Quittapahilla Creek Garbage Museum

10/04/2024

The good folks in Doc Fritchey Trout Unlimited need help stocking trout in Quittie Creek, Oct 11-12.

Fri Oct 11. Quittie Creek Nature Park in Annville. Main parking area at about 1 PM. Bring waders if you are willing to get in the water. Volunteers also needed to carry buckets and to walk along with the volunteers in the creek who are float stocking.

Sat Oct 12. Quittie Stocking by the Palmyra Sportsmen’s Association (PSA) Cooperative Nursery. PSA raises trout that are stocked in the Quittie, primarily from Snitz Creek to Syner Road, but also in Quittie Creek Nature Park’s special regulations water. PSA needs to empty their hatchery in preparation for fingerlings, which they receive from the Fish and Boat Commission. They are doing that on Sat Oct 12. The hatchery is located south of Route 322 along Route 241. The first load of fish will be stocked in the Quittie in the PSA water along Syner Road. DFTU needs volunteers to help load the delivery truck with trout and to float stock the sections of the creek that will receive fish. Plans are to load the truck at 1 PM and go directly to Syner Road to drop off fish for the float stocking crews.

After the delivery truck has been unloaded it will return to the hatchery to load the remaining fish to be delivered to Quittie Creek Nature Park in Annville.

DFTU is a key partner of the Quittapahilla Watershed Association and very active in working to improve the water quality in the watershed. As a 501c3, DFTU can apply for & administer stream restoration grants from state, federal, and private funding agencies. In the past few years, DFTU has applied for & administered grants for several local stream restoration projects, including:

- 2018-2019: Hershey Farm on upper Snitz Creek: 1,125 linear feet of stream restored, $150K grant from the PA Fish & Boat Commission

- 2023-2024: Quittie mainstem downstream of the Spruce St bridge in Annville, 700 linear feet, $100K grants from the PA Fish & Boat Commission and the Leb Co Conservation District

And others. Please be in touch if you're interested in helping with the trout stocking Oct 11-12.

08/09/2024

On behalf of the Quittapahilla Watershed Association, a big thank-you to Daphne Messersmith and the Tree & Environment Committee at Cornwall Manor for suggesting a tour of the Quittapahilla Creek Floodplain Restoration Project -- aka "SQ1" -- upstream of the 22nd St bridge, along Chestnut St. up to the end of the Hazel D**e. And another big thank-you to Bryan Hoffman of the Lebanon County Stormwater Consortium for offering such an informed, insightful, and helpful summary and interpretation of the project for our guests.

You know the project -- the one that's garnered so many negative comments in past months from people who don't understand it and don't want to take the time to learn about it, but who criticize it anyway because so many trees were taken down or because it looked like a wasteland (which for a time it did) or because it would be a breeding ground for mosquitoes (which it won't be thanks to mosquito control measures) or . . . you name it.

Fact is, this is a good & useful project that promises to bring many benefits in the project area itself and points downstream -- e.g. see these two detailed & informative articles in LebTown from last year:

• Tom Knapp, "Where did the trees go along the Quittapahilla Creek in North Cornwall? LebTown answers reader’s question about ongoing creekside project.
by Tom Knapp August 1, 2023, at https://lebtown.com/2023/08/01/where-did-the-trees-go-along-the-quittapahilla-creek-in-north-cornwall/

• Chris Coyle, "Quittie restoration at 22nd Street is complete, but won’t look ugly for long. 400 years of sediment build-up and stream bank erosion can’t be fixed overnight," Nov. 29, 2023, at https://lebtown.com/2023/11/29/quittie-restoration-at-22nd-street-is-complete-but-wont-look-ugly-for-long/

In short: the creek & floodplain in the project area have been assaulted & injured & impaired & mismanaged by human beings for most of the past two centuries. It took a lot of time to mess it up so bad, and it will take time to fix it. Patience.

For more on the project, scroll down to Sept 2021 on the "Studies & Documents" page of our QWA website, at http://www.quittiecreek.org/documents.html

04/27/2024

04/25/2024

Join us at 10:00 am this Saturday, April 27 in the Annville Town Square for the Greater Annville "Clean Up the Streets" event, organized by the Quittapahilla Creek Garbage Museum in partnership with the Quittapahilla Watershed Association, the Quittie Creek Nature Park Committee and Celebrate! Annville of the Friends of Old Annville, and Lebanon Valley College.

We'll provide safety vests, gloves, trash bags, trash-pickers, and maps of the areas to be cleaned up. The event will run till 12 noon.

