| Wastewater | Deer Island, Boston Harbor - Page 12 |
| The decade of the 1970s had begun with the promise of a new focus in the country on protecting the environment. The creation of the EPA in 1968, the major expansion of the Clean Air Act in 1970, then in 1972 the Clean Water Act, and locally the start of the Wastewater Management Study for Eastern Massachusetts, or EMMA report, all were indications that increasingly the people nationally and locally would not tolerate environmental degradation. Unfortunately for Boston, the 1970s would end with city well on its way to becoming the nation’s worst violator of that Federal Clean Water Act and having the distinction of having the most polluted harbor in the country. |
| How had the early momentum to solve the problem of pollution in Boston Harbor been lost by the end of the 1970s? One possibility to consider is that eventual failure lay in the earliest recommendation made by the EPA to MDC in 1971. The request was for two studies, one for a solution for the final disposal of sludge, and the second for an engineering report on the future needs of the “entire MDC sewerage system.” The selection of incineration as the solution for the disposal of sludge by Havens & Emerson tied the hands of Metcalf & Eddy and later Greeley and Hansen in their efforts to offer the best solution for entire Boston metropolitan sewerage system. |
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For the EPA incineration was, and still is, an acceptable process. As long equipment is properly built, operated, maintained, air quality standards met, and ash disposed of in an environmentally sound way, incineration greatly reduces the bulk of the material to be disposed and sometimes be can used for energy generation. Though in Boston, in the early 1970s, incinerators were not a popular topic. Located just off the Southeast Expressway, the South Bay Incinerator had been built in 1958 to end the dumping of Boston’s rubbish on Calf Pasture (today’s Columbia Point) and then Spectacle Island. Poor design and poor maintenance lead to it becoming an environmental disaster burning forty percent of Boston’s trash without any filtering. The facilities primitive air pollution control equipment had broken down never to be repaired, and more equipment failures ended the hope of producing steam for nearby buildings. With the help of the EPA and a court ruling the state was able force the city to close the facility in 1975. Now the EPA was back approving of the plan by Havens & Emerson to dispose of all of Boston’s sludge with a massive incinerator on Deer Island. |
| One town that was especially apprehensive about incineration as a method to dispose of the sludge was Winthrop. With the jet fumes of a fast-growing Logan Airport on one side, and the smell from sewage overflows at the Deer Island Treatment Plant on another, the idea of a large incinerator at the plant was opposed by all. Local politicians, first House Representative Ralph E. Sirianni, Jr., followed by Rep. Alfred E. Saggese, Jr., would continue from the late 1960s through to the late 1980s to file legislation to protect the town. It was Sirianni in 1969 who first proposed court action to force the MDC to correct problems at the plant. Public opposition to incineration was not limited to Winthrop. In 1975 South Boston Senator William Bulger filed legislation blocking the MDC from incinerating sewage sludge. |
| While others would continue to file legislation to block incineration as late as 1990, questions had arisen much earlier as to why incineration was ever selected as the preferred method to dispose of the sludge. One of the possible answers rekindled doubts on the MDC ability to manage such a big project. When legislators and the press in 1975 discovered that the company that had first recommended incineration, Havens & Emerson, after conducting a $40,000 study would a receive a $1.2 million contract to design the incinerators they recommended, it looked like another corrupt move by the MDC. In defense of the MDC, incineration was approved by the EPA and the MDC had to implement a solution to stop discharging the sludge into the harbor initially by 1976, then by 1979. |
| The more important problem with Havens & Emerson incineration proposal was that it effectively blocked all other sludge disposal solutions from being evaluated thoroughly. The appeal of first phase of the H&E plan was that it offered a quick solution for stopping the dumping of sludge into the harbor that did not need secondary treatment. That could wait until the mid-1980s. The drawback was that it was secondary treatment of wastewater that is required to produce the sludge that could be processed and marketed as fertilizer. The EPA’s own 1975 marketing study that rejected a sludge-to-fertilizer solution acknowledged that the analysis only considered sludge from a primary treatment plant. But once the H&E incineration plan was accepted, and with the blessing if the EPA, any further analysis on sludge disposal alternatives were destined to produce unsatisfactory results. |
