Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies

dumping the pump: another revolution

The defining face-off in the fight to stop the pump started on the morning of January 10, 1983, when a pickup truck lumbered down River Road into the historic rural village of Point Pleasant in northern Bucks County. It was the advance team for the construction crew hired to excavate the foundation of a water-pumping station near the banks of the Delaware River. More than 2,000 citizen-activists, organized by Del-AWARE, repulsed the truck. They had help from its $1-a-year-consultant, Abbie Hoffman, renowned for his role in leading antiwar protests in the 1960s and his environmental work on the St. Lawrence River. Many had been hunkered down at the site for weeks, waiting. Forming barricades with handmade stone walls, their bodies, and their cars, the protesters sought to turn back the construction equipment and prevent the diversion of Delaware River water through a pump intended to feed expansive suburbanization and cool the twin nuclear reactors of the Limerick power plant under construction by the Philadelphia Electric Company (now PECO). The scenario was repeated a day later, as the heavy equipment approached the activists' encampment from another direction, but this time, court order in hand, helmeted state troopers disbursed the crowd, arresting and carting off scores of demonstrators to be arraigned before President Judge Isaac S. Garb in Doylestown, the Bucks County seat.³ The resistance and arrests at the site would continue for days and received national media attention.

The mass display of civil disobedience crowned more than three years of organizing, advertising, politicking, educating, and lesser-grade protest aimed at thwarting the construction of a multimillion-dollar, multicomponent water-supply project. The system consisted of a pumping station to be built in Point Pleasant and transmission pipes leading to a reservoir to be built nearby. Up to 95 million gallons of water daily ultimately would be drawn from the river and pumped overland to the reservoir and, from there, discharged into two Delaware tributaries: Neshaminy and Perkiomen Creeks. About half of the water would go to suburban communities in Bucks and Montgomery counties, and the rest to the Limerick power plant as backup coolant. [End Page 301]

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Figure 1.

"Sheriff's deputies carry a demonstrator to a police bus at the Bucks County construction site." Photographed January 12, 1983, by Vicki Valerio. From the Philadelphia Inquirer, January 13, 1983, Main Edition, page 21. Courtesy of Philadelphia Inquirer Archives, Temple University Library, Special Collections Research Center.

Planners as early as 1960 conceived the original project differently: to redistribute Delaware River water to growing and drought-prone communities in Bucks and Montgomery counties, and to control flooding. They later enlarged its scope to furnish coolant for the proposed Limerick nuclear energy plant.⁴ These early iterations drew muted dissent, mostly from riverfront landowners and old-line conservation groups.⁵ A history of the pump project prepared by the Neshaminy Water Resources Authority (NWRA) in the late 1980s noted:

Some of the residents opposed it because they knew that half the water diverted from the Delaware would be used to cool the Limerick nuclear generating station. Others opposed the project because they believed it would cause environmental damage to the Delaware River and the two creeks and that the project would probably not be able to supply sufficient water year round.⁶ [End Page 302]

When the Bucks County commissioners voted to approve the project and signed a contract with Philadelphia Electric in 1980, it became evident that the long-pending project was on the fast track to becoming reality. Alarms sounded in the local environmental community and well beyond. The opposition coalesced around Del-AWARE, Unlimited, Inc. Taking as its logo a skeletal fish struggling for air, designed by artists from among DelAWARE's ranks, it framed the struggle to "Dump the Pump" as a populist life-or-death battle to save the beloved Delaware River and preserve a rustic, riverine way of life.⁷

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Figure 2.

Site map and diagram of the Point Pleasant pumping system. From Environmental Assessment Report and Findings Point Pleasant Water Supply Project, Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources, August 1982. Courtesy of the Mercer Museum Research Library.

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Figure 3.

Bumper sticker with Del-AWARE logo. From the author's collection.

Following the early 1983 blockade and arrests at the pump construction site that ignited opposition to the pump, the focus of protest shifted to the Bucks County Courthouse, where Del-AWARE and its friends [End Page 303] staged a two-month "sleep-in" inside the building to call attention to a drive to put the pump project to a referendum. Other activists collected 24,000 signatures to get the question on the ballot. A member of a prominent Bucks County family dumped a load of manure on the courthouse steps. Advocates of the pump responded with their own largely corporate-funded campaign, "Save Bucks, Vote No," claiming that dumping the pump would cost county taxpayers $100 million.⁸

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Figure 4.

Handbill distributed by Del-AWARE during the pump referendum campaign. Courtesy of the Mercer Museum Research Library.

[End Page 304]

In May 1983 a "yes" vote to stop construction of the pump drew 56 percent of the vote in a nonbinding referendum, and the November election resulted in a political realignment wresting majority control of Bucks County government from two pro-pump Republican commissioners to two antipump Democrats.⁹ The party shift was only the third since the 1920s. Despite the activists' fierce struggle, the fate of the water project had already been sealed, with the incumbent county commissioners' signature on a contract and, likely, with the pro-business pressure being brought to bear on Governor Robert P. Casey. Judge Garb later ruled the contract legally binding on the successor county government, a decision that was upheld in higher court.

Sporadic demonstrations at the site and legal action based on various procedural and environmental grounds continued at least until the pump went operational in July 1989, and were contested by Philadelphia Electric and the two Montgomery County water authorities that planned to purchase water from the project. Along the way, Del-AWARE won some legal victories that reduced the capacity of the water pipes, and thus staved off proposed large-scale residential development in ecologically sensitive parts of Bucks and Montgomery counties.¹⁰

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Figure 5.

The pumping station in operation at Point Pleasant. Photo by the author, April 5, 2014.

