Water Stories
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The Delaware River watershed provides drinking water to more than 13 million people, including 3 million in New Jersey. The Alliance for Watershed Education aims to engage a diverse public to enjoy and help protect the natural river basis.
The John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge, just south of Philadelphia, is a member of the Alliance for Watershed Education - an organization that teaches a diverse public to enjoy and protect the Delaware River Basin.
PowerCorps Camden is a youth employment program that combines the teaching of life skills with green infrastructure training that will help the city manage stormwater overflow.
South Orange’s River Day is a great example of the power of community stewardship of natural resources, and also the joy of joining others to improve the place we live.
Twenty-one municipalities in New Jersey have combined sewer overflows (CSOs). This causes flooding into the streets and rivers, and sometimes basements of disinvested communities. Experts are working to keep stormwater out of the sewers to prevent overflows.
Three organizations are working together to support student projects related to water quality management, conservation, and habitat protection.
Environmental pioneers have planned strategically and cooperatively to combat threats to natural spaces like development, invasive species of plants and animals, climate change, and industrial pollution. They’re showing how the human ecosystem and plant and animal ecosystems can survive and thrive together.
Careful sampling and analysis is crucial to maintaining clean water sources and cleaning up polluted ones, but keeping constant track of water quality across thousands of miles of rivers and streams in New Jersey is a daunting task - one that would be almost impossible to do properly without crowdsourcing the work to a largely volunteer network.
Hundreds of dams in NJ, built for various reasons over the centuries, have outlived their usefulness, fallen into disrepair, and are causing harm to the local ecosystems. CivicStory interviewed Jim Waltman, Executive Director of The Watershed Institute, about strategies for restoring the health of NJ waterways by removing dams.
Protecting and restoring the waters that drain the Delaware River basin is a complex undertaking with multiple players from all the states that share the river as a resource. The Coalition for the Delaware River Watershed’s annual forum convened stakeholders on issues ranging from stream designation to cross-state policies and innovative partnerships.
The 2019 Stormwater Utilities Symposium focused on upcoming changes in stormwater management rules, and the best ways to mitigate (mostly urban) flooding, a problem that threatens to get worse with climate change.
Could proposed changes to New Jersey’s Stormwater Rule assist municipalities with reducing combined sewer overflows?
Jersey Water Works convened experts to brainstorm ways to fix and finance improvements to New Jersey’s aging water infrastructure. The meeting highlighted the state of New Jersey’s water systems, how to fix them, and perhaps most frustratingly, how to pay for fixes.
Many Newark residents are unaware that their drinking water is drawn from the New Jersey Highlands forest, or that commercial development and logging threaten its source, as reported by Ambreen Ali.