| Further confusing serious consideration of any other type form of land disposal was the ill-timed proposal made (and rejected) by the Army Corp of Engineers for spray irrigation and rapid infiltration of effluent from Boston sewage system on open land in southeastern Massachusetts. The technique is a good alternative if there is an abundance of flat open land available or is in a dry environment where the moisture is needed. Neither the case anywhere in Massachusetts. To the people of Southeastern Massachusetts being the recipient of Boston’s sewage was never going to be accepted. And even then the proposal offered no final solution for what to do with the sludge it generated. |
| In an alternate 1970s, the consulting engineers designing a new sewage treatment system for Boston would have worked together to propose a modern secondary treatment like those being built at the time in major metropolitan areas up and down the East Coast. Then they could have used their expertise to offer an improvement on the sludge-to-fertilizer process that had been implemented in Milwaukee fifty years earlier. Possibly that solution could never have been reached based on how the process was initiated. Nevertheless, the process was moving in that direction. Deer Island had been selected as the site for one large treatment plant, conversion of at least some of the sludge to compost was proposed, and now facing opposition from the public, state legislators, and eventually state regulations, incineration had been demoted to stop gap measure to provide immediate relief. |
| Failure of leadership |
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| While however unlikely it was that a comprehensive solution to the problem of pollution in Boston Harbor could have been implemented by the end of the 1970s, what guaranteed that a solution would not be found was the change in leadership of the agency charged with implementing the solution. With Michael Dukakis taking over the governorship from Frank Sargent in January 1975, MDC Commissioner John Sears resigned in March. Dukakis named Henry S. Francis, Jr. the assistant state secretary of environmental affairs as acting commissioner. Originally hired by Frank Sargent, the Harvard graduate had distinguished himself as a scientist doing research in Antarctica where there is a mountain named after him. Francis was back in Environmental Affairs in April when Dukakis brought in real estate developer, William J. Byrne, as full time MDC Commissioner. Francis would be gone by the end of the year with Dukakis criticizing him because, “he could not stand the gaff,” and not be willing to criticize the environmental record of the previous administration. Reportedly Byrne was out in only three months because he would not agree with the cuts Dukakis demanded that would close MDC swimming pools. |
| The Dukakis choice to replace Byrne was former MDC Commissioner John Sears’ legislative affairs assistant, John F. Snedeker. He had distinguished himself as a consummate political insider. If an MDC budget needed to be approved, or a bill killed, he was the man would do the horse trading to, for example, in exchange for a vote, get a new hockey rink built in a legislator’s district. It was no surprise when Dukakis chose him to be the MDC Commissioner. |
| Then MDC Commissioner John Sears earned “almost unanimous opposition” when in January of 1975 he increased the water rate by 20%. At the time he was a lame duck and probably could have just let the next Commissioner deal with the higher costs of operations, maintenance, and the debt service. But he continued to lobby for the rate increase in the press as late as February, this with his departure from the position just weeks away. In 1976 Commissioner Snedeker followed the path of political expediency and announced that there would be no increase in water rates. Then, following the time-honored tradition in politics of kicking the can down the road, he again did not raise rates in 1977. Possibly there were votes that were earned from legislators who did not want to hear complaints from their constituents about their water rates going up. |
| MDC Commissioner Snedeker’s decision to delay the unavoidable need to raise water rates would not impact the larger effort to clean up Boston Harbor. It would be a different larger effort by him and the Dukakis administration that eliminated any possibility that the process started in the early 1970s to implement a comprehensive sewage treatment solution by the end of the decade would succeed. Despite running the agency whose system was largely responsible for polluting Boston Harbor, and would also be responsible for cleaning it up, Commissioner Snedeker set in motion the process that would delay for 20 years the cleanup of the harbor. |