[End Page 305]

Del-AWARE's success in mobilizing a community around the goal of stopping a project reflected forms of grassroots environmentalism and political activism forged or refined in the rise of social, religious, and political conservatism, the anger, and the political disillusionment characteristic of the 1980s. Its failure to fully achieve that goal likewise reflected the intersection of environmentalism and politics then unfolding at county, state, and national scale. The pumping system, described by its opponents as a project designed in one era and built in another, existed within a similar time warp in terms of the political realignments taking place at its rollout.

1980s activism: the big picture

While the overarching narrative of the 1980s has emphasized the influence of Ronald Reagan in the role of standard-bearer for the traditional values of the new conservatism, other scholarship places at the forefront the ferment beneath the surface, particularly at the grassroots level. Oppositional activists of this era "quietly consolidated, ratified and even extended many of the salient changes of the 1960s and 1970s," using tactics from that time when it suited their purpose, and improving upon them when necessary, wrote historian Bradford Martin. "Unlike their 1960s forebears, 1980s activists were as likely to try to influence established institutions as to undermine the foundations of their authority."¹¹

The actions of Hoffman, the Del-AWARE consultant better known as a member of the Chicago Seven, the group of activists tried for leading antiwar demonstrations that culminated in rioting at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, reinforces Bradford's view. Quoted during a speaking tour of college campuses in late 1982, Hoffman described his approach to environmentalism as "holistic," involving an understanding of democracy and political power relations. "People on a grassroots level realize global issues mean something to them," he said. He also described the era's activism as being fostered by 1960s radicals, who had grappled with the issues of the Vietnam War, civil rights, and feminism.¹² Hoffman's main role in Del-AWARE was as a coach and trainer in the art of nonviolent protest, according to Richard H. McNutt, an industrial engineer and one of Del-AWARE's founders.¹³

Historian Michael Stewart Foley has described the 1970s and 1980s as an era of "front-porch politics," in which local activism flourished, contrary to the popular stereotype of the two decades as a time in which Americans [End Page 306] converted to political conservatism and practiced civil disengagement. At the national level, that may have been true. Closer to home, citizens took matters into their own hands, forming grassroots groups engaging in self-help. They mobilized to fight for fairness for themselves and their children, or to beat back deeply sensed threats to their hopes, their health, their neighborhoods, and their livelihoods. These local activists often held an ambivalent attitude toward government, on the one hand decrying the role of perceived governmental incompetence in policy failures like economic stagnation, urban blight, and the Vietnam War, but on the other, still looking to government for expert regulatory, legislative, or legal help in serving the public interest and solving problems.¹⁴ Yet another strand of the literature on the politics of postwar environmentalism places it within the context of the key activist movements of the 1960s: antiwar, feminist, and civil rights.¹⁵

On the environmental front, the confluence of various historical cross-currents helped shape the face of 1980s-style activism. The first Earth Day in 1970 is widely viewed as the starting point of broad-based environmental consciousness in the United States, but scholars have traced its modern roots back at least to the late nineteenth century, to the advent of a conservation ethic, concern about pollution, and wilderness preservation initiatives, as well as the various public health movements of the Progressive Era.¹⁶ Evolutionary social and economic changes since World War II helped convert conservationists into environmentalists. Growth of consumerism, paired with increased knowledge of ecology and the interrelationships within the natural environment, contributed to a transition from production-oriented management of natural resources, to conservation, and then to full-blown environmentalism. Americans, with more money and more leisure, increasingly valued the natural world as a source of recreation and quality of life.

Environmentalism from the mid-1960s to 1980 can be characterized by a growing federal involvement in environmental matters, beginning with legislation to purchase and preserve open land, and moving toward regulation to stem air and water pollution and maintain ecological balance, as a reaction to the adverse impacts of industrial development.¹⁷ The 1960 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) required environmental impact statements (EIS) for major projects involving federal agencies, and opportunities for public review and comment. This gave communities and activists a new tool for scrutinizing land use projects and contesting those they deemed harmful.¹⁸ [End Page 307]

The landslide 1980 election of Ronald Reagan ushered in an organized backlash to the expansive federal role in resource protection and public land management, led by grassroots groups from the West. These groups couched arguments either in terms of states' rights, the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion, or "wise use"—as opposed to preservation—of natural resources. The Wise Use doctrine, espoused by Reagan's Interior secretary, James Watt, and formally articulated in the late 1980s to counter environmentalism, promoted commercialization of resources on public land and resisted regulation of private land. While the rhetoric of Wise Use may have echoed some aspects of the early conservationists' measured approach to managing natural resources, the movement in practice held to a hard line on the primacy of commodification of public land.¹⁹ The Reagan administration policies roused environmental groups and spurred them to bridge their individual differences and mobilize collectively. "Its anti-environmental views were expressed with enormous clarity," wrote environmental historian Samuel P. Hays.²⁰

Another influence on environmentalism was the rapid pace of postwar suburbanization in the United States. Adam Rome argued that antipathy toward the consumption of open land by myriad subdivisions of mass-produced tract housing and the water pollution resulting from their poorly drained septic systems has been a driving force behind the environmental movement.²¹ Conversely, Christopher C. Sellers traced the origins of environmentalism to suburbanites, especially those in leafy, affluent enclaves on the exurban fringe, who whetted their appreciation of nature with their own trees, critters, and lawns.²²

The whole cloth of Del-AWARE Unlimited was woven from these threads. Its membership most often white, well educated, and middle class or better, while diverse in age, occupation, political ideology, and geography, the nonprofit environmental group for close to a decade held to a draw the combined forces of the Philadelphia Electric Company and government at all levels. The organization invoked the imagery of the American Revolution, viewing its mission to stop the pump as democracy in action. As described in its 1985 Action Plan:

It is a contest between two radically divergent views of the nature of humankind's role and responsibilities as steward of the environment. It has also become a contest in the continuing struggle to secure for the people of our communities the essential rights of citizens in a democracy. [End Page 308]

