Bay Journal Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series examining the health of smaller streams and sections of rivers in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. If you would like to suggest a waterway to feature, contact Jeremy Cox at jcox@bayjournal.com.
In 1972, the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission minced no words in its assessment of Quittapahilla Creek.
Despite originating from a clear-running spring, the waterway “quickly deteriorates” because of pollution from “numerous” wastewater inputs, agency officials wrote.
Animal feedlot runoff, limestone quarry washouts, wastewater treatment plant discharges and chemicals from a Bethlehem Steel mill had transformed the stream into “little more than an open sewer.”
The agency’s report concluded by strongly discouraging stocking the Lebanon County creek with trout, which had been suspended five years earlier.
“Little possibility of recovery exists,” it warned.
Time has proved that assessment to be accurate in some ways and inaccurate in others.
There have been significant changes throughout the 77-square-mile watershed in recent decades that have benefited the creek’s health.
The steel mill closed in the mid-1980s. Sewage plant upgrades have led to notable reductions in nutrient pollution.
And state and local governments have invested millions of dollars into restoring segments of the 22-mile waterway and its tributaries.
After a nearly 20-year hiatus, the state restarted trout stocking in the Quittapahilla in 1985, and anglers have returned in droves.
But daunting challenges persist.
Since 1970, Lebanon County’s population has risen nearly 50% to about 145,000 residents, leading to the conversion of wide swaths of farmland and forests into subdivisions, roads and shopping centers.
Despite a surge in pollution-reduction practices adopted by farmers in the county, nitrate-laden groundwater still seeps into the creek from cropland.
And the dream of achieving water temperatures cool enough to sustain natural trout reproduction remains just that — a dream.
“I think it’s pretty clear the watershed as a whole remains impaired,” said Michael Schroeder, president of the Quittapahilla Watershed Association. “There are lots of injuries that need to be addressed.”
Schroeder nominated the creek to be featured in the Bay Journal’s “Our Waterways” series after reading a story in the May 2025 edition about similar efforts to fight legacy sediment about a dozen miles to the south in Chiques Creek.
Like the Chiques, the Quittapahilla has attracted a broad coalition of public and private partners dedicated to its recovery, Schroeder said.
The Lebanon County Stormwater Consortium, a coalition launched in 2017 by six municipalities, leverages locally collected stormwater fees to perform restoration projects in the watershed’s urban northeastern quadrant.
The coalition’s goal is to help those localities meet their collective pollution-reduction obligations under their Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System (MS4) permits.
The Quittapahilla Watershed Association, founded in 1997, sponsors projects elsewhere in the creek’s watershed.
The “Quittie,” as it’s affectionately called, generally flows westward, bubbling up from the ground just east of the city of Lebanon and paralleling Route 422, one of the county’s busiest highways.
It remains entirely within Lebanon County before emptying into Swatara Creek in North Annville Township.
The Swatara then carries those waters south of Harrisburg, where it intersects with the Susquehanna River.
The name “Quittapahilla” is believed to be a corruption of an Algonquin Indian phrase meaning ”a stream that flows from the ground among the pines.”
The pine and hardwood forests that once covered much of the land are largely gone, accounting for just 13% of the watershed’s land cover. (Across the Chesapeake Bay’s 64,000-square-mile drainage basin, forests represent about 60% of the land.)
The biggest threat to the waterway’s health is agriculture, Schroeder said, pointing out that cropland accounts for 50% of the land use in the watershed but is responsible for about 80% of the creek’s contaminants.
According to the most recent U.S. Department of Agriculture census, Lebanon County boasted nearly 1,000 farms, ranking fourth in the state with $662 million in agricultural sales.
Most of those proceeds were tied to dairy farms and raising chickens for meat.
The amount of farm acreage grew 2% in the county between 2017 and 2022, the census shows.
As natural lands give over to farmland and urban development, the goal line for reducing stormwater pollution creeps farther away, said Katie Hollen, a watershed specialist for the Lebanon County Conservation District.
“You do some [best management practices], but then things change,” Hollen said. “You [work] to keep things from increasing instead of [working] to get a decrease.”
Fish and other types of underwater life have gotten the sharp end of that stick.
All but 1.8 miles of the 89 stream miles encompassing the Quittie’s mainstem and its tributaries are listed as impaired for aquatic life, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP).
The Quittie’s watershed association launched a water-quality monitoring program in 2018, which has come to focus on six sites across the watershed.
Bob Connell, a volunteer with the organization and a scientist retired from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, predicted during the group’s monthly sampling tour in August that all the nitrate readings collected that day would be at or around the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s drinking water limit of 10 parts per million.
That limit was set in the 1960s to shield against blue baby syndrome, a potentially fatal condition that deprives babies of oxygen if they ingest too much nitrate.
“What we’re trying to do is build multiple years of data, so we can make assessments,” Connell said.
The cleanup progress hasn’t been easy or cheap. The DEP fined Lebanon and three other towns a total of $128,000 in 2010 for failing to meet stormwater requirements, according to the Lebanon Daily News.
Continued pressure from the state led the town to collaborate with five other communities in the Quittapahilla watershed to form the stormwater consortium.
Homeowners pay $60 each annually into the dedicated fund to finance $1 million a year in stormwater improvement projects.
Running through the city of Lebanon, though, the creek is an eyesore — an urban ditch confined within concrete walls.
The Hazel Dike, built in the early 1900s, has proved effective at reducing flooding in the city, but it acts as a superhighway for sediment and other pollutants, environmental advocates say.
And the lack of shade all but guarantees waters too warm to support trout, which require cold water.
Hollen said she hopes that ongoing restoration projects will yield measurable water quality improvements in the decades to come. “In 10, 20 years, hopefully we can see what we’re doing now is working,” she said.
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(Reprinted from the Chesapeake Bay Journal.)
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[Posted: September 4, 2025] PA Environment Digest
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