| Wastewater | Deer Island, Boston Harbor - Page 4 |
|
While Boston’s sewerage system was conceived and built to serve the entire metropolitan area, that was not the case with Boston’s water system. Initially cities and towns tapped the rivers, dug their own wells, and built their own reservoirs. Growth in the population forced mutual solutions that would lead in 1895 to the creation of the Metropolitan Water Board. Its mission was to provide water to Boston and 12 nearby cities and towns, mostly overlapping with those that the Metropolitan Sewerage Commission already served. The overlap between the two boards was evident and without any complaint in 1901 the Massachusetts Legislature merged two to form the Metropolitan Water and Sewerage Board. |
|
As it had been done previously on both boards, a senior politician was appointed as chairman. Initially chosen to lead the Water Board, Henry H. Sprague (1841-1920) continued to be selected as the head of the consolidated board until he resigned in 1914. Born in Athol, Mass., Sprague had been elected to the Boston City Council, the Massachusetts House of Representatives, then the Massachusetts Senate serving as President for two terms. Not unique as a respected politician, Sprague does have the unique distinction as being known as the “Father of the Australian Ballot” in the United States. Not a commonly used term, except possibly for political science majors, it described the use of government printed ballots for elections. Prior to its implementation ballots were handed out by the political parties. Known as a reformer, Sprague was a member of board of multiple civic and charitable organizations and fits into a period of time known as the Progressive Era. |
| Typically spoken of in the positive, except possibly for the support for prohibition of alcoholic beverages, there were significant gains made during the Progressive Era (1890s to 1920s) in addressing problems caused by industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and political corruption. Unfortunately, in Massachusetts there was an unintended consequence that would hinder any effort to stop the degradation of Boston Harbor. Calls for reform in the state led the legislature to call for a Constitutional Convention in 1917. About nine hundred state residents took out papers to run for 320 positions in the convention. Voting was relatively light in the May election. The occupations of the delegates chosen included 157 lawyers and judges, 90 merchants and businessmen, 5 farmers, 4 clergyman, 2 hotel keeps, among others. Ultimately the convention would put forward nineteen amendments to be voted on by the citizens of Massachusetts. |
|
In the election of 1918 all nineteen amendments were passed, though only about one half of the people who voted in the election took the time to vote on the amendments. The last amendment, number nineteen, called for the reorganization of the state’s two hundred plus commissions, agencies, and executive and administrative offices into no more than twenty departments. The number twenty was arbitrary and resulted in the joining of some activities that were foreign to each other. In the end the two outliers that did not fit into other departments were the Metropolitan Water and Sewerage Board and Metropolitan Park Commission. There were departments created for Conservation, Public Utilities, and Public Works, any of which would have seemed logical for the home for one or either of the two, but the difference was that the two were not state-wide agencies. |
| So, in 1919 the Metropolitan Water and Sewerage Board and the Metropolitan Park Commission were joined together as number twenty not as a department, rather as the Metropolitan District Commission. It was a fateful decision that would result in numerous problems, but not for the parks division. This was the golden era for the Metropolitan Park Commission. The Blue Hills and Middlesex Fells reservations were created in this time frame, as were public beaches of Revere and Nantasket, the Emerald Necklace, and parks along the Charles River and Alewife Brook. It was the time of such well-known names as Frank Law Olmsted, Charles Eliot, and Warren H. Manning. This was also a golden era for water portion of the Metropolitan Water and Sewerage Board. The Wachusetts Reservoir was under construction and first filled in 1908. At the time it was the largest public water supply reservoir in the world and the largest body of water in Massachusetts. For the metropolitan sewerage division, the first shadows of the problems dumping raw sewage in Boston Harbor were just becoming evident. |
| The Metropolitan District Commission (MDC) would grow to become a massive agency that maintained parks, swimming pools, playgrounds, bandstands, beaches, museums, athletic fields, historic sites, golf courses, bike paths, and skating rinks; it had its own highways and bridges; its own police force; and it was responsible for supplying water and disposing of sewage for the Boston metropolitan area. The MDC also would grow to earn a reputation for cronyism, patronage, scandals, and corruption. What would more of a problem for the MDC in its efforts to stop polluting Boston Harbor was that it could not independently raise the money needed to do it. The state legislature had to improve bonds. Not a problem when asking for funds for a park in a politician’s district, a big impediment when asking for millions of dollars to build sewage plants that nobody wanted in their city or questioned if they were even needed. |
