Building on the Success of the Clean Water Act

Chuck Mower has been guiding canoe trips on the Merrimack for decades. (Jon Greenberg, NHPR)

The boat launch in Merrimack is only about a hundred and fifty yards from Chuck Mower’s house. Early one morning, Chuck took me, producer Sam Evans Brown and about 2 thousand dollars worth of recording equipment for a paddle in his canoe down the river.

CUT 1007
(0:45) [Sounds of putting the canoe in the water]

As Chuck lowered his bulk into the stern and we moved all of two feet from the shore, I had an immediate and profound concern for that equipment.

CUT (0:30) J:Chuck, this is not feeling stable!

The canoe twisted under us like a wet toothpick but Chuck kept us upright. He used to lead canoe trips for the Merrimack River Watershed Council . His tour guide patter had a 19th century ring to it.

CUT Chuck talk 1022 ??

It WAS a beautiful morning and like so many other people who enjoy the river, we enjoyed drifting along, looking at the woods and watching for wildlife.

Canoe rigged to tape during a paddle - a good reason not to capsize. (Jon Greenberg, NHPR)

The trees provide a wonderful sense of isolation on the river. (Jon Greenberg, NHPR)

PADDLING SOUNDS

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(1:01, 1:19, 1:28, 1:33) [Osprey screams]

Chuck’s about 60 and he grew up in the house he lives in today. So he remembers as a kid when the river wasn’t pretty at all.

CUT The river itself seemed thick and slimy green, there were great cakes of material covering everything that was sticking out.

Then came the Clean Water Act and the cities and factories stopped dumping raw waste. The improvement wasn’t overnight but it almost seemed that way to Chuck.

CUT The MER, unlike the CON is a hard-bottomed and fast-moving river, so when the discharges stopped it quickly flushed itself. River grasses almost immediately reestablished themselves,

Chuck said it was great to be able to see the river bottom again. The river’s cleaner look has inspired some people to make it look really clean. A lingering eyesore for the river is plain ordinary trash – especially downstream. One group is tackling that problem with extraordinary gusto.

SFX CRP “Voice: Excuse me, how do I get (unintelliglble)?/ Take our umbrella // more sound

The Clean Water Project's sign. CRP founder Rocky Morrison built the flagship pontoon boat himself. (Jon Greenberg, NHPR)

On a Saturday in Lawrence, Massachusetts, a flotilla of pontoon boats and dinghies gets ready to shove off. One workhorse of a boat is emblazoned with a large sign – the Clean River Project. The man at the helm, Rocky Morrison, heads out with a battle cry of “let’s go clean something”

CUT CR 1 "lets go clean somethin!"; Motor starts up

Twice a year, this group uses winches and chains to pull up the biggest items. To date, they’ve removed 15 cars and 4 safes. The focus today is on smaller fare, plastic bottles and assorted flotsam. We pull up to the bank. Kids, teenagers and grownups hop out with trash bags and start gathering.

CUT general gathering sound

This is definitely the sort of activity that parents call character building.

CUT All right guys, let’s head this way/Don’t just stand there/ Ooh, ugh, Is this a pair of pants?

Before Rocky started the Clean River Project, he was not a particularly civic minded person. He was busy running his building company in Salem. He wasn’t a joiner, he didn’t volunteer. But he did spend a lot of time on this part of the river and a few years ago, the parade of river trash got to him.

CUT You would see every 15 feet a piece of lawn furniture, mattresses, you’ll see a couch float by. It got to the point that we said, enough’s enough. ‘Cause no one was taking action .

Rocky organized his first clean up day using an incentive straight out of Mary Poppins. He turned it into a game.

Surveying the trash pulled from the river. (Jon Greenberg, NHPR)

CUT ROCKY I got all the boaters on the river to do a scavenger hunt and everything was done by points. Tires were 15. Barrels were 20. We didn’t forget anything. The only surprise was the ATM machine. That was a surprise.

That’s right. One guy found an ATM machine. With no cash but good for bragging rights and extra points. Rocky says one of the best rewards for him is that people keep coming back for more clean up days, even when there aren’t any points or prizes.

