Mars Borough continues conversation on MS4 stream work
Mars Borough’s project to refurbish stream banks and enact other repairs along the Breakneck Creek continued this week after officials discussed future locations and priorities at a meeting Monday night.
The borough is required by federal law to move forward with Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System (MS4) improvements, and has been working with Chatham University professors and graduate students to gather public input, investigate weak points and plan future actions in the Breakneck Watershed.
“We started talking about priorities in the borough in terms of projects for speaking to the MS4 mandate, and speaking to the needs of the borough itself in terms of water runoff,” Mars Borough Mayor Gregg Hartung said.
Hartung explained that the borough council, Chatham representatives and Kevin Creagh of KLH Engineers determined three priority locations for future stream work, although official plans are still forthcoming. The top priority region is a portion of the Breakneck Creek located behind the municipal building in downtown Mars.
“We are losing quite a bit of the shoreline along the Breakneck Creek, so that’s a primary concern,” Hartung said. “We’re seeing that as project No. 1 in terms of this year.”
The second and third priority locations, respectively, are an area on the west side of Mars underneath Beaver Street and the area near St. John’s Specialty Care Center and Penn Mar Plaza.
Roy Weitzell, aquatic laboratory director at Chatham University, whose graduate student class worked on reports and information-gathering related to the creek in the fall and winter of 2021, said the current plans are still in progress.
“They’ve made some provisional plans, and have to physically do something down there because the stream is eroding and it’s accelerating and threatening infrastructure,” Weitzell said. “We don’t have the buy-in from the landowners and we don’t have any kind of plan at the moment. It just seems like ‘it’s a possibility, let’s keep talking and investigating.’”
Weitzell will bring a class back to the borough in the fall to study the Breakneck Creek watershed and continue planning.
“This is a really good relationship for us from the perspective of it gives our students some real-world experiences and interactions to support and apply the science that we try to teach them,” he said. “This is the kind of stuff they will hopefully be doing when they get out of college. To have these real-world interactions and think about problems from all the angles is really a benefit for us, and it benefits the borough too.”
