A rare opportunity to lock in legal requirements to help protect Alewife Brook for years to come.

Tuesday April 9th at 7 PM

MassDEP has proposed another “Water Quality Variance” to waive water quality standards for Alewife Brook for up to five years. The variance would allow Cambridge, Somerville, and MWRA to continue to dump untreated sewage from their Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs) into the brook while they finalize their new Long Term Control Plan (LTCP) to control CSO discharges. The polluters were granted a three-year extension to submit that plan.

This public comment hearing is our chance to demand that DEP include protections for our community in the variance. We can’t wait for action until the new CSO control plan takes effect in 2027. DEP must require Cambridge, Somerville, and MWRA to reduce CSO sewage discharges NOW! DEP has not yet agreed to do so.

Whether you live in the floodplain, jog, commute, cycle, walk your dog, stroll with your kids, watch birds, or play your guitar on a bench along Alewife Brook, this Public Hearing is for YOU.

You’ll have up to 3 minutes to tell your story about why you love the Alewife, and why it’s important to you that MassDEP end the dumping of sewage in our brook.

Demand a safe, healthy, boatable Alewife Brook NOW!

Ultimately, we want an end to CSO discharges in Alewife Brook. We want to enjoy it as a brook and not see it used as an overflow sewer. Then no water quality variance would be required.

In the meantime, we demand that DEP include the following protections for the Alewife Brook community in the CSO Variance:

• An on-site warning-light notification system for the Alewife Greenway, so we know when CSOs are discharging sewage into our park, sewage that often floods over the path
• Green Infrastructure to capture stormwater and reduce CSO discharges NOW
• Action NOW to address massive sewage discharge volumes at Somerville’s Tannery Brook CSO (SOM001A) & Cambridge’s Alewife T Station CSO (CAM401A) before the new CSO control plan goes into effect in 2027
• Consequences for the polluters for their failure to meet Boston Harbor Clean-Up Court Case requirements for Alewife Brook CSOs
• Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act (MEPA) review of the new draft LTCP before the plan is set in stone
• A requirement that the polluters continue to work to eliminate sewage discharges in the Alewife Brook even if the Boston Harbor Court Case is resolved
• Ongoing community involvement in variance decision making, with input from the Department of Conservation and Recreation and waterbody advocacy groups on how direct measures like sediment removal, channel maintenance, and habitat restoration can improve water quality and support boating, fishing, and other recreational uses of the Alewife
• Requirements informed by actual volumes of sewage discharged, not based on hypothetical “Typical Year” modeling

For more information:
Download MassDEP’s variance fact sheets here and here.
And the full language of the proposed variance here.

Please register today. Come to the hearing. Ask MassDEP to protect our community’s health.

Special Alewife Sewage Pollution Hearing
Tuesday, April 9th at 7 pm
Zoom REGISTER HERE

Please register now. There is power in numbers.

A Real Hearing on Alewife Sewage Pollution. Finally.

Demand an End to Untreated Sewage Pollution.

A safe neighborhood and path for walkers, joggers, and cyclists.

An on-site beacon light sewage warning notification system on the Alewife Greenway Path.

Hold Somerville accountable for being out of compliance.

Tuesday, April 9th at 7 pm
Zoom REGISTER HERE

You will not be silenced
with another boring MWRA PowerPoint Presentation.
Everyone will have an opportunity to speak.

On March 21, 2024, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection hosted a meeting at their headquarters in Boston where we talked about Alewife Brook Water Quality. The main topic was the issuance of a new Alewife Brook CSO ‘variance’, which would allow MWRA, Cambridge, and Somerville to continue to dump untreated sewage into Alewife Brook until they have a new approved sewage pollution control plan.

Save the Alewife Brook Steering Committee members were psyched to meet at DEP HQ along with other river advocates from the Mystic River and Charles River Watershed Associations. Also present were folks from Cambridge,  Somerville, and  the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority.

We were so grateful for the opportunity to meet with MassDEP.
Thank you, MassDEP!

And we have some great news to share:

MassDEP has agreed to hold a special public hearing in early April for the Alewife.

You will be invited to come to that hearing and speak out for Alewife Brook. 

The Brook needs you there, so MassDEP will continue to see that many people support ending the dumping of raw sewage in the Brook. Please plan to join us.

There is power in numbers! Stay tuned for details about the upcoming hearing.

Join us on Saturday morning, April 13^th, for an Early Earth Day Alewife Greenway Path Clean-Up and CSO Tour. We will gather trash along the path next to the brook. While we’re there, we’ll provide a tour of the Combined Sewer Outfalls and the Concrete Sewage Death Channel.

We’ll discuss what we’re doing together, to make Alewife Brook fishable, boatable, and safe, for the enjoyment of all.

Come listen to BABAM the activist brass band!

• Bring gloves, water, & garbage picker, if you have one. We’ll provide bags.
• Meet at Bicentennial Park at Mass Ave and Boulevard Road at 10:15 am on Saturday, April 13^th
• Free Kolsvart Swedish Fish, T-shirts, & boat bags for volunteers to help spread the word!

Participants take individual responsibility for their own safety, avoiding touching any suspect items.

Sign up for this event here:

Join Save the Alewife Brook

in person or remotely via ZOOM

Wednesday, October 25th at 1 PM

Support House Bill 886 ~ An Act Relative to Combined Sewer Overflows
A Sensible, Achievable, and Necessary Response to Raw Sewage Being Dumped into our Waterways through Combined Sewer Outfalls

Register to speak about the second to last bill, H.886.
The deadline to register to testify, either in person or virtually, is Monday, October 23rd at noon. So please register right now!

