By Jon Hurdle, NJ Spotlight

Is there a better way to urge more public investment for cleaning up an urban stretch of the Delaware River than to dress up as a heron and spend a Saturday afternoon drifting down the river with 75 of your closest friends?

That’s what Stu Lehman had in mind when he donned a long blue costume beak and yellow goggles to participate in “Floatopia,” a ramshackle array of flotation devices, kayaks, and canoes that launches from the north side of Camden once a year in an attempt to show the world that the river is a neglected recreational asset at the heart of a heavily urbanized environment.

“I’m a lesser blue heron,” said Lehman, from behind his mask. “My habitat got so small I had to lease it. I’m interested in seeing the river get cleaner and cleaner because 88 percent of what I eat is fish, as well as frogs and salamanders. I’m not sure the food that I can find is tasty or safe but I’m going to keep eating it as long as I can.”

Lehman, 68, a retired water specialist with the Environmental Protection Agency, said he was participating in his first Floatopia because he wants to support its effort to make the river cleaner and more accessible to communities along its banks such as Camden.

“Things are becoming cleaner, and we’re taking care of a lot of the industrial and municipal waste but we’ve still got a long way to go,” he said before launching his kayak.

Ducks and dinosaurs

Lehman was among about 75 people who boarded a multicolored flotilla of inflatable unicorns, flamingos, oversized bathtub ducks, pineapples, and at least one dinosaur to drift slowly on the tide down the “back channel” between Camden’s Pyne Poynt Park and Petty’s Island for a couple of hours on Saturday afternoon.

The inflatables were tied to a floating dock where a guitar player entertained those lolling in their devices, and speakers urged participants to support efforts to clean up the water in a 27-mile stretch between Camden and Wilmington, Delaware so that it finally attains a coveted official status of being “swimmable and fishable.”

‘We hope that people will see that it’s a great resource for recreation, that you can swim in it and play on it but that the job is not done yet.’ — Don Baugh, Upstream Alliance

“It’s important for our community to understand what a great resource this is,” said Camden Mayor Victor Carstarphen, in a shoreline interview. “Not a lot of folks know that you can swim here at certain times of the year. One of my jobs is to get more funding for cleaning up our waterways so that all the time, the river can be a resource for our community.”

Floatopia, now in its third year, was attempting this time to create public demand that will result in state and especially federal funding being used to repair or replace combined sewer overflows — old drains that dump stormwater and raw sewage into the river during heavy rains, making it unsafe to swim in for at least 48 hours after storms.

Why not use federal funding?

“For the last 12 months there has been a flood of federal dollars flowing to the states that we think should be available to help solve some of these problems,” said Don Baugh, president of Upstream Alliance, a nonprofit that organizes the event. “There’s never been more federal monies available; we’ve never had an opportunity like this before.”

Baugh said some of the federal money that’s newly available for improvements in infrastructure and pandemic relief should be used to fix or replace the combined sewer overflows, which continue to overflow into waterways and even streets in communities including Camden and Philadelphia.

Read the full story here

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