Riverkeeper column: Five observations about the Williamsport river spill situation as we continue to monitor things 10 days after the first report

Middle Susquehanna Riverkeeper Association Board President Michael Kinney takes footage of the river and some rocks below the Williamsport dam on Monday, Aug. 25.

​Riverkeeper note: The following first-person column was written by Middle Susquehanna Riverkeeper John Zaktansky. You can email him directly at [email protected]. It is not available to share online or in publication yet.
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A plastic bucket grasped tightly in each of his two knotted hands, the shirtless old man in long blue shorts carefully tip-toed from rock to rock down the steep bank of the Susquehanna River’s West Branch above the Hepburn Street pump house outfall.

As he neared the water’s edge, he glanced at the pool in front of him and the Williamsport dam beyond. He stopped and fished out a pair of swimming flippers from one of his buckets, sitting down to swap out his shoes for the fins and then grabbing a cheap snorkel from the other bucket.  

It was becoming alarmingly obvious this guy was about to jump into the water just below the Hepburn Street pump house where just a short time before, thousands of gallons of fracking wastewater flowed into the river.

An unknown person pulls out flippers and a snorkel near the Hepburn Street pump house outfall on Tuesday, Aug. 19.

​​It was Tuesday afternoon, August 19, my first chance to explore the spot and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Was this guy oblivious to what had just happened here? Did he know and just not care? Was it some form of protest or an attempt to collect data or samples or …

I quickly walked down to the nearby Eagle response team that was working around the clock to remove oily wastewater that still sat pooled inside the pump house.

“There’s some guy about to jump into the river just below the boom,” I told the one worker.

“He’s not with us, but we’re just about to go down and add a fresh boom,” he mentioned. “We’ll see what is going on.”

While I was gone, the old man was joined by several young fishermen. They waded into the river and cast in various places along the shoreline. He had changed out of the flippers back into his sneakers and paced the shoreline, inspecting the oatmeal-colored foam that drifted across the river’s surface.

Less than two days before, on Sunday evening, a pair of fishermen had reported a black goo flowing into the river at this very site. It led to an immediate response by the Williamsport Fire Department and Municipal Water Authority, shutting down the pump house outfall flow into the river and tracing the source of the contamination to a nearby warehouse owned by Eureka Resources.

The ensuing mess – and response – has led to a series of questions, teachable moments and other observations that I think are best tackled in a column of this style (at this time).

A rainbow-colored sheen is seen across a small cove of water along the banks of the West Branch of the Susquehanna River on Tuesday, Aug. 19.

1. Awareness and public safety
One of the lasting images from this situation is going to be this shirtless older guy with his flippers sitting on the edge of the pump house concrete about to jump into the river.

I never got to speak directly to him. I wish I did. I’d love to know how much he knew – or didn’t – about what happened there not long before his visit.

I have a suspicion he may not have known what was going on. Many of the passersby I have talked to at the site have not. They have seen the activity, the floatable oil spill cleanup booms and asked what was going on, if there was construction.

Part of the confusion may have come because of a lack of prime coverage in local mainstream media. As a longtime newspaper journalist, there is no secret that the day’s biggest news stories wind up on the front of the local newspaper.
Interestingly, here is a quick glimpse at the covers of the Williamsport Sun-Gazette from Aug. 19 through today (Aug. 27):

One photo-less story atop the front-page fold on Aug. 19 and then no more front-page coverage until a follow-up package on Wednesday, Aug. 27 – 10 days after the spill was reported.

​Plenty of Little League World Series coverage – as there should be – but very little front-page spill coverage (this doesn’t mean they didn’t run stories about it, just not on the front page). And they weren’t alone. WNEP-TV did nothing with the spill at all (from what I can tell via some searches of their website), as well as certain other respected media groups in the region.

I am not knocking the Sun-Gazette staff. I worked there once upon a time and have worked in other local newsrooms. Journalists need facts and they aren’t going to front-page stories that don’t have fleshed-out details and quotes and info. I’ll speak more about that in Observation 2 below.

Of course, a large reason for their lack of concern may be tied directly to local environmental agencies (outside of our own) suggesting the river was completely OK for recreational use and there was no threat to public safety – that people could and should access the river and recreate like normal. Nothing to see here. All is well.

