EPA's report card gives Charles River lower grade

After years of improvement, the Charles River's water quality rating is set to be downgraded today by federal officials, a disappointing setback in the decade-long campaign to make the river clean enough for swimming next summer.

In its annual report card, the US Environmental Protection Agency plans to announce that the Charles merited only a B-minus, a backslide from the steady B grades of the past four years.

In 2003, high bacteria counts made the river unsafe for boating 15 percent of the time and unhealthy for swimming more than half the time. Officials cautioned that the grade does not reflect a dramatic deterioration in water quality, but a leveling off of the progress seen in recent years.

"You saw dramatic improvements and a plateau, and we're stuck on a plateau right now," said William Walsh-Rogalski, a regional EPA official. "It's a function of the fact that, with any environmental problem . . . it's getting it across the finish line that's really hard. The last 5 percent is always the most difficult."

Despite the downgrade, advocates and boaters say the river is healthy in most areas, most of the time.

"This is not the `Dirty Water' of the Standells," said Robert Zimmerman, executive director of the Charles River Watershed Association, referring to the 1965 pop song about the contaminated Charles. "Nor has it been for quite a while."

Today the Charles is alive with recreation, from Duck Tours that send visitors quacking upstream to sailboats and kayaks that put boaters in close contact with the water.

"It's very safe all the time," said Fran Charles, sailing master at the MIT boathouse, who remembers rare times in years past when sailors who tipped their boats would get infections in open cuts. "We have the tippiest boats on the river except, perhaps, kayaks. If you fall in, simply take a shower."

But the Charles has yet to measure up to expectations of consistent safety, set in 1995 when John DeVillars, then New England's EPA administrator, declared that it should be swimmable within 10 years.

From its headwaters at Echo Lake in Hopkinton, the Charles wends 80 miles to Boston Harbor through towns that once relied on the river for industry and later used it to discharge waste and storm water. Many communities still send sewage into the river during heavy rains, a result of combined sewer systems that mix sewage with storm runoff.

In recent years, the river has improved dramatically as the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority helped communities to separate some combined sewer systems and built a new Deer Island Treatment Plant, relieving the pressure on the system.

Sewage overflows in the Charles have dropped from 1.74 billion gallons in the early 1990s to 182 million gallons last year, 75 percent of it treated, according to MWRA spokesman Jonathan Yeo. When current projects are complete, sewage overflows to the Charles are expected to drop to 27 million gallons a year, 90 percent of it treated, Yeo said.

Towns along the Charles have been working to stop sewage from flowing directly from sewer pipes to the river, the result of illegal connections made to homes, dormitories, and apartment buildings through the region. Even inadvertently, sewage can seep from aging underground lines into storm pipes, regulators are finding. The EPA plans to ask communities like Newton and Waltham to immediately begin investigating systems to find sewage leaks and illegal connections. Because the agency controls those communities' storm water permits, it hopes to force comprehensive repairs within five years.

In the years since officials set out to make the water safe for swimming by 2005, the Charles has marked substantial progress, earning an EPA report card grade that rose from a D to a B by 1999.

The rating relies on the Charles River Watershed Association's monthly testing data, fecal coliform samples taken from each of nine testing stations each month of the year. The EPA acknowledges there could be year-to-year variations that can alter the data and that their grade is influenced by progress in prior years. The findings could also be skewed by factors ranging from the number of hot summer days that allow bacteria to survive longer to the growing population of geese, whose droppings deliver bacteria to the water, Walsh-Rogalski said.

But many advocates are focusing on storm water runoff as the next big problem facing the Charles.

The watershed association is among the groups calling for more creative approaches to returning rain to ground water and rivers, a difficult prospect as development paves over more and more surface area.

"In urban and suburban areas in the US, we treat rainwater like trash and throw it away," Zimmerman said. "That has enormous consequences. We're going to have to find out technically how to avoid doing that, how to make the city behave as if, as far as rainwater is concerned, it had never been built."

Stephanie Ebbert can be reached at ebbert@globe.com.