Check out this graphic: these 25 pieces of trash were picked up in just a few blocks on a Sunday stroll in February. Multiply those 25 pieces by all the streets in Annville and you'll get a sense of how much trash is out there, just waiting to be picked up! And it won't be there for long: the next rainstorm will likely wash all this street trash into Quittie Creek, the Chesapeake Bay, and the Atlantic Ocean.

04/01/2024

So I've started putting together the talk I'll be giving at the Annville Free Library next Tues April 9 on the work of the Quittapahilla Watershed Association and got to thinking about the question I asked during my TEDx-Lancaster talk "Rivers of Garbage" ten years ago in May 2014 on my work creating & curating the Quittapahilla Creek Garbage Museum:

What is a river?

(see https://youtu.be/meCElH_LpoY?si=o_Zg8R6vdR0t-4U5)

And that got me thinking about the talk given by Prof Thomas Miller Klubock of the Univ of Virginia at our annual conference of the Middle Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies (MACLAS) at Colgate University in Hamilton NY a couple weeks ago on the same question:

What is a river?

(I’ve served as MACLAS Treasurer since 2018: see http://www.maclas.org/executive-committee)

Tom Klubock is an environmental & labor historian who works on Chile. He won the MACLAS Whitaker Prize for his most recent book, “Ránquil: Rural Rebellion, Political Violence, and Historical Memory in Chile” (2022). I’ve assigned his previous prize-winning book, “La Frontera: Forests and Ecological Conflict in Chile’s Frontier Territory” (2014) in one of my courses at LVC. It’s really good.

Tom’s talk at MACLAS focused on his new research project on the copper mining corporations that dominate the Chilean copper industry (Chile is the world’s biggest producer of copper). As Tom tells it, according to the legal filings of those copper corporations that he dug out of the archives, a river isn’t really a river.

No, a river is actually a waste conveyance mechanism: a way for companies to get rid of the toxic tailings produced when extracting & refining copper. That’s what the corporations argued in court.

And that’s basically how we treat many of our rivers & waterways here in the USA and right here in Lebanon County: not as vital parts of complex ecosystems – not as “super-organisms” that make possible myriad forms of life – but instead as waste conveyance & disposal mechanisms.

And that’s why we need organizations like the Quittapahilla Watershed Association: to remind ourselves what rivers really are.

Hope to see you next Tues April 9 at the Annville Free Library.

03/02/2024

QUITTAPAHILLA WATERSHED ASSOCIATION • SUMMER 2023 STUDENT INTERNSHIP PROGRAM • FINAL REPORT • PART 1

This is the first in a series of posts on the work of the Summer 2023 Student Internship Program organized by the Quittapahilla Watershed Association (QWA), for which I’m happy to serve as president.

The basic idea behind our summer internship program is to hire two college students in environmental science to work as a team full-time for 400 hours at $18/hour each to assess the conditions of the tributaries that feed into Quittapahilla Creek in Lebanon County PA.

I’m delighted to report that we’ve secured funding to continue the program in summer 2024 – ♪ woo ♪ hoo ♪ ! The 2024 announcement is included here.

The grant money comes via the good graces of the Lebanon County Conservation District (LCCD), which receives funds through PA-DEP. We also depend on three other partners: (1) Rocky Powell of Clear Creeks Consulting, LLC, who trains our student interns, receives the data they produce, evaluates it, and writes the final report, including recommendations moving forward; (2) The Lebanon Valley Conservancy (TLVC), which administers the grant money; and (3) Doc Fritchey Trout Unlimited, which provides logistical & other help.

The QWA is all-volunteer and receives no money. What we get is the satisfaction of facilitating good environmental stewardship in the watershed.

The stream assessments undertaken by our student interns include: (1) surveys of channel cross-sections, longitudinal profiles, and particle size distribution of the streambed material; (2) stability assessments to identify, quantify, and document stream bank erosion; (3) photo documentation and mapping of stream conditions observed; and (4) data entry and plotting of all information collected during the surveys and assessments. Real scientific data.

Last year’s interns, LVC Environmental Science Majors Hannah Horengic and Ilyssa McLaughlin, did a terrific job.

The final 61-page report resulting from their work is housed on the “Studies & Documents” page of the QWA website, here: http://www.quittiecreek.org/documents.html (scroll down to October, 2023).

Our 2023 student interns assessed the conditions along three tributaries:

(1) Snitz Creek
(2) Gingrich Run
(3) Killinger Creek

Each tributary is divided into “reaches” or sections. Most such reaches are somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 linear feet. Reaches are subdivided into smaller sub-reaches, like Reach 5A, 5B, etc.

The accompanying map shows the 66 reaches assessed by our summer 2023 student interns.

