What goes in
The creek →Most people here know what this creek used to carry. The mines and the coke ovens put their waste straight into it for the better part of a century, and getting it back out has taken a good deal longer than putting it in ever did. A fair amount of that work has held. The creek has carried enough oxygen every day for months now to keep fish alive, and it could not always have said that.
One part has not held, and it is an odd one, because it is not about what is in the water. It is about what nobody has written down.
The part that has not held
three businessesThree businesses upstream of these three towns have a permit to put something into Five Mile Creek, and have not filed a report saying what.
The longest of them has gone eleven quarters without sending in the paperwork the permit asks for, and the EPA has marked it every quarter of that time. Not one of them has been fined a dollar over it. This does not mean anything harmful went into the creek. It means that for as long as those reports have been missing, nobody has been in a position to say either way.
How this is meant to work
Plainly putA permit here is the ordinary paperwork that lets a business put something into a waterway. Holding one is not a mark against anybody. There are a good many of them in force along this creek, and most belong to car washes, truck yards, and quarries going quietly about their business. The permit is the part that makes a discharge legal, limited, and countable.
The counting is the whole point of it. Every permit holder has to measure what goes into the water and send those numbers to the state on a schedule. That report is called a discharge monitoring report. It is how anybody at all knows whether a limit is being kept, and it is the only reason a page like this one can exist.
So a report that never arrives is worth as much attention as a number over the line, and it may be worth more. A business that reports going over its limit has at least told everybody it went over. A business that files nothing has told nobody anything, and the creek below it is the same creek either way.
It is also worth checking back for the plain reason that the list changes. New permits get issued as new things get built upstream, and this page reads the EPA twice a day, so a new name shows up here about as soon as it shows up anywhere.
What the EPA says about the creek
2022 reporting cycleThat is the wording the EPA uses for Fivemile Creek. A restoration plan being on the books means somebody has set a cleanup target for this water, not that the work is finished. The four lines below are the uses the EPA measures a creek against, and what it found for this one. Read the EPA report on this waterbody.
What the water measures
USGS gauge near RepublicOxygen depletion is one of the things the creek is listed as impaired for, so the daily low is the number that matters rather than the daily average: a creek can average comfortably and still run low before dawn. Across 90 days from July 18, 2026 to October 15, 2026, the lowest the creek got was 5.7 mg/l, on September 6, 2026. Conductance is a rough measure of how much dissolved material the water is carrying.
Everyone who holds a permit
50 permits in force · 7 in noncompliance a year or more · 77 terminatedHere is the whole list, sorted so that the records worth a second look come first. The last column counts how many of the last twelve quarters the EPA marked that permit as being out of compliance. A zero is the ordinary case and most of this list is zeros. Every name links to that business's own page on the EPA site, so you can check anything here against the source in one click.
Where this comes from The permits, the inspection dates, the penalties, and the compliance quarters all come from the EPA Enforcement and Compliance History Online database, which this site reads twice a day. The impairment finding and the designated uses are the EPA's own words, and the link beside them goes to the EPA page they are quoted from. Oxygen and conductance are measured every fifteen minutes by the USGS gauge 02457595 near Republic. Five Mile Creek is made up of two hydrologic units, Upper and Lower Fivemile Creek, and a business appears here when the EPA places it in one of them or names this creek as the water it discharges to. What town a business sits in is deliberately not used, because a business in one of these three towns may well discharge somewhere else entirely, and saying otherwise would be putting words in the EPA's mouth. Nothing on this page describes or judges any business. It sets down what the EPA published and links to it. If a figure here looks wrong to you, the link next to it is the place to go and check, and if it is wrong we would rather hear about it than not.