| There were people who very early recognized there would be a problem dumping millions of gallons of raw sewage into the harbor. As early as 1910 the Metropolitan Water and Sewage Board report for the year noted that because of the “large amount of sewage which is now carried into the harbor,” state officials should, “consider the desirability of making some improvement in the future in the method of its discharge.” |
|
There also were people working on a solution. In 1886 the Massachusetts State Board of Health, based on an act of the Legislature to “protect the purity of inland waters,” established the Lawrence Experiment Station (now named the Senator William X. Wall Experiment Station). Along with other topics, the laboratory was tasked with conducting research on the best method of disposing of sewage. In 1913 they reported on positive results clarifying sewage using aeration. The year earlier one of the visitors at the lab was Gilbert Fowler, consultant chemist to the massive Davyhulme Sewage Works in Manchester, England. He had taken a trip to explore new ways sewage was being treated in the United States. On his return he described what he had seen to two chemists, Edward Ardern and William Lockett. They modified what was being done in Lawrence and got better results by recycling the aerated sludge. In 1914 they published a paper on the topic and are credited with inventing the activated sludge process for treating sewage, fundamental to most modern wastewater treatment plants. |
|
In a 1918 report, An Investigation Of The Discharge Of Sewage Into Boston Harbor, a joint board of Massachusetts water, sewer, health and public works officials took a small step when they acknowledged that pollution might be a problem. The Moon Island outlet was called out because, “the discharge at this outlet extends over a large area covering on calm days in summer 600 to 700 acres of the harbor surface, while the thin film of oily sleek extends to greater distances. These conditions have been a cause of complaint to those sailing in this part of the harbor when the water is affected by the sewage.” The deeper water outlets at Deer Island and Nut Island, with their continuous discharge of “fresh sewage,” were thought be acceptable. Discussions about treating sewage revolved around the hope that in the future “merchantable products” might be “practicability recovered,” not around the benefit of reducing pollution. After examination of sewage treatment efforts in other cities the Board determined that they had, “been unable to find that any process has yet been worked out on a practical scale which gives reasonable promise that the valuable materials in the sewage can be recovered at such a cost as would furnish a reasonable return on the necessary outlay.” Two years earlier, in 1916, the city of Milwaukee, Wis. had built an experimental sewage treatment plant using the latest activated sludge process. |
| Near the end of the report there is a recognition that discharging raw sewage might be a problem. The Board noted that “experts” urge that the greatly improved character of treated effluent, “alone is worth considering as it would reduce pollution in the harbor.” But the Board did not “feel justified in recommending at the present time the expenditure of money by the city of Boston or the metropolitan sewerage district” until extended experiments and investigations had been done. |
| Contaminated shellfish |
Top |
| Like in the late 1800s when the danger of contaminated water prompted officials to build a system of sewers in Boston, it was another health issue that raised the alarm on the danger of pollution in the harbor. By 1927 the Massachusetts Department of Public Health had spent several years dealing with the issue of contaminated shellfish reaching markets. In the annual report for that year they found that, “areas in Boston Harbor have been grossly polluted and closed to shell fishing.” This and complaints from Dorchester residents about pollution on their beaches prompted legislators in 1929 to ask for another investigation into the affects the discharge of sewage was having on Boston Harbor. |
| In April of 1929 the Legislature formed a Special Commission and gave it three tasks: |
| “…first, to examine the waters and shores of the harbor and of the rivers and estuaries tributary thereto to determine their sanitary condition and what changes, if any, may be necessary or desirable to relieve the pollution of any of these waters; second, to examine the systems of sewerage and sewage disposal tributary to said harbor, rivers and estuaries; third, to recommend such additions, enlargements, diversions or improvements in any of the present sewerage systems or sewage disposal works as in its opinion are necessary or desirable to prevent objectionable pollution…” |
| The report was to be published by the end of 1930. That was same year that officials who wrote the 1889 Board of Health report that set-in motion the construction of the North Metropolitan Sewerage System had used in their projections of population growth to design the sewage system. In 1889, after considering available treatment and disposal options available at the time, they had decided that discharging raw sewage off Deer Island was the best solution. Now 30 years later, current officials had the same opportunity to evaluate those same options again with a look to the of the needs of the metropolitan area 30 years in the future. |
|
