They love that not-so-dirty water
Charles River shows a gain in cutting pollution
Ten years after setting an ambitious goal to make the polluted Charles River clean enough for swimming this spring, environmental activists and government regulators applauded their progress yesterday, while acknowledging that they have fallen short.
Last year, the Charles was safe for swimming 54 percent of the time and for boating 96 percent of the time, according to bacteria monitoring by the Charles River Watershed Association.
In the most-used portion of the Lower Charles -- between the Longfellow and Massachusetts Avenue bridges, where kayaks and sailboats skim the water -- the water met state swimming standards all last summer.
''That's an incredible milestone for us," said Robert W. Varney, regional administrator for the US Environmental Protection Agency in New England. ''But at the same time, we know that there are other parts of the Charles that are not consistently fishable and swimmable."
The EPA, which issues an annual scorecard on the water's quality, yesterday gave the Charles a B plus for 2004. The grade in 2003 was B minus, which EPA officials had said reflected a plateau in progress, rather than a deterioration of water quality.
Although the results were among the best in recent years, they were not consistent enough to ensure that bacteria in the water will not make swimmers sick. Activists were heartened by the progress, but said they must continue their efforts.
''I'd say B plus is good," said Vivien Li, executive director of the Boston Harbor Association, who joked that her mother might not agree.
''There's more work to be done; we have to sustain that," said John DeVillars, the former EPA regional administrator who launched the river cleanup goal in 1995.
The river, which stretches 80 miles from Hopkinton to Boston Harbor, was once so polluted by industry and sewage discharges that it inspired ''Dirty Water," a 1966 recording by the Standells.
Ten years ago, DeVillars declared that the waterway that divides Boston and Cambridge should be swimmable within a decade. He acknowledged that the goal was ambitious, but he and other officials were inspired by the drive to clean up Boston Harbor and began working with community groups to achieve the goal.
''It truly is the case that the Charles is an example for the rest of the country," said Benjamin Grumbles, assistant administrator of the EPA's Office of Water.
The progress is not only visually observable, but also can be checked in the bacteria counts that the Charles River Watershed Association monitors have been collecting for years. In 1995, boating was safe 39 percent of the time, and swimming was safe 19 percent of the time.
Varney said that cleanup efforts like this one become more difficult and more expensive at latter stages, after the easiest, quickest improvements have been made. ''Then as you get closer and closer to the goal, you're dealing with smaller and smaller increments of pollution," Varney said. ''They become more and more expensive on a cost-per-ton or cost-per-gallon basis. It becomes more and more of a challenge as you get closer to that goal."
Varney attributed the past progress to the partnerships among civic and environmental groups and governmental regulators, who did not postpone action while waiting for complete data.
''We didn't allow analysis paralysis to get in the way," Varney said. Instead, agencies ''took the information that we had and set a goal and worked toward it while at the same time improving the science, improving the data, improving the modeling that's needed for future decision-making.
Their collective efforts have eliminated 1 million gallons of sewage discharges from being dumped into the river from illicit connections, he said. The Massachusetts Water Resources Authority and the Boston Water and Sewer Commission have been fixing many of the combined sewers that flood the river with sewage during storms, cutting the annual discharges from 1.7 billion gallons to 162 million gallons.
''It's very important that we learn from the past," said John P. Sullivan, chief engineer for the water and sewer agency, who pointed to the city's backslide from world leader in sewage management to polluter. .
''We were the world's best in 1884," Sullivan said. ''We took care of a public health problem that no one else could do yet. And then we went to sleep. . . . The good news is: Now, we woke up again." 