At issue are important political questions about the future of the communities of the region and all who live here: questions of land use and development, resource management, taxes and our economy. At issue also is the vital question of who will govern here—the people, or a handful of special interests and profiteers.²³

Del-AWARE's rise, internal friction, and fall illustrate both the contradictions inherent in staging political protest in the Age of Reagan and the growing pains of an evolutionary environmentalism forced to take into account not only the dynamic of constant change and diminution of the natural landscape, but also the shifting political winds that swirl around the design, approval, funding, permit issuance, regulation, and, sometimes, adjudication of large-scale, long-term environmental projects.

delaware, the river

In Bucks County, a northern suburb of Philadelphia, geography and geology have shaped developmental destiny, with no natural feature more significant in this process than the Delaware River, the longest undammed river east of the Mississippi.²⁴ Although Del-AWARE participants had varied and sometimes multiple motives for their actions—antinuclear, antidevelopment, or natural-resource protection being the most common—they spoke with one voice of their affection for their river. As Del-AWARE activist McNutt put it, "You have to understand the value of the river and this place before you understand why it's so important to protect it."²⁵

The Delaware marks Bucks County's southern and eastern borders, flowing east from Bensalem Township in the south, then turning north en route to Durham Township at the Northampton County line. From the earliest days, the river has been a mainstay of community life, first as transportation artery and food source, and later as source of water power and scenic treasure. The Lenni Lenape Indians, farmers and hunter-gatherers who originally populated the land, built their villages and conducted many of their daily activities along the Delaware and the creeks that fed it.²⁶ The earliest European settlers, a mix of Swedes, Dutch, and English, often made their living as trappers and traders, and likewise clustered near water. "The Lenape's pantheistic religion included a special reverence for natural phenomena; in many ways the Indians represented the first ecologists of the region," asserted [End Page 309] the Delaware River Corridor Study issued by the Bucks County Planning Commission in July 1982, nearly contemporaneously with the height of the pump controversy. "Later Bucks County settlers often shared the sentiments of the explorer Henry Hudson, who remarked of the Delaware, 'one of the best, finest, and pleasantest rivers of the world,'" the study continued.²⁷ Every year, on Christmas Day, a group of Revolutionary War re-enactors gather in Washington Crossing and, weather permitting, board Durham boats to replicate George Washington's perilous Delaware River crossing to mount a surprise raid on the British encampment in Trenton.

To Del-AWARE's activists, and to other residents of the region in the 1980s, the river remained a defining element of the landscape and a prime source of beauty, recreation, and tranquility in their lives, as it had been for generations of river dwellers. But in contrast to their predecessors, they had a philosophy they could name to describe their attraction to the river and their determination to protect it: environmentalism.

Bucks County today comprises three distinct regions—southern, central, and northern—known to residents as Lower, Central, and Upper Bucks, respectively. The regions have been affected to varying degrees by two key trends of modern development: industrialization and suburbanization. A countywide history produced in 1995, six years after completion of the pumping system, found Lower Bucks to have the largest share of all forms of development, Upper Bucks to be largely undeveloped and agricultural, and central Bucks, "caught between the two," to be in the throes of the suburbanization experienced earlier in Lower Bucks.²⁸ The spot flooding and the demand for water spawned by growing suburbanization prompted Bucks County to assemble a smaller-bore version of the pump system in the early 1960s.

Much of the riverfront in Lower Bucks, particularly at the southernmost end, has historically been devoted to industrial use, although there has been recent interest in remediating pollution and reclaiming public access. In the late nineteenth century, textile mills, sawmills, an iron foundry, and numerous manufacturers were located in the riverfront boroughs of the southern end of Lower Bucks. The Rohm & Haas Chemical Company set up operations on a site next to the Delaware River in Bristol Borough in 1917.²⁹ The Merchant Shipbuilding Corporation arrived in 1924.³⁰

The pace of industrialization and development in Lower Bucks spiraled after World War II. US Steel's mammoth Fairless Works rose on 3,900 acres of prime farmland in Falls Township in 1951.³¹ Proximity to markets, raw [End Page 310] materials, and cheap water transportation were among the reasons for the site's selection. To house workers, developers built the county's two largest housing developments. The 5,000-unit Fairless Hills development, started in 1951, covered 1,300 acres within five miles of the Fairless Works. The Levittown community of more than 17,300 mass-produced tract homes was built between 1952 and 1958 on farm fields and woodlands spanning parts of four Lower Bucks municipalities.³² Falls Township recorded a tenfold population increase from 1950 to 1970, growing from 3,540 to 35,850.³³

In Central and Upper Bucks, home to many of Del-AWARE's most ardent supporters, the advent by the 1930s of summer bungalows, built along the Delaware and its tributaries for wealthy vacationers from New Jersey and Philadelphia, hastened the decline of the agricultural economy. In New Hope and neighboring Solebury, in particular, the natural beauty of the river and bargain prices on idle farms during the Depression brought artists, writers, and actors to the area, cementing its earlier reputation as an artist colony. Point Pleasant, the epicenter of the "Dump the Pump" protests, was, and is, an unincorporated historic village with largely rural surroundings. It lies partly in Plumstead Township, in the eastern part of Central Bucks, and partly in Tinicum Township, just to the northeast, in Upper Bucks. Plumstead had a population of about 5,100 as of 1980 and Tinicum, about 3,500, with both experiencing early signs of suburban growth.³⁴ From 1970 to 1980 the share of residential land use rose from 23 percent to 29 percent in Central Bucks, and from 18 percent to 25 percent in Upper Bucks, while the share of farmland and other undeveloped land fell at an even greater rate. (By contrast, the share of residential land in Lower Bucks fell from 32 percent to 30 percent during the same decade.)³⁵

