TINA MARKOE/Courier-Post Lew Stout prepares for canoeing on the tributaries leading to the Delaware river in Gloucester City.

JEF DAUBER/Courier-Post

Lew and Diane Stout paddle their canoes past floating carpets of pond lilies and willows draped over the banks of Camden County's Newton Creek.

It's a surprisingly lush world tucked away amid the highways, warehouses and industries flanking this urban waterway.

"I really don't know what it is," Lew Stout says, trying to describe his passion for the creek. "It's pretty. It's nature. It's just some kind of attraction for the water."

The Gloucester City couple can now enjoy the creek because of what has been called one of the most remarkable recoveries of a river system.

The Delaware River and its tributaries are the cleanest they have been in more than 100 years as the result of increasing controls on industrial waste discharges, the exodus of manufacturers from the riverfront and the construction of modern sewage treatment plants along the river and its tributaries.

That doesn't mean all the problems have been solved. Officials are still struggling with cost-effective ways to upgrade antiquated urban collection systems that discharge raw sewage into the river during heavy rains. This situation prevents federal officials from declaring the river swimmable, a designation that could lead to official swimming beaches on the river.

The Stouts' home overlooks the South Branch of the Newton Creek, about two miles from the spot on the river where the Walt Whitman Bridge approach ramp sweeps into South Jersey. Lew Stout is a self-employed construction contractor; his wife works as a billing clerk for a Woodbury auto dealership.

The creek is rich with the earthy smell of mud. A huge snapping turtle "with a head the size of a softball" now lives somewhere in its murky water. The Stouts call him Grandaddy.

The couple have seen fish, probably shad and herring, jumping in the creek in recent years. And they've witnessed birds--great blue heron, red-tailed hawks, even an occasional osprey--come back, patrolling the creek for food.

"I think the fish are there, so the birds are coming back," says Diane Stout. "It's definitely been a lot cleaner."

The Delaware was once one of the nation's most polluted rivers. And tributaries like Newton Creek were virtually open sewers flowing to the river. In summer, sewage and hot weather would foster the growth of bacteria and algae that used up virtually all the dissolved oxygen in the river and creeks. The waterways became bacterial wastelands in which only bottom-dwelling fish like carp and catfish could survive.

Today, some of the worst places are now hot spots for fishing. Over the past few years, state and federal officials have been tracking the return of shad throughout the river's watershed, including Newton Creek.

The cleanup has been expensive, costing more than $3 billion to reduce chemicals discharged by industry and for construction of municipal sewage treatment systems, including regional plants in Camden and Gloucester counties.
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