By Peter Howe, Globe Staff
As anyone who has ever looked at the garage a month after spring cleaning knows, it's one thing to tidy up a place - and another thing entirely to keep it clean.
As the epic $4 billion Boston Harbor cleanup nears completion, the waters are visibly cleaner than they have been in the lifetime of even the city's oldest residents. All the way up the food chain, from ampelisca shrimp and flounders to harbor seals and beachgoing humans, life is thriving in the recovering harbor.
But as typical household water and sewer bills climb past $700 a year and the heroic mission of saving the harbor gives way to the prosaic task of managing a huge sewage-treatment factory, some observers fear public and political will to keep the costly effort going could falter.
``It's not exciting to maintain it every day - there are no photo ops,'' says Thomas B. Powers, second in command at the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, which oversees the harbor cleanup and the $3 billion Deer Island treatment plant.
Vivien Li of the Boston Harbor Association, a key lobbying group, agrees: ``This job is only done if there's a strong commitment to maintenance and upkeep of that facility.''
Some public officials and harbor advocates remember the grim story of the old Deer Island treatment plant. When it opened in 1968, subjecting more than half of Greater Boston's sewage discharges to treatment for the first time, it represented as great a leap forward for the harbor's health as its successor.
But in the hands of the famously underfunded and overpoliticized Metropolitan District Commission, which ran through 10 commissioners from 1973 through 1983, the plant fell into disrepair within a few years after it was built. The company that built its diesel-powered pumps and machinery went bankrupt weeks after the plant opened. Keeping it running became an endless headache.
``This facility is a loaded gun aimed at Boston Harbor, the beaches, and public health,'' declared Chester G. Atkins, then chairman of the state Senate Ways and Means Committee, in the summer of 1983. Atkins had just toured the plant after a burst pipe unleashed a 20-foot-deep torrent of raw sewage.
One clear reason for confidence that the new plant will not be allowed to run down is that it is in the hands of an independent authority. The MWRA's sole function is providing clean water and sewage treatment; Beacon Hill can move only indirectly to control its spending. For the Legislature-entangled MDC, which also ran parks, beaches, parkways, and skating rinks, sewage treatment was an afterthought, as many MDC officials have said.
Another source of confidence is that the harbor's health remains under the scrutiny of a federal judge, David Mazzone. Widely admired for his energy and tenacity, Mazzone has closely monitored the cleanup, which was mandated after a 1983 lawsuit by the city of Quincy and the Conservation Law Foundation that forced the state to fix the region's sewerage system.
``I've done 155 monthly reports, and I'm going to continue to do that until the time comes that there's no further need for federal judicial oversight,'' says Mazzone, who will stay on the case at least until the end of 1999 and probably longer.
But as the MWRA launches a $1 billion overhaul of Greater Boston's drinking water supply, yearly household water and sewer bills are likely to climb another $100 or more. Some harbor advocates and MWRA insiders fear that as the harbor's health comes to be taken for granted, pressure could mount to cut corners on Deer Island maintenance or slow down planned steps to further clean the harbor.
Already, the MWRA has reached a point of diminishing returns. The biggest bang for the buck was achieved with the end of sludge dumping into the harbor in 1991. Last year Deer Island started secondary treatment, a process that uses oxygen bubblers to encourage the growth of waste-munching organisms.
The old treatment plant at Nut Island in Quincy was shut down this past summer after a five-mile cross-harbor tunnel opened to ferry wastes formerly treated at Nut Island over to Deer Island for vastly improved treatment. By next year, Quincy Bay, Hingham Harbor, and the Hull Gut should visibly benefit. And by late this year, the outfall pipe from Deer Island should begin carrying the much better treated effluent waste nine miles away from Boston Harbor into Massachusetts Bay, where it will have far cleaner ocean water to dilute it.
As a condition of licensing the pipe, the US Environmental Protection Agency is imposing a strict testing regimen covering dozens of pollutants - at a cost of up to $3 million a year to MWRA customers - to ensure that the discharge does not pollute the bay. It is also requiring contingency plans to shut down the pipe and resume discharges into the harbor if problems appear in the bay, as some Cape Cod activists still fear.
Also, the MWRA this year launched a 10-year, $450-million effort to clean up or shut down about 75 ``combined sewer overflows.'' These are pipes that discharge raw or lightly treated sewage into the Charles River and other harbor tributaries during major rainstorms, such as the June deluges that fouled harbor beaches for days.
By 2008, the combined sewer overflows should be gone from every beach in Dorchester, East Boston, and South Boston. The major remaining one on the Charles River - near Magazine Beach in Cambridgeport - will be upgraded with screening and chlorination facilities that are now under construction.
``My sense is that once we have these things done, we will have taken the harbor from the harbor of shame to the harbor of showplace,'' says Douglas B. MacDonald, MWRA executive director. ``There will still be some things we want to do, to polish up with better stormwater controls.''
Indeed, if the question is what more could be done to cleanse the harbor, rainwater runoff from streets and neighborhoods represents a sort of final frontier.
In a typical Boston weather year (if such a thing can be said to exist) with 43 inches of rainfall, about 52 percent of the water entering Boston Harbor comes from the Charles, Neponset, and Mystic rivers and Chelsea Creek. Another 3.3 percent - about 10 billion gallons of water - flows from city streets into the Charles below the Watertown Dam and the Neponset below Lower Mills Dam. The rest comes from the sewer network.
A decade from now, the only remaining source to target for big improvements in what enters the harbor will be those rivers, and especially the street drains that empty into them from Cambridge, the Back Bay, Dorchester, and Milton.
While the cost-benefit ratio for improving sewage treatment and fixing combined sewer overflows is known, it's not yet clear how much cleaning up street runoff - which would require stepped-up municipal street sweeping and expensive catch-basin improvements - could cost for each increment of water-quality benefit.
Despite some anxiety about the public's willingness to bear the ongoing costs of further cleaning the harbor and keeping Deer Island running at peak performance, many officials are optimistic that Boston Harbor has reached a point of no return. To many, it is unimaginable that it could be allowed to slip back to the worst days of the 1970s and 1980s.
``There are porpoises out there now, and thousands of people visiting the beaches every summer,'' says David B. Struhs, the state environmental protection commissioner. ``They have become a constituency for the harbor whether they know it or not.
``Deer Island is such a professionally run operation, it's unrivaled. Our problem now is finding enough kids who want to work as lifeguards at the beaches,'' says Struhs. ``I don't see any chance of backsliding in my lifetime.''
Peter J. Howe is a Globe environment and technology reporter.
