Residents stumped by grayish color of creek
http://www.buffalonews.com/city-regi...creek-20141004Greg Nowak and his boys Tyler and Ben knew something wasn’t right with Ellicott Creek the moment they arrived to fish last Thursday afternoon in Lancaster.
The water, which often runs clear in this part of the town near Bowmansville, was a milky-grayish color.
“I’ve been fishing here for five years now, and I’ve never seen it like this,” Nowak said of his first visit to the fishing hole in about 2½ weeks.
It’s something Jean Elsinghorst, a Lancaster woman who’s lived on the banks of the creek for four decades, has also observed over about the same time frame.
Elsinghorst lives in a spartan, one-story home at One Haskell Drive. Several large picture windows in her home overlook her pastoral backyard that slopes down to the bank of the creek. She watches the creek every day.
“What’s wrong with the water?” is a question on the minds of Elsinghorst and a lot of her neighbors along Harris Hill Road.
That answer remained a mystery Friday afternoon.
State Department of Environmental Conservation investigators are looking into it along with the Buffalo Niagara Riverkeeper.
There’s no smell, so it’s unlikely a chemical, and the grayish-colored water extends from shore to shore in the affected area and appears to “intensify during the day,” Elsinghorst said.
What disturbs Elsinghorst is that the great blue heron that paid her yard morning visits has disappeared.
“He was there every morning,” said Elsinghorst. “Later in the afternoon, he’d be fishing in the falls on Genesee Street. I haven’t seen him there either.”
The mallard ducks have vanished, too. She said they haven’t been around “in a couple of weeks.”
The cormorants and a beaver are also gone.
Elsinghorst’s yard is deserted.
Water lilies have disappeared from the creek, and according to the Nowaks, the fish have, too.
Nowak, who said he and his 11- and 13-year-old sons frequently catch plentiful numbers of bass and perch in the creek waters here, didn’t get a single nibble late last week, although Tyler did snag a crayfish from the water while standing on the bank of the creek.
“The color – that looks dead,” Elsinghorst said of the water. “I’ve been here 40 years, I’ve not once seen it like this.”
Elsinghorst said a DEC official told her something “was being dumped in the water” when they visited her property Thursday.
State DEC officials, when reached by The Buffalo News on Friday, wouldn’t elaborate about the suspected cause of the apparent pollution.
Whatever’s happening can likely be traced to a 1-3 square mile area.
A visual survey by The News of the area this weekend morning revealed that further upstream – at Pavement Road in Lancaster – the waters of Ellicott Creek were crystal clear. The entire bottom creek bed was easily observed from the bridge over Pavement Road.
About a mile downstream, at a Stony Road bridge, the water appeared more turbid, also taking on the whitish-gray color observed near Elsinghorst’s property.
Jeff Brunea, a Forestville resident who cuts his father’s Harris Hill Road lawn beside the creek every week, is also stumped.
“Growing up in that house, I know what that creek is like,” Brunea said. “It’s strange. I’ve never seen it before. To me, it looks like gray water coming out.”
Brunea last fished the creek about two months ago but said he’s pulled everything from small and large mouth bass, northern pike, blue gill, sunfish and bullhead species from the water.
Brunea also said the creek’s had the grayish pall for “about three weeks now.”
“We haven’t had any rain per se. If the creek’s cloudy, it gets brown not gray,” he added. “To me, it’s quarry water.”
Nowak shares the theory.
Besides flowing through a large swath of heavy brush and woodland between Pavement and Harris Hill roads, there are a number of industrial and commercial sites within a stone’s throw of the creek, including a rock crushing operation, concrete supplier and recycler, a large distribution center of grocery and perishable items as well as the ongoing construction of a large new subdivision.
If authorities know the source, they weren’t saying Friday. “It’s certainly under investigation,” according to a local law enforcement official. “I can’t really give you information as of now.”
Is there something different in the quarry water?
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Originally Posted by gorja