CUT Rocky: I have a good friend of mine who’s never been out on the river before and I brought him out here and the river was low and we started pickin’ up papers and plastic and stuff. And he says to himself, what am I doin’ here, and I found that he kept callin’ me every week to come out here. He said it was like counseling to him to come out here and just donate and just pick up and it was nice and quiet and he enjoyed it. And after a while you get hooked on it.

At the end of the morning, a mound of trash bags, a bicycle wheel, a white and orange roadside warning barrel, and a mattress covered the deck of Rocky’s boat. It was tangible booty – only valuable because it was no longer in the river.

Trash is bad, but at least you can see it and do something about it yourself. Two of the major threats to the Merrimack are practically invisible and can’t be solved by volunteer efforts. Storm water runoff and old sewer pipes.

An outfall in Concord with significant algal bloom, a sign of excess nutrients. (Jon Greenberg, NHPR)

SFX Let’s head upriver

Steve Landry is a state Merrimack watershed supervisor. He’s a biologist and whenever he can, he gets in a canoe and tries to spot illicit outfalls, pipes that dump something into the water that they shouldn’t.

It’s a kind of detective work done with GPS locator and sampling bottles. Steve takes us to check on pipes that empty into the Merrimack in the middle of Concord.

CUT There’s a big indentation/ do we go up as far as we can?// Yes. Yes, you can see the outfall up ahead. It’s a corrugated metal pipe way up here.

We slosh up the stream bed.

CUT: S: the flow here is very significant. Steady flow; this channel is chock full of sediment. And there’s abundant algae so we obviously have a pretty significant source of nutrients coming off the land or from this outfall.

There are places on the river where, at times of the year, the oxygen levels in the water fall below what they need to be. Excess nutrients might be the culprit. But Steve’s focus today is the e coli bacteria.

SFX --more sloshing

We slosh a little further until we reach a pipe about 3 feet in diameter. Steve catches some of the water in a sample bottle and packs it into an ice cooler. Over the years, he has done this about 400 times at other spots on the river. Steve approaches each one with a hope that might strike some people as a little odd.

State Merrimack Watershed Supervisor Steve Landry. (Jon Greenberg, NHPR)

CUT Nothing thrills me more than finding a nasty nasty outfall that I can take pictures of take a sample of and get strong ecoli results on. Because Its rewarding. You know your going to go back and contact the officials and solve that problem in short order.

Steve follows the path of the pipe back up to a parking lot. Hard surfaces like this collect things like oil and brake fluid that then wash into the river. Steve crisscrosses the lot like a bloodhound, stopping at each drain. He has a connoisseur’s nose for hints of petroleum, kitchen waste and of course, sewage. He is unrestrained in his effort to get a good sniff.

CUT Track 1033
(6:50) [sounds of Steve Sniffing in the manhole cover]
J; Do you ever get people asking what you’re doing?
S: A few do ask and I’m glad when they do because we have a chance to impart some knowledge about storm water and property management to them. Probably 8 times out of 10 peoples’ response is something of wonder. I don’t realize that went to a river, or I thought that went to the waste water treatment plant.

Landry uses his eyes, ears and nose to track the source of outfall water. (Jon Greenberg, NHPR)

Steve spends a lot of his time talking to people who live far away from the Merrimack. He tries to explain that the river is like the end of a huge funnel; everything from the wide end eventually flows into it. He says the top priority is to reduce runoff pollution. After a storm, bacteria counts spike. Parking lot chemicals reach the Merrimack and undermine the river’s ecosystem.

CUT When you convert pasture, or forest to pavement, rooftops, driveways, manicured lawns, driveways you’ve made it so much easier for rainfall and storm water runoff to reach feeding tributaries and the main stem of the Merrimack river, that you accelerate the rate at which pollutants reach the water.

SFX Thunderstorm

Runoff puts a totally different face on a thunderstorm.

When you listen to the rain, it’s easy to feel that it’s cleaning things up, freshening the air and washing away the dirt. Steve’s point is that whatever it washes off does not disappear. It goes to the river.

There are ways to minimize the damage, or eliminate it entirely. Steve says the first challenge is to help people understand how water moves across the land, what it picks up along the way and to believe that such details matters.

By the way, Steve got the lab results from our day tracking discharges. The big pipe we spent so much time on came up clean for bacteria but two others we saw that day had bacteria concentrations well over the state limit. Steve is following up.

For NHPR News, I’m Jon Greenberg.