Officials met in Tamaqua last week to discuss the pollution of a downtown creek.

In January, there was report of a discharge in the Panther Creek, which runs adjacent to Tamaqua’s borough building where the meeting was held. Like many bodies of water across the Schuylkill region, Panther Creek faces problems for a few different reasons.

“We’re learning more about what happened a few months ago when we had that awful orange discharge enter the Panther Creek,” said state Sen. David Argall, R-Schuylkill/Berks, who was on site for the discussion.

“My question here today was what went wrong, and most importantly, the second question was what can we do to clean up this creek?”

Tamaqua Borough Manager Kevin Steigerwalt said that in many local communities, these water polluting issues are due to the historic mining and sewage.

“We’ve encountered similar things before. That really wasn’t a shock,” Steigerwalt said. “We know there are some environmental issues related to mining. Not so much the way they do it today; it’s more so past practices.

“Then you have the issues with the Coaldale sewage systems. I can relate to that; we have some similar issues. You have three towns over there. It’s an old infrastructure. They’re taking in stormwater and sewage, and then they have overflow during a very heavy rain event, they might have some discharging. We do have that situation as well, in an older community.”

Steigerwalt pointed out that Tamaqua’s plant discharges into the Little Schuylkill, the Coaldale-Lansford-Summit Hill Sewer Authority plant discharges to Panther Creek - both bodies of water run through Tamaqua.

Mike Tirpak, one of the engineers representing Coaldale-Lansford-Summit Hill, explained that an Act 537 project is in the works to aid the sewer authority. However, there is currently no actual timeline of the project.

“It’s a sewage facilities plan - which is planning out your sewer system, new upgrades and that kind of thing,” Steigerwalt added.

The DEP said there haven’t been any more reports since the top of the calendar year. Bill Reichert, Schuylkill Conservation District, said that January’s reported discharge wouldn’t have killed any fish.

“We’ve made a lot of progress on old mine-impacted streams and rivers in Schuylkill County,” Argall said. “I see people fishing where I wouldn’t put my toes 40 or 50 years ago, but this creek is pretty impacted, and I’d like to clean it up.”