune. Se’s former editorial editor, retired last year after more than forty-five years at the paper. His career began as a journalist and McKenna covered McGurl’s early days on the river.
“What has inspired me the most about Bernie is that. . . when it comes to environmental issues, it’s very much about policy and how the government approaches them, and Bernie has been very competitive in those areas,” McKenna said. “But at the same time, it was something different, because I understood that it was also a practical business. He was the guy who forded the river, picked up debris, and recruited other people to do the same.
McGurl’s power and technique worked better than he imagined, he said.
McKenna grew up in North Scranton along Leggetts Creek, a tributary of the river. He said most people who grew up near the river knew better than to go near it.
Robert Durkin is the executive director of the Greater Scranton Chamber of Commerce. He grew up in Olyphant and also remembers the polluted river. The back of the factories faced him so they could sell their waste in the water, he said.
Durkin was the first executive director of the Lackawanna Valley Heritage Authority (LHVA) and worked alongside McGurl.
“Without a doubt, Bernie McGurl is one of the most important public figures in Lackawanna County over the last 50 years,” he said, “and I mean that sincerely. “
He said it’s not just about how the LRCA has moved the river forward, but also how those innovations have replaced residents’ quality of life.
“I’m pointing to Bernie,” Durkin said.
McKenna walks her dog along the Heritage Trail (created and now maintained through LHVA) that runs along Lackawanna from Carbondale to Taylor. Innovations are visible. People ride motorcycles and fish for trout.
“Honestly, of all the things that have happened in the last 30 years in the region, the progress is one of the most remarkable,” McKenna said.
McGurl sits at a wooden table in Trax Bar Kitchen at the Radisson Lackawanna Station Hotel. In his hands is a blue folder full of poems. Faded black-and-white and color photographs of a young McGurl with his brothers and friends Ron Semian and Craig Czury were strewn across the table.
They talked about poetry, Vietnam recruitment numbers towering over their heads, and, of course, the LRCA.
“We didn’t need the LRCA to be an environmental organization that wasn’t on my side. . . The river was a mess. It was a crisis for a hundred years. We can make all the protests we were looking for about it. But it probably wouldn’t plug the river,” McGull said. “The river will be erased by involving other people in its concealment. . . So the concept was to be a proactive organization rather than a reactive one. “
McGurl met Czury and Semian in the 1970s. They were in the Scranton art scene, especially in poetry and theater.
They have supported not only the LRCA but also McGurl’s poetry.
“When other people tell you ‘oh, nothing changes, everything is, everything is terrible’. . . it’s a wonderful example of how things have changed,” Semian said. “Over the course of my life, I’m amazed at how much this has changed. . . from this very, very dirty river to one of the trout fishing streams in America. . . It’s an example of what can be done. “
McGurl is looking to the future, adding his paintings along with Jones. She inspired him from the beginning.
“She convinced me I had what it takes,” he said. “I need to see her succeed in this position. . . Because in the end it will be the good luck of the organization for the next generation. And we have an ambitious agenda.
Jones will move forward with the North Scranton Riverfront assignment this year.
It took LRCA 30 years to obtain the assets of Diamond Avenue at Parker Street in Scranton. McGurl estimates the task will cost $15 million and take 20 years to complete. The purpose is to make the heritage trail bigger, create connections, and build a park. The allocation will eventually alleviate the scourge, repair the surrounding area and provide greater access to the river, according to the LRCA’s abstract plan.
Jones is excited about the organization’s bookings at Moosic Mountain.
Although named after the Lackawanna River, the LRCA not only maintains the lowest point of the valley, but works the basin, adding the highest points, the mountains.
The Lackawanna Valley Conservancy is the land accepted as belonging to the LRCA. They recently preserved 262 acres on Mount Moosic that is home to rare pine and oak habitats, McGurl said. It has shallow soils and rocky outcrops impacted and influenced by glaciers. The newly preserved land has bat hotels, which are cover sites for bat breeding.
“It’s about taking a step back and looking at a broader basin,” Jones said.
With a grant, LRCA plans to acquire and renovate the assets of the former Hudson Coal Company on Depot Street in North Scranton. The organization needs to establish its headquarters there and open up the rest of the area to other teams and events. McGurl estimates that the assignment may cost only about $3 million.
He still advocates for more investment for the organization. Most painters work part-time, and in order to achieve the kind of ambitious paintings they want to make, they need more full-time people.
And then the Old Forge Bore Hole.
Mining is a complicated business. Groundwater flowed into the mines and had to be pumped out. The last coal corporation abandoned its mines in November 1960. And, as McGull describes, he turned off the bombs and left.
“And during the winter (19)61-62, the mine filled with water, over 60 million gallons per day and during that winter it filled up and started coming out in every single direction imaginable,” he said. it was causing a lot of property damage. “
During this decade, Old Forge drilling was done in the lower part of the valley, about 6 km from the confluence of the Susquehanna River. From there, millions of gallons of water flow out of the mine basin, spewing iron and other minerals into the Chesapeake. This gives the rocks an orange color and pollutes rivers and the Chesapeake Bay. McGurl estimates he needs a $40 million mine processing plant.
“We hope that, if we’re lucky, in the next 15 years we’ll have a mine water treatment plant, we’ll plug it and put other people to work as well,” he said. told an organization of students from top schools.
McGurl said living to a hundred per goal. This is part of what helps keep it in the LRCA’s long-term plans.
“But to be practical and realistic, if it happens, wonderful, if it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen,” he said. “I know what it was like as a kid, growing up in the Lackawanna Valley and Scranton. . . The coal industry was on the brink of extinction. It was very dirty. This has caused a great deal of environmental and human damage in the approximately 140 years that this activity has been carried out here. So it was dark when I was when I was a kid. . . And I wanted to make the most wonderful things for future generations. . . That’s what motivates me.
Before getting involved in the river, Bernie was invited to a dinner party in 1987. There, he was presented with a Koan, a Zen Buddhist meant to galvanize reflection and contemplation.
“The Koan that my variety revealed to save the river, to save the mountain,” he said. “I didn’t get it. How important is this to me? When I was given concerns at the LRCA, one day I had a flash. Wow, this Koan.
Poetry, metaphor, and symbolism motivated McGurl’s involvement in the LRCA, the river, and in general.
“It’s been very rewarding for me, personally, emotionally and mentally, to have done all this work. “