Morning Call: April 11, 2003

With trout season starting Saturday, some Palmer Township residents want to remind people who fish: Obey the danger signs along parts of the Bushkill and Little Bushkill creeks or you literally may be in over your head.

Sinkholes continue to open and shift in and near the waterways along the Palmer-Stockertown-Tatamy borders.

"Sinkholes in this limestone area are a fact of life, but not in a streambed," said Tony Ramunni whose property line on Mariska Lane abuts Bushkill Creek.

"Somebody's walking along and steps off into a big hole, what do you do when your waders fill with water? If you're a kid, I don't know."

Residents say the Bushkill's known sinkhole problem, which straddles private land, stretches from the Main Street bridge in Tatamy to the Route 191 bridge in Stockertown. The Little Bushkill's known sinkholes run upstream from the mouth of the Bushkill to the Sullivan Trail bridge in Stockertown.

"Where the Little Bushkill comes in, we don't know how far up they go because the creek doesn't run dry [in the summer]," Ramunni said.

According to Tatamy Road resident Linda Iudicello, the state Fish & Boat Commission stopped stocking this area since the sinkholes were discovered in and near the streams in October 2000, after part of the Bushkill bridge collapsed. (The bridge remains closed.)

Although no one camps along the bed the night before trout season's opening day, Iudicello said, the lack of stocked trout has not stopped fishermen from ignoring -- and in some cases ripping down -- danger signs posted by residents.

"We get some beautiful brown trout that migrate up here," Iudicello said. "We've had people from New Jersey and New York come down and they get in the water where it's not posted, and we've had people come in and take the signs down. It's very few, but it takes only one to get hurt."

Daniel B. Tredinnick, a Fish & Boat Commission spokesman, said the 20-mile Bushkill Creek is stocked at three locations from just below the headwaters, the base of the Kittatinny Mountain to the Delaware River.

Ramunni, who has become an amateur expert on sinkholes, pointed Thursday to dark, shadowy sections of the fast-moving, cold creek -- some as small as a man's boot, others as wide as a small sedan -- where he says the known sinkholes are.

Here the water is a darker green, and the locations seem to correspond with photographs he took last September when the creekbed was dry. The photos show deep holes in the rocky bed, some of which appear to be earthen indentations a few feet deep, others that look bottomless.

"Right now you can't see a lot of them," Iudicello said. "A lot of them we don't know how deep they are, but some of them are big enough to swallow a man, let alone a child."

Don Lerch, assistant district engineer for design at the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, said construction bids for the crumbling bridge will be announced later this year, with construction beginning sometime in 2004.

For now, sinkholes form in fields along the bridge and in the stream below.

"This creek used to be an asset," Iudicello said. "Now it's just scary."

Steve Esack