
Tensions abound between our needs and wants and what the natural world can sustain
| February 3, 2025
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With all this snow, you might expect that the drought conditions of the fall and early winter are a thing of the past.
New York State has declared — according to its map here — that the whole state is in a normal non-drought condition.
The same can’t be said of the rest of the watershed.
Southeastern New Jersey is deep red, which is extreme drought.
As you can see in the map above, all of Cape May and a big chunk of Cumberland are in extreme drought and the red touches parts of Salem, Gloucester, Camden and Burlington. The other parts of those watershed counties are in severe drought.
There’s one area in Sussex County, Del., that’s in extreme drought, with the rest of Delaware, and much of southeast Pennsylvania in severe drought.
But what about all this snow? Doesn’t that help when it melts?
Well, it could, but the temperatures haven’t been below freezing, so much of the snow isn’t melting but slowly disappearing through sublimation, or basically slowly evaporating.
We did a story about drought conditions about two weeks ago, but we figured we do a bit of an update since the weather has been different (colder) from the past few years, which was also different (warmer) from the previous patterns.
Different is the hallmark of climate change. By this time of the year — either through precipitation or melting snow — we expect all our reservoirs to fill up. We are entering uncharted waters, so to speak, and expectations can be upended.
Speaking of snow and ice, many of the clean drinking water advocates in the watershed are banding together this week for Winter Salt Week to highlight the pervasiveness of road salt in our waters.
The battle to keep roads safe means we use a lot of salt. From the story: “20 million to 30 million tons of road salt are used each winter. That’s the equivalent to the weight of 175,000 blue whales or 62,000 passenger airplanes.”
That salt enters our streams and rivers and also enters our groundwater, especially in developed areas where there’s lots of impervious surfaces.
We published another story about road salt being a year-round problem.
We need to find a balance between our immediate needs for safety and our long-term needs for safe drinking water. It’s a balance we need in so much of our relationship with the natural world.
Among the tensions between the natural and manmade worlds, we published this story about Keystone Cement’s desire to start using rail cars instead of trucks to haul hazardous waste to fuel its kiln in Bath, Pennsylvania. The rail line, which runs parallel to the Monocacy Creek, a tributary of the Lehigh River, is operated by Norfolk Southern, the company responsible for the East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment in February 2023.
Local citizens have voiced their concerns but a permit renewal application is in the hands of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. Local residents have done their best to make what is invisible in the normal course of things, visible.
And last, we can’t forget the ongoing saga of the SS United States: It was planned to leave its berth in Philadelphia in November and begin its journey to Okaloosa, Fla., and then it didn’t.
Delaware Currents dug beneath the surface with a slew of public records requests and discovered an acrimonious relationship between county officials in Florida and the Coast Guard.
Where there is tension, we need to look beneath the surface and find out what the issues are. That’s part of our job here at Delaware Currents.
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