However, was that really the case? How do we define that? How far (downriver) do we define that? Can’t we recommend avoiding the river in certain areas until we know more? And how closely did people really check things before making such a bold proclamation?

Fracking wastewater offers an unknown cocktail of contaminants. It is one of the big environmental debates of our time – should fracking companies be required to provide a list of ingredients in their concoctions or should the recipe to their secret sauce be a trade secret?

Many are concerned about things like radioactive elements of various kinds – something that DEP insists was tested for and not found in this wastewater. Other groups have questioned DEP's testing methods, but we don't know the extent of all that DEP has tested and for how long since they have been involved at this site via inspections and other monitoring for quite some time. No one, outside of DEP and Eureka, had access to the specific wastewater from that tank for testing until it spilled recently and it takes weeks for a full panel of results to return. 

However, until we know more about that, are individual elements/contaminants the only variable for public safety? What about the visible (and highly smell-able) oil/petroleum on the riverbank and in the water below the Hepburn Street outfall most of last week

Oily sheens were evident along the riverbank on Wednesday, Aug. 20, even after a small rain system moved through the area.

​Sheens covered small coves of the river and sections of stone had an oily coating that was obviously petroleum-based. I wondered at one point what would happen if someone dropped a lit match in certain sections of that area.

Heavier storms on Sunday, Aug. 24, seemed to have flushed out some of that – washing it downstream – but I still found remnants of petroleum yet this past week. Certain rocks in the water’s flow seem to be more susceptible to the oily substance sticking to their surface even under a strong flow of water.

A rainbow-colored sheen still can be seen on this rock which was pulled from the middle of the river's flow on Monday, Aug. 25, below the Williamsport dam. A few rocks were found like this, but much of the other signs of petroleum-based pollution were not as evident.

​​The concentration of oily substance at this site is definitely lower and almost hard to notice unless you are looking, but the impacts to the ecosystem may last quite a while. Birds have been in and out of it and likely have been impacted by the sheen in various ways. Aquatic creatures (such as the freshwater mussel found dead in this stretch of water later last week and pictured below) can be especially susceptible to pollutants. And people who may be more sensitive to environmental issues likely would have been impacted.

So, should people have been in that immediate area right after the spill? 

Ultimately, our association was the only one urging caution for anyone looking to use the river recreationally in that section. It wasn’t an attempt to scare people or over-blow anything, but based on immediate, real observation that there was still environmental presence of an environmental pollutant and that until we knew more details, it was better to be safe than sorry.

I would love to have a sit-down conversation with all groups across not only this area but well beyond concerning the protocol about environmental hazards and how we properly inform people so they can make good, educated decisions about what situations they put themselves and their families into.

A freshly dead freshwater mussel was found by Michael Kinney in this image on Wednesday, Aug. 20.

2. Facts … not opinion
The one place people could find spill coverage – social media – unfortunately also doesn’t operate with the same level of standards as traditional journalism.

Facebook and Instagram’s formula for likes and follows and (once upon a time) re-tweets lends itself to the world of “tabloid journalism” where shock value and big headlines that stretch the truth to make the most outlandish claims receives the most impact.

Online, the spill received quite a bit of traction, but it is critical that we look at these situations with the facts – that we take a scientific approach, gather data and then make decisions, announcements, etc.

That is why we recommended a cautious approach to public recreation at this site. That is why you won’t see headlines from our association that Eureka’s spill led to thousands of gallons of radioactive waste getting into the river … at least until we have conclusive proof that the waste from that specific tank was definitely radioactive, and, again, those tests take time.

Facebook comments to stories that did share actual photos and videos and info from the site were understandably all over the place … and people are allowed to have their opinions in such cases. However, one person’s personal conspiracy theory read by another could be taken as a truth and can be quickly spread with the click of a mouse or cell phone keypad button.

Tabloid journalists are just as guilty, then, when painting with half-truths in an effort to push a certain narrative or increase views. True journalists tell both sides of a story, use facts, scientific evidence and stay otherwise unbiased and impartial.

As a Riverkeeper, I’m not necessarily a journalist anymore, but I see some very similar parallels. The facts and data and truth are vital. They are the true north … the black-and-white of a situation that can get very gray very fast.
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It is our job to hold accountable any group that leads people astray on either side of that pendulum.

​3. Everyday heroes
Many people, when hearing this story, gloss over the Sunday, Aug. 17, backstory of how it was detected and jump right into the semantics of how bad (or isn’t) it was/still is.

