By Rachel Sawicki

WILMINGTON — The Wilmington Riverfront is on its way to becoming fishable and swimmable again after decades of industrial pollution ravaged all life in its waters.

Delaware legislators, the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, the Christina Conservancy and other partners met on Friday to celebrate The Christina and Brandywine Rivers Remediation, Restoration and Resilience Plan Project (CBR4). The planning area is approximately 4,000 acres of the tidal main stems of the Christina and Brandywine Rivers and surrounding riverbank areas in the city of Wilmington and New Castle County.

“Our aim is to create a blueprint that will guide the last big push to get these rivers cleaned up, restored, and not just beautiful to look at, but so that they support life,” said Jennifer Adkins, executive director of Clean Water Supply at American Rivers. “And I mean a whole array of fish,wildlife, and people. Even in some of the places that maybe are not so accessible today.”

Ms. Adkins is also on the board of directors for the Christina Conservancy and is the project manager for the CBR4 project. She said they are still in the early phases of the project, collecting data and information that will guide the physical plans for restorations.

“It is important for us to understand the current conditions to be able to tell what’s most important for improving these waterways,” she said. “By this time next year, we will have a suite of strategies and projects that have been vetted by scientists, as well as getting input from stakeholders in this area, importantly including community members from some of the communities that live close by and most impacted by these rivers.”

DNREC Secretary Shawn Garvin said they are evaluating and testing multiple innovative treatment strategies, some of which have already been tested in other parts of the state.

“Right now we’re in the monitoring phase of a pilot study using enhanced carbon technology here in Wilmington, which is part of the footprint of the CBR4 project,” Mr. Garvin said. “It is also the same technology that the city of Wilmington has been using to remediate PCBs next to the south Wilmington wetlands. This is something first tested out in 2013 at Mirror Lake in Dover and we have seen great success.”

The project also addresses several environmental justice issues as well. Mr. Garvin said that many of Wilmington’s most vulnerable communities are located along the banks of the Riverfront and have been heavily impacted by contamination, flooding and sea level rise for decades.

Not only does clean-up projects like CBR4 aim to repair the affected communities, but to restore and re-engage as well. Historically, people of color in the United States were kept away from engaging with nature due to redlining practices from the Industrial Revolution.

Recognizing Trail Ambassadors

Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., recognized a group of students across several high schools in New Castle County for their work as Trail Ambassadors with the Delaware Nature Society. Last year, the society launched the year-round workforce development program to engage local youth. Four students were accepted last year to explore nature year-round, learn to interpret the outdoors to the community and visitors, and mentor younger community members. This year, they increased the acceptances to eight.

“While it is about workforce development and training and opening opportunities and doors for new careers in STEM, it’s also about engaging the youth in the communities where they live,” said Joanne McGeoch, interim executive director for the Delaware Nature Society. “We have this great natural resource right in Wilmington. So making sure that their voices are represented in these types of projects gives them a chance to bring those ideas back into their communities so that they are represented in these task forces.”

Ms. McGeoch said that urban areas have lost a lot of their treescapes and green areas and they want to make sure that Wilmington has places for kids “to see and appreciate the wonders of the natural world.”

“I think there’s a lot to be said about what we’ve learned in this last year during the pandemic, how valuable nature is and how it is a refuge and a place to go when there’s other stresses and factors in your life that are outside of your scope of control,” she said.

Former DNREC Secretary and now president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, Collin O’Mara, said that cleaning up waterways across the country is doable for the first time thanks to President Joe Biden and other Delaware legislators. He commended Sen. Carper for his work in the Senate that passed $55 billion in funding for clean water under President Biden’s infrastructure bill. Mr. O’Mara also praised Gov. Carney’s $50 million investment in clean water, the biggest investment in clean water in Delaware in over 25 years, passed under the Clean Water Act last month.

“A vision is great, but a vision without action is just a hallucination,” he said. “The piece that has been missing for a long time when it comes to the Brandywine and Christina has been money… but put all of this funding together and we’re looking at tens of millions of dollars to clean up this water.”

Sen. Carper acknowledged that the idea of cleaning up the Riverfront was daunting, but it was made possible by a “great team.”

“I like to say that I stand on the shoulders of those who came before me,” Sen. Carper said. “When I was brand new in government, Former Governor Russell Peterson had this crazy idea to transform an industrial wasteland… decades of pollution, enormous cost to clean it up... but everybody said ‘you’d be stupid not to do this.’ So I decided not to be stupid.”

A two-year grant for the project was awarded by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s Delaware Watershed Conservation Fund in Fall 2020, totaling $770,397 including matched funds.

Mr. Garvin noted that a total of $1.5 million in state funding has been allocated toward the CBR4 project for hazardous substance cleanup, data analysis and more.