Del-AWARE frequently invoked the specter of water-induced urban sprawl and "greedy developers" in its public pronouncements and its literature. "Bucks County Becomes Northeast Philadelphia!! Commissioners' Water Plan Pushes Development, Traffic, and Taxes," shrieked the headline of a newspaper advertisement drafted by Del-AWARE to spur turnout for the public hearing on the project by the US Army Corps of Engineers.³⁶ "Rampant development will follow the new water, costly sewage treatment plants will be needed and a new city of Bucks will replace the rural character of the county," Val Sigstedt, Del-AWARE's founding chairman, testified during the five-hour public hearing held September 15, 1981, at the Bucks County Community College auditorium and attended by more than 700, with 200 others watching on closed-circuit television in the lobby outside.³⁷ [End Page 311] Essential for the project to advance was an Army Corps permit to authorize construction activities in the Delaware River.

del-aware, the organization

Del-AWARE's founders point out that the membership came from "everywhere."³⁸ Articles in the local newspapers and a membership profile from 1981 suggest a concentration of members, particularly activists, in rural or suburban Central and Upper Bucks communities on or near the river: New Hope, where Del-AWARE held meetings in the back room of a bookshop, Solebury, Lumberville, Doylestown, and Point Pleasant.³⁹ That did not stop Del-AWARE from leafleting and circulating petitions throughout the county in a drive to publicize its cause and collect signatures calling for a referendum on the pump, or from organizing chapters in neighboring Montgomery County. "We went to Lower Bucks because that's where the people were," said Chuck Yarmark, the Del-AWARE president in the late 1980s.⁴⁰

More than a generation has elapsed since Del-AWARE stalwarts and sympathizers stood at the barricades circling the pumping station construction site and facing down state troopers and the county sheriff. What emerges from interviews with participants, from the documentary record now available, and from secondary sources is a portrait of a well-organized, well-financed operation with strong indigenous roots, participatory, and with diffuse and sometimes fractious leadership.⁴¹ Sigstedt, the stained-glass artist from Point Pleasant who founded Del-AWARE in 1980, intended for it to be a grassroots group with a strong base of local support. "It is an enormously sophisticated community, these water towns. So we didn't want to intrude on that," he said.⁴² "Debates went on forever. We were so deeply invested emotionally: it's hard to create a razor-sharp agenda and hold to it when emotions are so deep," recalled Yarmark.⁴³

Del-AWARE became a cause, rather than an organization, and its members formed bonds of community that have endured for years. "It was just like a supernova that burst and sent fragments all over. You can't go through something like that and not be affected for the rest of your life," said Bill Collins, who edited Citizens Voice, the newspaper published by Del-AWARE. Citizens Voice, fat with advertising from local businesses, bore a logo of George Washington crossing the Delaware on its masthead, along with the legend, "Dedicated to The Land of The Delaware: America's River." [End Page 312]

The organization's commitment to nonviolent direct action was also a signature trait. The Global Nonviolent Action Database maintained by Swarthmore College chronicled Del-AWARE's activities in detail:

Protests and acts of civil disobedience continued well into the late 1980s. Del-AWARE and supporters consistently occupied construction sites, often with hundreds of people on hand. Sit-ins at the Bucks and Montgomery County courthouses and on site disrupted operations, and a four-year legal battle between Del-AWARE lawyers and pipeline developers slowed down construction, frequently halting operations until PE [Philadelphia Electric] lawyers managed to have them overturned. Volunteers worked in shifts to constantly monitor the construction process, carefully looking out for the most minor of building code violations that could be brought to court and further slow the project's progression.⁴⁴

When Del-AWARE held demonstrations, marshals from within the group were tasked with ensuring safety and preventing violence.⁴⁵ It had silent partners, affluent long-time residents who quietly wrote substantial checks, as well as public activists.⁴⁶ Its core membership generally came to Del-AWARE through one of two threads (or sometimes both): antinuclear politics and environmentalism, although the strand of river-oriented environmentalism, so embedded in the local experience, usually was in the forefront. "What holds us together is that we are shamelessly, fearlessly, in love with the river," Sigstedt told an early protest meeting sponsored by the group.⁴⁷

In retrospect, Del-AWARE's leaders regard the organization as diverse and representative. Still, some generalizations are possible. Prominent among the activists were younger people in their twenties and thirties equipped with stamina and greater freedom from work and family obligations that would get in the way of meetings at night and days on the barricades. There was a sense of urgency to their efforts. "We were a lot of thirty-somethings," recalled Collins when asked about Del-AWARE's origins.

The economy was dead in the water. It was the confluence of circumstances and events. If everybody were busy, I don't know if we'd even have had the people power for the whole thing. … Ronald Reagan was president, there were clones of him in every department. … You had to stand up and stop things, you couldn't just stop it with words.⁴⁸ [End Page 313]

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Figure 6.

"Colleen Wells, Del-AWARE's president, and Abbie Hoffman, consultant to the group." Photographed January 10, 1983, by Brad Bower. From the Philadelphia Inquirer, January 11, 1983, Main Edition, page 8. Courtesy of Philadelphia Inquirer Archives, Temple University Library, Special Collections Research Center.