However, let’s just take a moment to thank the nameless fishermen who took the time to report the black “goo” they saw below the Williamsport dam that sparked the response and wound up blocking a large amount of additional fracking waste from making its way into the river.

People just assume that Riverkeepers and DCNR staff and DEP workers and others are the ones that find pollution, but really those reports almost always start with everyday people who are out, see something off, get curious and do something about it.

We have helped, numerous times, be an intermediary for people who felt overwhelmed by the idea of reporting a possible pollution event to the interwoven network of state agencies. And it can be confusing … if find a grouping of dead fish in a waterway, would you call the state’s fish and boat commission or department of environmental protection?

We get a lot of people who say they don’t want to share something because they worry they are over-reacting and don’t want to look stupid. I get that. I am the same way.

Which is why we have been working to develop a library of blog posts on a wide variety of important topics to tell the differences on things like foams you may find on waterways (like the foam floating on top of the water by the Williamsport dam) and oily substances … sometimes they are produced by naturally occurring bacteria and there is a way you can determine it before you report. And even a story on algae growths and when to report that.

Ultimately, if you aren’t sure, here is a slide you can use to move forward with a report:

In addition to the two fishermen, there were quite a few other everyday heroes who stepped up to this spill situation so far.

Right after that call, the Williamsport Fire Department and Williamsport Water Authority and Sanitary Authority reportedly put in numerous hours and resources beyond the expected to make sure this situation didn’t get worse than it could have been.  

​Eagle Response Services worked on handling the waste that was trapped in the pump house and securing the spill at the Eureka Resources site. Some may cringe when they see the photos of oily waste in the pump house bowels that were taken Tuesday afternoon … I see them as a victory because that waste was successfully trapped and then transported back to a tank at the Eureka site because of the fishermen and the responding agencies. It didn't wind up in the river.

4. Missing the point?
When I first walked down to the site on Tuesday, Aug. 19, it wasn’t the sight or smell of oily gunk that first caught my attention. It was the litter.

Later, when sharing photos and videos on social media, so many people were outraged about the oily sheens and evidence of wastewater on rocks but seemed to ignore or completely oblivious about the massive amount of litter in the same photos.

I spent quite a bit of time along waterways. Seeing litter along them isn’t a new thing. Perhaps that is why we gloss over to the fact anymore, which is sad and scary. However, at this site specifically, it seemed especially bad.

I remember thinking at one point how quickly we have been to shake fingers at the pollution event going on (as we should be … and Eureka needs to be held accountable to the fullest extent), but really there is plenty of guilt to go around concerning the collective state of our river's health.

There is quite a bit of irony, for example, in the fact that two fishermen reported this spill (thankfully) and yet when investigating the site, I found myself tripping over balls of fishing line, discarded bait containers and other fishing-related items left by anglers who were less aware of the environmental big picture. 

I would urge you to check out this overview video our board president, Michael Kinney, put together last week. He had some of the same observations without us even discussing it beforehand:​

5. Much more to come
In a lot of these situations, there seems to be a big public uproar at the beginning, and then it fades into obscurity fairly quickly.

However, this spill is going to take quite a bit of time to fully flesh out. DEP’s investigation is still ongoing and Eureka has a variety of deadlines and tasks to meet not only at its Second Street property, but also at a facility on Catawissa Avenue in Williamsport and its property in Bradford County.
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We will continue to check the spill site and waiting for sample results which, as I mentioned earlier, can take weeks.
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It is also easy to hyper-focus on one big situation and not realize that other concerns are happening across the wide watershed we cover. More on those as information is available and we are able to share it out. 

Here are links to each of the stories and photo galleries done so far on the Williamsport spill situation:

• ​Aug. 22, 2025: Regional DEP provides end-of-week statement, inspection reports, other updates on Williamsport spill situation
• August 21, 2025: More than 1.3 million gallons of wastewater stored at Williamsport facility in tanks without required alarms among violations DEP issued 10 days prior to river spill
• August 20, 2025: Riverkeeper update: Initial radioactivity scan shows no elevated levels, but oily residue still prevalent near Williamsport river spill site
• August 19, 2025: Riverkeeper: Play it safe and avoid recreational use of river below Williamsport dam as spill cleanup continues

Photos taken at the site on Monday, Aug. 25, 2025: