| Wastewater | Deer Island, Boston Harbor - Page 23 |
| There are two ceremonial bookends to most major civic construction projects. First comes the groundbreaking ceremony. Politicians and other dignitaries assemble to turnover a shovel of dirt to signify the start of the project, and to take credit. For the Boston Harbor Project that date was August 10, 1988, though the only work underway at that time was the construction of a new pier and dock on Deer Island. It would be another two years in December of 1990 when another groundbreaking ceremony would mark the beginning of the actual construction of the first phase of the new treatment plant. |
| Similarly, the end of most civic construction projects is marked with a ribbon-cutting ceremony where politicians and dignitaries gather again to praise the work completed, and again take credit. For almost all major civic construction projects that completion date is typically much later than was originally planned, (see Bent Flyvbjerg’s, "Over budget, over time, over and over again.") The MWRA did not have the luxury of being late. They had early on committed to a plan devised by CM Richard Fox, and approved by Judge Mazzone, that would have the Boston Harbor Project completed by end of 1999, the end of the century, with the risk of fines from the EPA if the schedule was not met. Without the tragedy in July of 1999 in the Outfall tunnel the MWRA would almost certainly have met the deadline. Nevertheless, just over a year later the MWRA would be able to claim a successful completion of the massive project. |
| One might have thought that coverage of the ceremony that marked the completion of a controversial project that took 12 years to complete and cost $4.2 billion would earn the front page of the Boston Globe. Nope, the lead story of Boston Globe on September 7, 2000, was the company MP3.com being ordered to pay $250 million in damages for their music download software. The original online music service would be shut down by the end of the year. News of a ceremony marking the completion of the BHP did make the first page of the Metro section. |
| Deer Island was now home to a modern computer-controlled wastewater treatment facility, the second largest in the country. There were no ribbons to be cut to mark the completion. As dignitaries watched, somewhere deep in the new plant a worker flipped a switch and treated effluent stopped being discharged into the harbor and instead dropped into the intake for the now completed Outfall tunnel. A picture on the jump page of that edition of the Boston Globe showed six people on Race Point Beach in Provincetown gathered to oppose the Outfall tunnel. One wore a gown made of tampon applicators he claimed drifted to Cape Cod from Boston Harbor. |
| Functionally the wastewater treatment system for the Boston area was complete. All the wastewater generated by the 50+ cities and towns served by the MWRA was now being sent to a treatment plant on Deer Island. There after receiving secondary treatment the resulting effluent was released nine miles out into Massachusetts Bay. All the sludge generated was being converted to fertilizer at a plant on Fore River. Practically there still were some loose ends that needed to be wrapped up. It wouldn’t be until 2001 before the last secondary treatment battery went online, and it wasn’t until 2005 when an extension of the Inter-Island tunnel eliminated the need for barges to transport the sludge to the plant at Fore River. |
| Another bookend to the building of a wastewater treatment plant on Deer Island occurred in 1999 when the MWRA completed a project to prevent erosion and reduce flooding on the sole road into facility. When the North Metropolitan System was just being designed in the late 1800’s, one of the major challenges was how to make the connection from Point Shirley in Winthrop to the new pumping station on Deer Island. Shirley Gut, the body of water separating the two, at the time was, at high tide, 315 feet across and 25 feet deep. Chief Engineer Howard Carson’s recommendation was to fill it in and use the same pipe construction method that was being used elsewhere in the system. That was rejected and the immersed tube method he devised is commonly identified as its first use the United States. Today, constructing individual tunnel segments, floating into place, and then sinking into position, is commonly used for highway tunnel projects. A hurricane in the 1930’s would fill and permanently close Shirley Gut. In 1999 part of the Western Shoreline Protection project was to replace Carson’s siphon with precast 108” pipes. |
| With the completion of the wastewater facility on Deer Island, and its associated tunnels, the focus of the MWRA moved to tackle the other part of the federal Boston Harbor Case, the problem of combined sewer overflow. Instead of one massive project at one location, solving the agency’s problem with CSO would require dozens of small projects across the entire service area. A map of the projects to be undertaken looks like a connect the dots puzzle that outlines all the major waterways in the Boston metropolitan area. The projects to be undertakes cover the gamut including, sewer relief, hydraulic relief, sewer separation, manhole separation, siphon relief, storage relief, storage conduit, inflow controls, storm drain improvements, and outfall repair. The MWRA’s largest CSO project was the $145 million South Boston CSO Storage Tunnel. Completed in 2017, the 17-foot diameter 2.1-mile tunnel under Dorchester Bay eliminated CSO by capturing up 19 million gallons of stormwater overflow and holding until conditions allowed it to be pumped to Deer Island for treatment. |
| The MWRA would put the cost of all the CSO projects at just over $900 million and it wouldn’t be until 2016 before they could successfully petition the federal court that it had met the requirement of the Boston Harbor Cleanup Case. Federal Judge Richard G. Stearns was presiding over the case after taking over from Judge A. David Mazzone who died in 2004. |
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