Experts who spent months mapping Jim Thorpe’s west side watershed told borough council Thursday its water is good and the land protecting it is in better shape than most Pennsylvania municipalities.

“Your water quality is excellent,” said Bradley Baldacci, a source water protection specialist with the Pennsylvania Rural Water Association. “Jim Thorpe’s water system is on the right track, and it’s a very clean water source.”

Baldacci presented a draft Source Water Protection Plan for the borough’s west side system, which draws from Mauch Chunk Creek. The plan, developed with an engineering firm that produced detailed watershed maps, identifies potential contamination sources and recommends protective measures to keep the supply safe for public use.

The numbers behind the borough’s favorable grade are striking. Council President Connor Rodgers noted that 77% of the protection area on the west side is forested; more than 3,545 acres of trees buffer the watershed from development and runoff.

“Some areas, especially mostly urban areas, you could see as low as probably 22%,” Baldacci said. “There’s nothing really you can do in that aspect except try to make green infrastructure to kind of mitigate any other contamination.”

The plan identified a few abandoned mine lands near the watershed, but Baldacci said they pose minimal risk. A bigger talking point was how fast a contamination event could travel to the borough’s intake.

“The thing I was shocked about was the time that something would enter the water — a quarter mile, half mile out — it’s extremely fast to reach our intake dam,” Borough Water Department Supervisor Dwayne Sterner said. “There’s not a lot of time to react if there would be a hazardous material incident or something.

“If everybody’s on the right page, that gives us time to shut down and come up with some type of strategy.”

Cooperation with other towns

That urgency is complicated by geography. Half of Jim Thorpe’s watershed sits in neighboring Summit Hill Borough; a different municipality that operates under its own rules.

Jim Thorpe has a septic system maintenance program. Rodgers asked whether the borough could push for more cooperation across municipal lines. Baldacci said he is already working on it.

“I’ve been trying to reach out to try and get Summit Hill on board with a source water protection plan as well,” he said. “Hopefully we’ll see something come out of that in the future.”

Sterner said the project has already opened up valuable new relationships.

“It opened up a lot of lines of communication with Summit Hill, and also with the Emergency Management Agency,” he said. “It’s been a very good thing.”

Emergency response planning

The plan is not a one-time document. Under its requirements, the borough must hold annual meetings, either with a small committee or by bringing source water topics before council, and file a yearly form. The Pennsylvania Rural Water Association will remain available to assist. Once the borough approves the plan, the DEP will review and sign off on it.

Baldacci said the document can serve multiple purposes beyond water protection. “It can be used for your emergency response planning,” he said. “It can be sent to your county commission to be able to create ordinances as well.”

On the education side, Baldacci said he has already met the plan’s outreach requirement by partnering with the Carbon County Environmental Education Center, including an event at Hickory Run State Park.

“It all starts from the youth,” he said. “We teach them how to protect their local watershed so that in the future they can work to protect it as best they can.”

The west side plan will be sent to Carbon County for incorporation into the county hazard mitigation plan, which is currently being updated.

A similar plan for the borough’s east side wells is in the pipeline, but officials said they will hold off until a new well source is established there. The borough is currently in the early stages of identifying test well locations on its east side property.