by Peter Crimmins | FOR WHAT
For more than 30 years, Connie Storz has been overseeing an 80-acre wooded plot next to Keystone Elementary School in Croydon, Bucks County. As a school administrator, I was interested in what’s going on at Croydon Woods.
“It used to be a real dumping ground,” said Storz, as he recently walked through the Croydon Woods Nature Reserve, as its bare trees began to emerge from the winter.
“Lots of homeless people, lots of little kids partying here and there, lots of quad bike rides,” he said. “Probably the worst, the young people ride quad bikes here. And motorcycles.
But public use of wood has grown especially in the last three decades. Croydon Woods, one of the last remaining coastal plain forests in Pennsylvania, is home to frogs, beavers, and owls. It is located along the Delaware River near Bristol and is full of beech and magnolia trees, wild cinnamon ferns, and small endangered grasses.
It is now maintained as a public green area through the Heritage Conservancy, which recently awarded the Environmental Excellence Award through Governor Josh Shapiro for its reclamation and control of Croydon Woods.
Although it is an urban oasis of greenery on its surface, Croydon Woods has a legacy of environmental pollutants underneath. Groundwater in the domain is infected with the carcinogen TCE or trichloroethylene. In 1986, the site was added to the Superfund’s federal list of poisonous sites. .
TCE is used in the manufacture of refrigerants and cleaning solutions. Exposure to high concentrations of TCE can cause a long list of diseases, as well as cancer and damage to the kidneys, liver, nervous system, and fetal development.
For more than a century, the domain around Croydon has been used for chemical production through Rohm and Haas, now Dow Chemical. Under the Superfund Act, chemical corporations are guilty of remediating a groundwater column in the domain surrounding the forest, but the specific TCE column discovered in the groundwater beneath Croydon Woods is of a different kind. It has never been imaginable to attribute it definitively to Rohm and Haas or Dow.
“The chemical signatures were others in the two columns,” said Andrew Hass, the EPA’s remediation task manager. “We have the idea that these are illegal dumps. “
Without any party, the corrective moves were the responsibility of the EPA and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, funded through the federal Superfund created in 1980 through the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Accountability Act (CERCLA).
Hass said that in the 1980s, TCE pollution exceeded 100 portions per billion. The goal now is to bring TCE grades to five servings per billion. After two primary cleanup projects over the past 30 years — adding groundwater pumping and treating it at the surface, plus injecting a biostimulant into the soil to advertise TCE-feeding bacteria — we’re almost there.
Hass has raised his thumb and forefinger to show how close they are. He said some measurements show levels as low as 5. 2 portions per billion, but the last 0. 2 ppb are the hardest. It would possibly be decades before Croydon Woods does. of everything removed from the active Suconsistent withfund template.
Despite the damage to groundwater, there is no danger to recreational land use because TCE is provided at the surface, according to the EPA. All homes that once used wells that drew contaminated groundwater have been connected to the municipal water formula since 1989.
In the meantime, the public will be able to enjoy Heritage Conservancy Croydon Woods. The Heritage Conservancy acquired the assets in 2016 to maintain its local ecology and inspire neighbors to use its approximately 1. 5 miles of trails.
But it wasn’t the poisonous groundwater that kept other people away. The network had learned to equate Croydon Woods with destruction and illicit behavior. Shannon Fredebaugh-Siller, network engagement manager for the Heritage Conservancy, said many forest neighbors were off-limits.
“There were quad bikes passing by and, one of the first weekends we owned the property, unfortunately there were several fires,” he said. “As a mother, I can understand that myself. It’s not a position where you say, “Yes. “, children, step and the forest. “
Fredebaugh-Siller’s task is to replace the Croydon Woods narrative to inspire citizens to think of it as an oasis of herbs. One of the first things Heritage did was hire a 24-hour surveillance company to prevent ATVs from destroying the forest floor. .
Croydon Woods has a wonderful advantage in being next door to a number one school. Fredebaugh-Siller approached Keystone teachers to expand woodwind systems as a training tool.
“We had a fourth-grade volunteer teacher, Kati Bryson, who was a wonderful partner,” she said. “This is where it all started for our paintings on environmental education in schools. “
Bryson uses the forest as a training ground to learn the basics of environmental conservation. There is a dominance of small trunks that favor frog habitat. Students take care of the cages set up for the small plants.
The schoolchildren have gained a sense of belonging to Croydon Woods and are watching. If they see something, they say something.
“Two weeks ago, we had a user with a quad bike who parked his truck and unloaded it,” Storz recalls. “Someone comes in and says, ‘Miss Connie! There’s someone with a quad. ‘”
“Well, I’m going out. I take a picture of your license plate. He looks at me and says, “What?” he said. I said, ‘You can bring quads here. ‘I told him where to go, somewhere in New Jersey, but here. He got it ready and left.
“Thank you for doing that,” Fredebaugh-Siller replied. Community awareness and engagement in this area has been instrumental in the adjustments we’ve seen.
Community engagement is the cornerstone of urban land conservation, according to rules established 10 years ago through the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service. U. S. Their recommendations for judgment and excellence come with an understanding of the surrounding community, connection to the benefits of natural spaces, and equitable offering to spaces.
Fredebaugh-Siller trained on those criteria about fish and wildlife and developed Croydon Woods as a pilot program that could be replicated at other Heritage Conservancy properties.
A mural has just been created on a wall of the adjacent Little League baseball field, which serves as an access point to Croydon Woods. The symbol, which features samples of the flora and fauna discovered in the forest, was designed with the participation of youth from Keystone Elementary School. .
The EPA’s role in Croydon Woods is limited to detoxifying groundwater. But Hass says the site’s long-term good fortune demands the involvement of its neighbors.
“EPA’s purpose with Superfund sites is to bring them back online, not just fence them off,” he said. “What the Heritage Conservancy has done, by taking control of this parcel and turning it into a park, is repurpose a Superfund Site. “
The Heritage Conservancy owns several homes in Pennsylvania, 4 of which are available to the public. Fredebaugh-Siller plans to mirror the style of audience engagement developed at Croydon at those other sites.