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Funds awarded to Dover, Seaside Heights to study water pollution
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Published in the Asbury Park Press
By DON BENNETT
STAFF WRITER
DOVER TOWNSHIP will get $412,000 and Seaside Heights $75,000 to determine the sources of pollution plaguing two waterways: Long Swamp Creek and a cove in Barnegat Bay.
The state Department of Environmental Protection is providing the money to Dover to study pollution in the creek, which runs through the township's commercial center, and to Seaside Heights for the cove between Mike's Island and the bay bathing beach.
When it rains, bacteria and nutrients wash into the stream and into the cove, DEP officials told the Ocean County Mayors Association in February.
But where that pollution is coming from is still unclear, according to Robert Scro, director of the Barnegat Bay Estuary Program.
That's what the money will be spent to try to find out, but relief is unlikely this year, he said.
"It's a multiyear project," he said.
Assistant DEP Commissioner Robert Tudor told the mayors in February the DEP had money to investigate and try to cure what is called non-point-source pollution problems.
Scro called a March 23 meeting attended by federal, state, county and local officials to discuss the pollution. The result was an agreement to spend some of it in Dover and Seaside Heights, Scro said.
The Ocean County Soil Conservation District will do a natural-resource inventory of the Long Swamp Creek area.
The estuary program, which has as its prime mission the protection of the Barnegat Bay watershed, will help coordinate the attacks on non-point-source pollution, Scro said.
The projects would serve as models for other communities facing mandates to control non-point-source pollution flowing from storm drains. Auto fluids, animal wastes, lawn fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides all contribute to that problem.
"We want to pinpoint sources and develop solutions," Scro said.
Robert Connell, an environmental scientist with the DEP's Bureau of Marine Water Monitoring, said 10 years of bay watching showed the Long Swamp Creek and the Seaside Heights cove were the sites most frequently found polluted after rainstorms.
The prime suspect in Seaside Heights was that borough's Department of Public Works yard, where garbage trucks were washed. That water was carried by storm drains to the bay just north of the Route 37 bridge near the boat ramp, he said.
Connell said there is also an "incredible amount" of dog waste along the bayshore south of the borough's bathing beach on the bay. The Long Swamp Creek is a small stream that runs through the Bey Lea Golf Course, past the Toys R Us shopping center, south of Bay Avenue near Ocean County Mall and the Seacort Pavilion Shopping Center, along Brookside Drive and under Route 37 and Washington Street; it empties into the Toms River on the Brown property, a township-owned recreation area.
Dover's Money Island beach on the river is just east of the mouth of the creek.
Connell targeted a large storm drain that runs into the creek just north of Route 37 at Brookside Drive as the main source of the pollution.
Scro said officials must submit some paperwork to the DEP in July to get the funds, which are provided to the state under the federal Clean Water Act.
Published: April 4, 2000
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