Women, who opposed building the pump by a margin of five to one, compared to a margin of two to one for men,⁴⁹ were in the forefront of DelAWARE's activism. Tracy Carluccio headed the Neshaminy Water Resources Authority (NWRA, the county-affiliated agency charged with financing and building most of the pumping system) in its antipump days, almost certainly the first woman to serve in that capacity, and one of the first on its board. Colleen Wells, a charismatic artist then in her mid-twenties, became Del-AWARE's president at the height of the pump controversy, and later assisted in legal proceedings. Patricia Walsh, a Del-AWARE founder, is credited with forging consensus among the often-contentious men who formed the rest of the group's early core.⁵⁰ On "Ladies Day" in Doylestown, women donned skirts or dresses, pushed tots in strollers, and clogged the streets and sidewalks of the county seat to protest the pump. "Some of them were grandmothers and some of them were nursing mothers, and they were in there all weekend in one of those cells," recalled poet and environmentalist Carolyn Foote Edelmann, speaking of other Del-AWARE activists who [End Page 314] served time in jail because of their antipump activities. "And those women were so brave."⁵¹

Del-AWARE designed many of its actions to influence public opinion, public policy, and political leadership. Its membership crossed party lines. Early on, the group brought in Mitch Bunkin, a political science professor from Bucks County Community College and a Republican committeeman in Tinicum Township, near the site of the pumping station, to chair the political action committee. Mike Krauss, formerly executive director of the state Republican committee, served on Del-AWARE's board of directors. Robert Sugarman, who during the Carter administration had chaired the US section of the International Joint Commission, the binational agency that deals with US–Canadian water resources issues and resolves boundary water disputes, became Del-AWARE's legal counsel.

After some discussion, the group hired Abbie Hoffman at a token sum, plus expenses, to bring a higher profile to the cause, along with skills in political theater honed by years in the trenches of radical protest. Sugarman was the intermediary who invited Hoffman to join Del-AWARE. "I thought, 'that's going to kill us in Bucks County.' But we thought, 'What good is demonstrating going to do if we don't get any coverage from the local media?' It was a calculated risk," Del-AWARE spokesman Rich Myers told the local press in explaining the decision to hire Hoffman.⁵² He had been living in New York State under an alias while campaigning to close the St. Lawrence River to winter shipping, before turning himself in on long-pending drug possession charges and serving several months of a one-year prison sentence.⁵³ Biographer Marty Jezer cited Hoffman friend and press aide Albert Giordano to explain that the activist's appeal in Bucks County did not break down along liberal/conservative or Democratic/Republican lines, but rather "between the people with personality and the people who wanted a rigid program."⁵⁴ A public opinion survey taken in January 1983, however, found that 42 percent of citizens thought hiring Hoffman was a bad idea, 38 percent thought it was a good idea, and 14 percent did not know who he was. The same survey found that if a vote on the pump were held immediately, 54 percent of citizens would vote against it, 18 percent for it, and 28 percent would be undecided.⁵⁵

The group worked heavily within the system, forcing a referendum and playing a key role in electing a state representative, a congressman, and two county commissioners who opposed the pump. In retrospect, reliance on the promises and efforts of elected officials, rather than Del-AWARE's own energies, to carry forward its agenda of quashing the pump project may have [End Page 315] been a mistake. Some of the organization's leaders ultimately felt betrayed by the politicians they had trusted.⁵⁶

By the mid-1980s, as prospects of stopping the pump dimmed, DelAWARE experienced internal friction and frequent rotation of leadership positions. The original executive director, Tracy Carluccio, had left to take the post of executive secretary at the NWRA, the county agency charged with funding and building the pumping system, when the newly elected county commissioners stacked the agency's board with antipump appointees as part of a strategy to thwart the project. Dissent arose as to the organizational structure, which had been remodeled along corporate lines, and Sigstedt and Collins left to form a new organization with a stronger antinuclear orientation.⁵⁷

Collins likened the project Del-AWARE fought to a Rube Goldberg contraption, that is, a complicated mechanical means of achieving a certain result. "You're basically building a bad plumbing system," he said.⁵⁸ He and others categorized it as an example of the "Western" or "industrialized" approach to water-supply management, entailing the diversion and transmission of large quantities of water from their natural channels through mechanical means. A smaller-scale system consisting of a pump at Point Pleasant and a distribution pump in Yardley, at the other end of Bucks County, had first been designed in the early 1960s to take Delaware River water and send it to parts of the county that faced shortages. By the mid-1960s the county had drawn up plans for building several small dams for flood control within the watershed of Neshaminy Creek, a Delaware tributary, and formed the NWRA to oversee both projects. In the meantime, Philadelphia Electric had formulated plans for the Limerick nuclear power plant. The Delaware River Basin Commission, the tri-state agency regulating withdrawal of water from the river, encouraged the utility company to approach Bucks County with its need for backup cooling water for its proposed second reactor, rather than to apply solo for a withdrawal permit. The electric company planned to obtain most of its cooling water from the Schuylkill River, but needed another source in case of low flow or drought.⁵⁹

James Greenwood, then a freshman Republican state representative elected with Del-AWARE's support, in testimony at the 1981 Army Corps permit hearing called the pumping system "a project planned in one decade, designed in another and then driven as a juggernaut into the next, despite a radically different set of circumstances, priorities and public sentiment." He continued, "I suggest that the project under review perpetuates outdated [End Page 316] population projections and outmoded land and water use planning concepts and is therefore obsolete."⁶⁰ It was approved and completed in a time in which the environmental sensibilities and public policy outlook at the grassroots in Bucks County were at odds with those at the national and state levels, where, thanks to policy and regulatory changes during the 1960s and 1970s, the permit review and issuance processes for major projects had been vested.

the governor and the pump

Once the county's chief judge ruled in early 1985 that the signed project contract was legally binding, and that decision was upheld by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, Del-AWARE's only recourse lay in attacking the regulatory process, including environmental review and permitting, which it did. The newly antipump Bucks County government lent support to dismantling the project, even going so far as to pack the NWRA with appointees committed to stop it, including a former Del-AWARE executive director. The activists' last-ditch hope was that Governor Casey would withdraw two required environmental permits under preparation by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources (DER). In 1986 Casey had campaigned in opposition to the pump, saying he would order a review of the permits needed to certify compliance with the US Clean Water Act and the Pennsylvania Clean Streams Act.⁶¹ The antipump majority on the Bucks County Board of Commissioners had joined Del-AWARE in seeking withdrawal of the permits. In a letter to Casey, they wrote:

The focus of public debate now shifts from the court to the Department of Environmental Resources. The court's decision was limited solely to issues of contract law. The court did not have the responsibility to decide, nor did the court purport to decide, the issue of public policy. Is the water supply system in the public interest? Is it environmentally sound? Is it the least intrusive means of meeting the foreseeable water needs of the region? These issues are within the DER's jurisdiction and it is these issues which must now be faced.⁶²

Casey, through his nominee for DER secretary, Arthur A. Davis, ordered a study of the two permits, to be conducted by an outside consultant and scheduled for completion in late 1987. [End Page 317]

In the meantime, Commonwealth Court in mid-1987 upheld a back-to-work order authorizing the resumption of construction, stalled since 1984 in the face of multiple legal challenges and opposition by Bucks County government. This triggered a new round of protests, blockades, and arrests in Point Pleasant that summer. Del-AWARE called it "Democracy Summer." Abbie Hoffman had left Del-AWARE three years earlier in a spat he claimed was about the grassroots group's failure to provide the money it had promised for a fundraiser staged at a New York nightclub. He rejoined the group and once more lent his very public profile to the protests, chaining himself to a fence at the Point Pleasant construction site on his first day back on the job.⁶³ In the November 1987 election, pro-pump Republicans regained their majority on the board of commissioners and President Judge Garb survived a contested retention election by a comfortable margin.

It was nearly all over except for Governor Casey's decision on the water-quality permits, said to hinge on the findings of the consultant hired for an independent review of the record. The consultant, Henry Caulfield, a politically savvy retired professor from Colorado State University, had extensive experience in water-resource management and natural-resource legislation. A native Californian who had served as a high-ranking official in the US Department of the Interior under two Democratic presidents, Kennedy and Johnson, he was viewed by Del-AWARE as a "western water guy."⁶⁴ Casey did not publicly articulate the reason for his selection, other than Caulfield's apparent professional credentials. Del-AWARE had pinned its hopes on the governor's response, based on Caulfield's findings. DER delayed the decision on the permits into early 1988, ostensibly to give them time to review the consultant's report. Both Casey and Caulfield dashed Del-AWARE's expectation that the pumping system would be shut down. Caulfield's report found no environmental obstacles to building out the pumping system but did suggest that the middle stretch of the Delaware be designated as a "Wild and Scenic River," under the federal resource-protection program of the same name (the upper Delaware had already been so designated), and that the designation should carve out an exemption for the portion occupied by the Point Pleasant pumping station. The recommendation ratified years of efforts by Del-AWARE and its allies to secure protective designation for the river. In 1990 a House subcommittee finally held a hearing on the Wild and Scenic River designation for the middle stretch of the Delaware, recommended by Caulfield and fought for by DelAWARE. Bucks County Commissioner Andrew L. Warren, in a statement [End Page 318] seeking to exempt from designation the riverfront ground occupied by the pump, wrote:

Since 1970 the project has been the subject of not less than fourteen lawsuits before the Common Pleas Courts of Bucks County, the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania and various other regulatory agencies in Pennsylvania. … Bucks County's only ability to obtain reimbursement for the expenditures that have been made depends upon the continuing existence of the Point Pleasant Pumping Station and related facilities.⁶⁵

Del-AWARE partisans speculatively attributed their disappointment in Casey to the powerful influence of Philadelphia Electric, real estate interests, or others who stood to gain from the project, or to Casey's health problems at the time.⁶⁶ "We got out-moneyed and out-muscled. We were politically naïve," Sigstedt said.⁶⁷ Warren stated of Casey's decision, "I have always believed that he felt, 'This is not an issue I want to get involved personally with … and I don't want to make the decision to stop it.'"⁶⁸ A 1987 news report on the DER order to suspend work on the pump pending completion of permit review had concluded with this observation: "Mr. Casey, who has made growth and economic development the principal goals of his administration, has been under pressure from business groups to allow the project to proceed."⁶⁹

Documents in Governor Casey's file on the pumping station indeed bear out the hypothesis that economic development interests and corporate lobbying outweighed any intention the first-term governor may have had of thwarting the pumping station. The file contents also suggest that the 1987 news report understated the extent of the pressure, and its sources, the most potent of which centered in neighboring Montgomery County. It includes: a letter from state legal staff advising the best way to keep the pump permit options open; an economic development analysis attributed to the North Penn Water Authority in Montgomery County stating that failure to build the pump would cost 9,000 jobs and $766 million in lost revenue related to residential construction; and a letter from a vice-president of the pharmaceutical firm of Merck Sharp & Dohme (today the largest employer in Montgomery County) expressing the need for water from the Point Pleasant project to enable corporate expansion and containing a veiled threat to relocate if adequate water was not readily available.⁷⁰ Casey's file also contains a [End Page 319] memo on the "pump issue" written just after DER extended certain project permits pending completion of the consultant's review. The memo, written by a press aide, transmitted news stories on the DER ruling from the June 28, 1987, issue of the Bucks County Courier Times, and concluded with the line, "From my reading of the stories, the integrity of the Governor remains intact." It bears the name of state "Senator [H. Craig] Lewis" handwritten in the top right corner. Lewis, a Democrat, represented the 6th District, which then encompassed the Montgomery County seat and many populous and suburban Montgomery municipalities.⁷¹

