Ugly fish bridgeport8/27/2023 ![]() ![]() It did not look appealing in those days.” Slaughterhouses like the March Packing Co., shown here in 1928 along the Bridgeport Canal, would discharge blood, guts, and other waste directly into waterways. “You look out on the river today, it looks appealing. Combined with losses of shad and other fisheries, that spelled the death of a regional industry once worth hundreds of millions of dollars.īut even for people who didn’t fish, Pepino said for decades, the river just wasn’t a place people wanted to be. Once plentiful caviar and sturgeon also disappeared. They would die on their journey upstream before they could lay their eggs in the upper Delaware. That made it impossible for migratory fish like shad to breed. The dead zone on the river ran from Philadelphia to about 25 miles down river in Marcus Hook, Pa. How can you support an ecosystem where the amount of oxygen was too low to measure?” “And so they said, ‘Somebody’s got to tell the professor the machine is broken.’ The machine wasn’t broken. He remembers one of his professors sending his class onto the river to measure the oxygen levels. ![]() ![]() state line.Īlmost none of the waste entering the river was disinfected, so it contained high levels of bacteria - again, eating up all of the oxygen.įormer regional EPA manager Richard Pepino was studying biology in college in the 1960s. Acidic industrial waste lowered the pH of the river for several miles above and below the Pa.-Del. There was also blood from slaughterhouses, oil from refineries like Gulf Oil and Sun Oil, and toxic waste from chemical companies like Rohm and Haas and Dupont. In 1964, the bacteria count at Philadelphia’s water intake at Torresdale was 39,300 per 100 mL.īut it wasn’t just sewage. “With more and more and more people, over time it became an increasing problem,” Kreeger said, “until something had to be done because everything was dying because of lack of oxygen.”īy 1964, about a million pounds of waste was going into the river every day, and more than 60 percent of that was coming from sewage treatment plants, with cities like Philadelphia, Camden and Wilmington contributing the most. Sewage breeds bacteria in the water, and that bacteria effectively gobbles up all the oxygen, leaving little to none for the fish and other aquatic life in the river. ![]()
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