In addition to its “[overall] summary of existing conditions and recommendations,” the final report has three parts:

(1) Maps showing the locations of the 66 sub-reaches assessed,
(2) Tables summarizing conditions along each of these 66 sub-reaches, and
(3) Photographs of conditions along each sub-reach, with a grand total of 2,289 photos.

This format makes the final report challenging to read, because as a reader you need to:

(a) locate a given sub-reach on a map,
(b) turn to the table summarizing conditions in that sub-reach, and
(c) turn to the collection of photographs for that sub-reach.

We’re trying to figure out a simpler, more elegant, reader-friendly way to present this material – like a GIS story-map, where you click on a given reach, the assessment summary appears, and you can scroll through the photos documenting conditions in that reach. We would welcome any help on that!

Next posts will spotlight specific reaches in the watershed – so stay tuned!

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Again, the main repository for QWA material is the “Studies & Documents” page –
http://www.quittiecreek.org/documents.html – where under Oct 2023 alongside the final 61-page final report you’ll find linked the following:

• Collection of 2,289 photographs documenting the findings in the final report
• PDF file of presentation by interns at our 17 Oct 2023 QWA meeting
• Video recording of the interns' 17 Oct 2023 Zoom presentation, housed on YouTube, at https://youtu.be/J64l3nzFAwM
• Press release by The Lebanon Valley Conservancy of 27 Oct 2023 describing the interns' work, athttp://www.quittiecreek.org/documents/2023_Interns/231027_TLVC_PressRelease_QWAInternsPresentFindings.pdf
• News story: "Quittapahilla Watershed interns present findings on health of local waterways," LebTown Staff, 2 Nov 2023, https://lebtown.com/2023/11/02/quittapahilla-watershed-interns-present-findings-on-health-of-local-waterways/
• Blog entry of Mon. Oct. 30, 2023, in the PA Environment Digest by David E. Hess, "Quittapahilla Watershed Assn. Interns Present Stream Morphology Surveys on Lebanon County Streams," http://paenvironmentdaily.blogspot.com/2023/10/quittapahilla-watershed-assn-interns.html
• Announcement of our 2024 Summer Internship Program!

05/01/2022

Pix from yesterday's Sat April 30 Quittie Creek Cleanup next to the 22nd St. Bridge in the floodplain behind Game Time Armel Family Fun Center (formerly Yogey's Putt'n Cream) with half a dozen LVC students -- Brandon Bauer, David Graff, Emily Lakin, Rachel King, Adam Rilatt, Dane Vallie, with the help of LVC's tireless Volunteerism Coordinator, Jen Liedtka. Thank you one & all!

Thanks also to Darren at Game Time for letting us leave our 8-plus large bags full of trash next to the dumpster. Not too many museum-quality artifacts, as usual only about 1-2% of all the plastic trash littering the forest floor. Haul included a tire, a coffee-maker, a boom-box, a trash-can lid, a 6-foot long plastic shutter, and several thousand small fragments & pieces of plastic of every imaginable description, mostly sheet plastic of some kind -- candy wrappers, chip bags, shopping bags, cups & lids, bottles & caps . . . hard to take a single step without encountering some bit of plastic debris amid the fallen twigs & leaves & exuberant greenery of spring.

04/28/2020

Public webinar 8 PM tonight Tues 4/28: "Disrespect: Rogue Creek Garbage, COVID-19, and the Missing Rights of Nature," sponsored by Better Path Coalition.

Register for this hour-long webinar at https://bit.ly/428webinar before 7:30 p.m. on 4/28.

DESCRIPTION: What’s the connection between the abundance of plastic garbage in our local waterways and the global COVID-19 pandemic? Both phenomena, along with the fracking & pipeline revolutions, global climate disruption, and systemic animal cruelty, are rooted in the same fundamental disrespect for the non-human natural world that defines our contemporary consumer-based capitalist society and political economy. In this presentation and invitation to dialogue, Michael Schroeder, Executive Director of the Quittapahilla Creek Garbage Museum in Annville, PA, and Associate Professor of History at Lebanon Valley College, will explore these not-so-hidden connections to argue the critical need to expand our conception and practice of “rights” beyond the inalienable rights of individual citizens to also embrace and codify into law the inalienable rights of non-human Nature.

04/07/2020

"DISRESPECT for the Natural World: The Not-So-Hidden Connections between Rogue Creek Garbage and COVID-19" -- Wed April 8 at 1:00 PM -- a remote WebEx Talk for Earth Days at Lebanon Valley College by the Executive Director of the Quittapahilla Creek Garbage Museum, who's also Associate Professor of History at LVC -- follow this link at 12:50 PM so your device can be configured in time for the talk:

https://lvc.webex.com/webappng/sites/lvc/meeting/download/6FA034771DD0B5D1E0533F84FC0A5644

Hope to "see" you there!