The cost of the pumping system, estimated early on at $47 million, had climbed in the face of design changes and opposition since first proposed. A 1987 court hearing on a back-to-work order sought by Philadelphia Electric and the two Montgomery County water authorities, North Penn and North Wales, placed the total project cost at $115 million. This included $55 million for Bucks County's share, and $60 million for the portion to be built by the electric company.⁷² At the time of Bucks County's sale of the pump to the two water authorities in 1994, the price of the transaction was $53.6 million.⁷³

the pump in perspective: other projects, other times

Del-AWARE's long and ultimately lost battle to halt the diversion of Delaware River water was a populist political movement unprecedented in the modern history of Bucks County. Within the first half of its life span, it had mustered the organizational, strategic, and financial muscle enabling it to win a convolutedly worded referendum, and realigned county politics by seating an antipump state representative, congressman, and Democratic majority on the county board of commissioners. It relentlessly pursued litigation directed at achieving its primary goal of stopping construction of the pumping station. How was this exemplary organization of citizen-activists defeated, at least in regard to achieving its avowed end? The answers lie in a number of factors, most rooted in national-level, sometimes intersecting, trends in politics and environmentalism. The pump project had first been designed in the 1960s. Many local political activists were "beaten before they started," argued Foley in his work on political activism in the 1970s and 1980s:

The accidental activists who mobilized around front porch issues often could not overcome the larger structural forces at work in the [End Page 320] nation's political economy: campaigns to save jobs, farms, and homes usually came up short, not because they were defeated by organized opposition but because they could not hold back the tide of capital, aided by Republicans and Democrats … chasing low-cost labor around the world, importing cheap agricultural products, and fueling suburbanization or urban gentrification.⁷⁴

Del-AWARE's political defeats at the local level in 1987, in the commissioners' election and the judicial retention election, sent a message that the organization was vulnerable and suggested that county voters had tired of the turmoil.

There was also the issue of "Western water." Del-AWARE activists maintain that if Jimmy Carter had been successful in his bid for re-election in 1980, he would have quashed the Point Pleasant Pump on federal permit grounds.⁷⁵ As governor of Georgia, Carter had halted construction of the Sewell Bluff Dam in 1973, citing the value of "irreplaceable natural resources."⁷⁶ Campaigning for Carter in Bucks County in 1980, Douglas M. Costle, the administrator of the federal Environmental Protection Agency, said his agency viewed as outdated the environmental impact statement (EIS) prepared for the project by the Delaware River Basin Commission. He noted also that his agency held veto power over federal permits for dredging the Delaware, required for the pumping station.⁷⁷ Del-AWARE had sought preparation of a new EIS for the expanded project.

In 1962, Congress passed flood-control legislation that included provisions for a huge flood-control dam on the Delaware River in New Jersey at Tocks Island, six miles upriver from the Delaware Water Gap.⁷⁸ A consortium of private power companies would have produced hydroelectric power from the dam's waters. A coalition of environmental organizations and community groups formed and eventually grew strong enough to influence both federal and local officials. In 1970 federal officials produced an EIS that dealt openly with the dangers of pollution and the problem of mud flats posed by the dam. The coalition issued a report that recommended that the river remain free-flowing, but that a national park component of the plan be downsized and retained. In July 1975 the governors of New York, New Jersey and Delaware voted to deny future funding for the dam, with the governor of Pennsylvania the sole holdout. Peter Kostmayer, then a freshman Democratic congressman from Bucks County, introduced legislation to designate that stretch of the upper Delaware a Wild and [End Page 321] Scenic River, which, when enacted in 1978, effectively blocked construction of the dam.

"The story of the rise and fall of the Tocks Island project mirrors the times in which it occurred," wrote New Jersey historian Frank Dale.⁷⁹ In this case, the desire for a dam after a hurricane-driven flood in 1955 reflected a resource-management orientation that was tempered first by the rise of environmentalism and skepticism of large-scale engineering projects, and then by the high costs of the Vietnam War. Del-AWARE's McNutt, who had also fought the construction of Tocks Island, recalled that Kostmayer killed the appropriation for the dam because its cost would have far exceeded the costs of storm damage, which had occurred primarily on the Lehigh River.⁸⁰ He and other veterans of the Tocks Island effort were among those who went on to spearhead Del-AWARE and still can be found in environmental leadership roles throughout the region.

In the south, another community environmental coalition mobilized to fight a massive waterway that would cut through Mississippi and Alabama to provide a navigational shortcut from the mid-Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico by linking two rivers–the north-flowing Tennessee and the south-flowing Tombigbee. As noted in Jeffrey K. Stine's account of the struggle over the "Tenn-Tom" project, the southern environmental coalition, like DelAWARE, acted politically, litigated extensively, and achieved a temporary halt to construction, but ultimately failed in its bid to stop the waterway. It lost its final lawsuit in 1983.⁸¹

The Point Pleasant pump began life as part of a water-supply and flood-control system in the 1960s, when such public works projects were routine, and nominally regulated. Its scope broadened to supply cooling water to a nuclear-power electric generation plant as NEPA was taking force, similar to the situation with the Tenn-Tom. The lack of an EIS updated to incorporate changes that had been made to the pump-station project was a cornerstone of Del-AWARE's antipump argument. But unlike the Tenn-Tom project, the pump would be funded through local government and private enterprise. Del-AWARE assembled political capital and financial resources to resist the pumping station at every environmental turn, as well as on public policy and cost rationales. The pump, too, was a product of its time. The Bucks environmentalists made good use of the avenue for public participation provided by NEPA, but their antipump advocacy differed in one critical respect from the efforts surrounding Tocks Island and the Tenn-Tom: timing. Del-AWARE activists began their fight in 1980, nearly fifteen years after [End Page 322] grassroots groups began questioning Tocks Island, and a decade after the struggle over the Tenn-Tom began. The pump proposal gained traction as new attitudes toward how natural resources should be used gripped Washington, DC, and trickled down to Harrisburg, with the doctrines of Wise Use and Western water, and organized pressure from corporate interests at the regional level playing a key role in the outcome of a contest over how, and by whom, the waters of a free-flowing eastern river should be used.

