• By BOB ANDERSON
• Advocate Florida parishes bureau
• Published: Oct 25, 2009 - Page: 1B

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PONCHATOULA — Members of a group that fought for years to clean up the Tangipahoa River celebrated success Saturday at the river’s edge.

“I didn’t think we’d ever do it,” said Shirley Welles, 88, who still enjoys kayaking on the river, which had become so polluted in the late 1980s that the state put up warning signs against boating and swimming in the stream.

Members of Citizens for a Clean Tangipahoa, also known as CFACT, gathered Saturday afternoon at Ponchatoula Beach, once a popular swimming spot, in response to the state Department of Environmental Quality’s decision removing the river from its impaired waterbodies list.

Members of CFACT displayed one of the now-weather-beaten state signs that for more than two decades warned people against contact with water in the Tangipahoa, which snakes its way from Mississippi to Lake Pontchartrain.

Cleaning up sewage and runoff from municipalities, individual residences and dairy farms were key factors in improving the water quality, members of the environmental group said. Members recalled sneaking into sewage treatment plants at night and paddling on the river during inclement weather to take water samples as part of their fight to save the river.

After the Girl Scout Council of Southeast Louisiana expressed concern about pollution of the river where the council maintained a camp offering recreational swimming, the state confirmed that the Tangipahoa was unsafe for swimming.

But state officials initially failed to do anything except post warning signs, said Bryan McMahon, CFACT’s first president.

By 1989, a number of local residents “realized that nobody was going to do anything unless we did it,” he said.

McMahon praised the experts who provided their services to the environmental group and to the group’s members who “went out in boats on inhospitable mornings and stormy nights” to take the samples needed to build a case.

The water testing by CFACT members “honed in on who was causing the problem,” he said.

The organization filed a federal lawsuit to force action, said Dwight Williams, also a past-president of CFACT.

The beach where the group gathered Saturday was once a popular spot, but it fell into disuse after the state put up signs warning against swimming, members said.

The nine businesses that had rented canoes and tubes to people for river recreation all shut their doors.