On schedule, in December of 1930, the Special Commission published its report, “Relative to the Discharge of Sewage into Boston Harbor.” If state legislators were looking for the report to provide them a vision for the future, they would have been disappointed. It concluded that, “the waters of the harbor in general are, for the most part, in satisfactory sanitary condition at the present time,” with sewage discharged at the three outlets, including Deer Island, “quickly dispersed in the tidal currents.” Their observation was that, “the condition of the harbor waters in general has deteriorated slightly within the past twenty-five years, but there is no indication that they are likely to become generally objectionable until pollution becomes greater than at the present time.” There was no mention of the problem contaminated shellfish that had prompted the investigation. |
| The authors of the 1930 report dismissed treating sewage as too expensive and too difficult to implement because of limited space available on islands near the harbor. Instead they recommended exploring the option of digging a series of deep rock tunnels to connect the three outlets and then running another tunnel out to beyond the outer island of the harbor and discharge the untreated sewage there. And that no legislation was needed, but to conduct another investigation in three to five years. |
| Major cities along the East Coast already operating sewage treatment plants by this time included Providence, R.I. (1901), Philadelphia, Pa. (1923), and Baltimore, Md. (1911). New York City’s first sewage treatment plant opened in 1903 with multiple other plants opening the 1930s. |
| Pictures of pollution |
Top |
| The Special Commission reconvened in 1935 and published its report on sewage discharge into Boston Harbor in December 1936. For the first time the report included aerial photographs showing clearly visible pollution on the surface spreading over a wide area emanating from the Moon Island and Nut Island outlets, (there were no pictures of the Deer Island outlet because the day the plane was taking pictures the ocean was choppy in the area). |
| Photographs, maps, and diagrams from the 1936 Special Commision's report on sewage in Boston Harbor |
|
|
| The report describes clearly polluted conditions in the harbor near all three of the sewage system outlets, and in the rivers and tributaries entering the harbor. It nioted that any shellfish taken from the harbor needed to be cleaned before being consumed. Recreational use of harbor had become a more important consideration, especially the use of the beaches. Swimming anywhere near the main three sewage outlets was identified as dangerous, and it was noted that floating matter from the outlets sometimes reaches nearby beaches. Quincy being a problem area, and a harbinger of future disputes. There is no mention of any possible contamination of fish caught in the harbor. With problems of tumors on harbor flounders not yet detected. |
| But again, like the 1930 report, if legislators were looking for a vision of the future sewage needs of the metropolitan area, they wouldn’t have found it in the 1936 report. The Commissioners would only “recommend” that “consideration be given to the preparation of detail plans for the treatment and disposal of sewage,” and it was the fifth of six recommendations. Their first recommendations were to study the cost of the very expense task of separating sanitary sewers from storm water drains, coming up with a way to get surrounding cities and towns to pay their fair share, and to make local Boards of Health responsible for keeping bathers from swimming at polluted beaches. |
| Proposal in 1936 to connect and extend sewage outfalls further into Boston Harbor |
|
|
| The Engineers’ Report, with Arthur D. Weston, Chief Sanitary Engineer of the State Department of Public Health as lead author, began their section stating, “recent and previous investigations show that Boston Harbor is polluted by domestic sewage and industrial wastes.” Then in almost 300 pages of analysis provided an in-depth look at the problem and possible solutions. This included a thorough examination of available treatment options ranging from land disposal to the latest activated sludge process, finally providing costs estimates for constructing facilities at each of the three sewage outlets to perform basic screening, sedimentation, and skimming. But that idea did not make it into their final recommendations which probably not coincidentally, matched those of the Commissioners. |
| The idea of digging tunnels to extend the sewage outfalls to the outer harbor islands was still an option. More carefully analyzed by noted geologist Irving B. Crosby, his suggestion was to first dig tunnels to closer islands in the outer harbor. Then as the conditions at outlets at those islands deteriorated, the tunnels could be hopscotched out to more distant islands until eventually reaching the outer most islands. Because of geologically difficult conditions the cost of the tunneling alone was estimated to be $27,000,000, almost $500 million today. And it was likely that raw sewage might still find its way back into the harbor on the tide. Also, chips released just past the outer harbor to test currents were found on Cape Ann and Cape Cod. |
| The old idea that the nearness to the ocean was Boston’s great advantage still prevailed and would continue to influence decision making into the future. Commenting on the type of sewage treatment needed, the report claims that, |
| “...although it is possible by the use of complete sewage disposal works to purify all sewage and industrial waste to prevent additional pollution of the water into which it is discharged, the great dilution possible in Boston Harbor which permits natural purification by oxidation of the organic matter makes a high degree of purification unnecessary.” |
|