| There was never total agreement on what step needed to be taken first to end the pollution in the harbor. Some argued that it was the polluted tributaries feeding into the harbor that needed to be cleaned up. Others thought the biggest problem were the toxic chemicals being discharged by factories and passing through the sewage treatment plants. For most there were two important issues that had to addressed. One, the CSO problem of polluted wastewater flowing directly into harbor during storms, and two, the inadequacies of the existing sewage treatment plants. Both problems would ultimately need to be addressed and the disagreements were mostly confined to which to do first. The solutions to the CSO problem was over 100 individual projects each of different size and complexity. The solution to deficient treatment plants was a single massive project. Arguments were made for both, but there was no escaping the fact that the federal government under the 1972 Clean Water Act was demanding that Boston’s sewage treatment plants be brought up to a secondary treatment level. |
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Headlines in January in the Boston Globe in 1976 touted an $800 million project to clean up Boston Harbor with the federal government picking up 75% of the cost, 15% would be paid by the state, and the 43 member communities of the MDC would pick up the remaining 10%. The project was to be completed by 1986. The next day Snedeker and the MDC came out against the plan. Reasons given by Snedeker included, the 10% would overwhelm the member communities, “improved” primary treatment at the two existing plants would be good enough, repairing CSO should be a higher priority, and finally, “there was no evidence that secondary treatment will benefit the environment of Boston Harbor.” |
| Political clout, as Snedeker was very well aware, was cultivated by creating coalitions of people or groups who share at least one common interest. For Snedeker that one interest was that no secondary treatment plant should be built on Deer Island. One of the proposals in the EMMA plan called for filling an additional 25 more acres of Quincy Bay off Nut Island to expand the primary treatment plant to secondary treatment. Getting the citizens and politicians of Quincy to oppose a secondary treatment plant was easy. They wanted the existing primary treatment plant to close. For the other 42 MDC member communities, any proposal that could produce acceptable results at a lower cost was fine. Except for Winthrop, who would be getting a large incinerator on their doorstep. But the concerns of Winthrop could be ignored because they were a small town without much political clout. |
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Coalitions often bring together strange bedfellows. Adverse to the political fallout of having to raise water rates because of the cost of the project, Snedeker did not have to look further than the Nixon/Ford era Republicans for another group adverse to spending. The Democrats controlled the House and Senate so there would be no studies emanating from those bodies arguing against implementing the Clean Water Act thoroughly. The Republicans on the other hand had the presidency with Richard Nixon. Soon after he had failed to block a portion of the funds for sewage treatment plants allocated by the Clean Water Act he initiated a study. In March of 1976, the National Commission on Water Quality, chaired by the Vice President, Nelson A. Rockefeller, presented its report calling for a “mid-course correction” in efforts to reach water quality goals by providing “some flexibility and even waivers on a case-by-case and category-by-category basis.” |
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That MDC Commissioner Snedeker would use an argument against incorporating secondary treatment presented by Republicans shows great political acumen and flexibility on his part, the fact that he ignored Democratic Senator Edmund Muskie's counter argument in the same report is more problematic. In his efforts to derail the plan what Snedeker needed next was a scientific argument for why secondary treatment was not needed, and better yet if available, might be harmful. He found that in the work of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’ distinguished scientist John H. Ryther. He was an expert on ocean systems and one of his areas of expertise was eutrophication, the excessive growth of algae in bodies of water. Nothing anyone wanted in Boston Harbor. His hypothesis was that secondary treatment actually enhanced the potential for its development. Just what Snedeker needed to bolster his argument for not building a secondary treatment plant, instead his plan was to pump the primary treatment effluent six miles out into Massachusetts Bay. |
| It would take one final move by Governor Dukakis and MDC Commissioner Snedeker to completely derail a process that would have resulted in the cleaning up of Boston Harbor much sooner, and at a much lower cost to future rate payers. |
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