the legacy of the pump in public policy and collective memory

The assessment of the pump's enduring influence on public policy by those interviewed for this study varied along the lines of their historic memory of the times, or along the lines of their political affiliations. Warren, the Republican county commissioner, for example, found that the struggle over the pumping station had coalesced pre-existing environmental consciousness in Bucks County, giving rise to formal initiatives to preserve land and natural resources. "The same people who supported the pump supported farmland and open space preservation," he said.⁸² Jordan Yeager, an environmental lawyer and Democratic Party leader, in high school during the height of the pump battle, viewed the county's open-space and resource-protection programs as a direct outgrowth of citizen mobilization during the 1980s.⁸³ Several sources pointed to themselves and other Del-AWARE activists who continue to play key roles in local or national environmental organizations, or other types of political engagement. Del-AWARE working groups spun off activist and policy organization such as the Delaware Riverkeeper Network and the Peace Center of Bucks County. While Del-AWARE did not attain its goal of dumping the pump in its entirety, its grassroots advocacy, technical skills, and dogged litigation forced construction modifications that promoted land use more sparing of natural resources and helped secure legislative protection for the Delaware River.

Collective memory of Del-AWARE and its activities clearly reflects the social character of this grassroots protest movement. Often, the social context—friendships, marriages, or animosities—persists today. Equally often, the narrators remain involved in environmental or political causes. What is remembered, as expressed through oral histories, has been informed by experiences and events that have occurred after the pump was built and went into operation and [End Page 323] has been infused with the high emotion that nearly all of those interviewed for this article attribute to the battle to prevent the pumping station.

When asked whether they believe historic memory of the pump still exists, the narrators had various impressions. Warren said such collective memory survives only among those who lived through the events but went on to describe the pump struggle as "one of the two or three most impactful times in Bucks County. It involved so many people," he continued. "There were demonstrations that involved generations of people."⁸⁴

Others allowed that community memory would vary according to subjective perception. One former Del-AWARE activist responded to my question with irony: "The pump fight was almost a half-century ago, and you're still thinking about it and asking if there was any lasting impact."⁸⁵ Shaughnessy Naughton, of Point Pleasant, pledged to ban fracking and to protect the Delaware River during an unsuccessful congressional campaign in 2014, noting that she had accompanied her mother to "Dump the Pump" rallies as a child.⁸⁶ "We still talk about it, we're still angry about it," said her mother, Jona, in an interview in 2016. "We were nothing but regular people. They called in the militia."⁸⁷

Another Del-AWARE member said that he thought community memory had dimmed because commemorative articles no longer appeared in the local press.⁸⁸ But if commemorative news reports are one measure of collective memory, the pump is still a living legend. A number of "anniversary" or retrospective stories have appeared since the 1980s. In 2000 a news article in the Morning Call of Allentown asked, "Whatever became of the group Del-AWARE?" The occasion for the inquiry was the release of a film biography of Abbie Hoffman. The newspaper went on to answer its own question: "Although Hoffman's antics in Bucks County to help preserve the Delaware River are left out of 'Steal This Movie!' there are certainly enough people who remember that long after his Yippie years were over, Hoffman was drafted for the 'Save the River' campaign by the environmental group Del-AWARE Unlimited," the article continued, concluding by noting that Del-AWARE dissolved in the early 1990s.⁸⁹

The most recent retrospective found in my research, dated March 2015, was posted on the website of KYW Newsradio 50 in Philadelphia. KYW remembered the pump struggle like this:

The mass demonstrations that followed lasted for years. Both sides were heard as KYW covered marches, blockades, arrests, public [End Page 324] meetings and court hearings. But opinions were cast in stone. Environmentalists who wanted to preserve the pristine nature of the river were joined by anti-nuclear activists, one of whom spent days shouting in protest from the upper branches of a tree. … But in the end, the pump was built and now supplies area drinking water—and Limerick.⁹⁰

An antiques shop in Perkasie, not far from Point Pleasant, as of this writing offered an "exceptionally rare Dump the Pump" protest button at auction on eBay, for a starting bid of $17.95. Another eBay seller had file photos of antipump protests from the Morning Call newspaper.⁹¹

Del-AWARE in its prime drew upon a deep wellspring of collective memory, the American Revolution. Washington Crossing in Bucks County, where the river separates Pennsylvania from New Jersey and General Washington set out for Trenton, rivals Valley Forge as an iconic Revolutionary War site. A Hoffman biographer credits him with brainstorming the linkage of the two struggles, when he bought flags and "Don't Tread on Me" banners in a Washington Crossing gift store for distribution to the troops massed at the pump construction site, then followed up with a spate of publicity statements rich in American Revolutionary overtones.⁹² Del-AWARE made frequent use of the imagery of underdog citizen-activists fighting for representative democracy in their literature, their costumes, and their public protests. It fought not only to quash the pump, but for a Wild and Scenic River designation on the Delaware. Yeager summoned some of this imagery in his explanation of the period's legacy. "Even when an activist movement doesn't succeed in the specific task or the overall mission, it has an inspirational legacy, that people express themselves on matters that are important to their lives," he said. "We know that Washington Crossing is there, and we have a sense that it means something and tells us something about where we live. … The words 'Point Pleasant' still mean something. They mean a great battle was fought here."⁹³

epilogue

As of early 2018 the pump began delivering Delaware River water into a section of the historic Delaware Canal between Point Pleasant and Solebury, under terms of a temporary agreement between the Pennsylvania [End Page 325] Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and the Forest Water Authority, the current pump owner. The manmade waterway, which runs parallel to the river, has been plagued by low water levels and dry spots. "I can't help but note the irony, that the pump that was the center of so much environmental protest in the 1980s is now being used to benefit the environment and the canal," said Allen Black, the president of Delaware Canal 21, a nonprofit organization that seeks to maintain the canal in good condition for public access. In the same news article, Bill Tinsman, a vociferous pump critic in Del-AWARE's heyday, whose family has owned a lumberyard near the canal for generations, called the agreement a "win-win for everybody."⁹⁴