Come to the hearing, either in person or online! When it’s your turn to speak, please say that you want the committee immediately to issue a favorable report on H.886, and express your concerns that CSOs are contaminating Alewife Brook.
If you have a personal story, those are most compelling. You will have only three minutes to speak, so you’ll need to be concise.

We need state legislation to end sewage being dumped in our waterways because MWRA has told us it has no intention of going beyond the bare minimum federal law requires them to do. 

H.886 is realistic, outcome-oriented, and consistent with current technologies and procedures:

Recognizing that some CSOs may need to discharge in large storms to prevent sewer backups for some time, this legislation requires that, in 10 years, each of the CSOs then in the MWRA sewer service area either:

1. Have the treatment across the system now provided at only five CSOs; 

or

2. Ensure that CSOs only activate during 25+year storms, and not during smaller storms (five CSOs along Dorchester Bay already have 25-year level of control)

For more information about this legislation, watch the public CSO briefing for legislators (organized by the Charles and Mystic River Watershed Associations), on October 19th:

Join us in the Sunday Parade!

SUNDAY OCTOBER 8, from 11 am to 1:30 pm

at 11 am gather at the Day Street Parking Lot 
in Davis Square, Somerville
ending in Harvard Square, Cambridge, at around 1:30 pm

Parade with Save the Alewife Brook, musicians, and puppeteers. Join us, to demand a safe, clean, and restored brook, for all species who live in and around the Alewife Brook.

Sara Peattie‘s Puppeteers Cooperative  is planning a FISH FUNERAL for us!

Wear a free Save the Alewife Brook t-shirt and carry a GHOST FISH when you join us in the parade!

Name *

First

Last

Email *

Click here to RSVP for the HONK! Parade

Add event to calendar

Cecily Miller from Arts Arlington has made this video to explain the HONK! Festival. More info about HONK! Festival here.

Governor Maura Healey’s first budget includes $100,000 for the Alewife Brook. Funding will go through Mystic River Watershed Association for a hydraulic and dredging study.

Construction of the Alewife channel with a crane dredge, circa 1909.
From the Department of Conservation and Recreation,
courtesy Massachusetts State Archives.

Why do we need a study of the brook?

A dredging and hydraulic study is needed to find solutions to the problems of flooding and poor water quality in the Alewife Brook. It is the first step needed to attract State and Federal Funding to address these problems. 

In 2022, the EPA wrote to MWRA, asking the agency to work with the Department of Conservation and Recreation to remove sediment from the brook. According to EPA: “the channelized nature of Alewife Brook, as well as the amount of sediment in the Alewife constructed channel, takes up flood storage capacity.”

Currently, water quality remains poor even on dry weather days when a lack of CSO and stormwater discharges should mean better water quality. Dredging sediment would improve water quality by removing contaminants and reducing bacterial counts in the water on dry weather days. 

Thanks to our Awesome Alewife Lawmakers!

Dave Rogers, 24th Middlesex (East Arlington & North Cambridge)

Dave Rogers, his Chief of Staff Kira Arnott, and his Aide George Armstrong worked with Save the Alewife Brook and Mystic River Watershed Association to craft the Alewife Brook budget amendment.

Representatives Sean Garballey (Arlington) and Christine Barber (Somerville) co-sponsored the request in the House Budget. Senator Pat Jehlen (Cambridge & Somerville) submitted it for the Senate Budget. We also want to thank Alewife area Senators Cindy Friedman (Arlington) and Will Brownsberger (Belmont) for supporting funding for the Alewife.

Thank YOU & thanks to EPA!

Honestly, this wouldn’t have happened without EPA’s recommendation and without your interest in a safe and healthy Alewife Brook. Thanks everybody!

Plans for dredging and removal of Alewife Brook concrete channel, page 43 of the MDC 2003 Alewife Master Plan Courtesy Massachusetts State Archives

Please sign the following email petition:

Michele Barden
EPA Region 1
5 Post Office Square, Suite 100 (06-1)
Boston, MA 02109

RE: NPDES MA0103284, Part I. B. 2. b.(8)

You can’t dump untreated sewage into Alewife Brook without telling us. There are too many of us living too close to it.

The Alewife Greenway/Bike path is a vital community transportation corridor. The Alewife Brook flooded over its bank and into the path after the downpour on August 8th, 2023.

No one using the path knew that millions of gallons of untreated sewage had been discharged into the water they were walking, jogging, and pushing baby carriages through.

The existing public Combined Sewer Overflow notification system is a failure.

People using the Alewife Greenway path need to know whether a particular CSO is discharging. They need to know immediately if the discharge has made using the Alewife path unsafe. They also need to know when an elevated level of risk has passed.

Technology has matured enough to allow an enhanced public notification system that operates in real-time. As an example, CSO Event Indicator Lights are required on the Potomac River [1].

A similar system should be required along the Alewife.

Our experience is that Massachusetts’ Sewage Notification Law is inadequate to protect us. EPA must expand on the public notification requirements in the Draft Permit to offer our community real protection.

[1] NPDES Permit No. DC002l 199 Part B, Sec.III, (h) Public Notification (1)

^{Sewage-contaminated Alewife Greenway. Shot at 3 pm on August 8th, 2023 by David Stoff.}

This is not Alewife Brook – it’s the Alewife Greenway under sewage flood water!

The public has a legal right to know when hazardous, untreated sewage is discharged into Alewife Brook because it is a serious health risk, especially during flood events. But residents are not informed. On Tuesday, August 8th, 2023, folks had no idea they were walking through water on the Alewife Greenway path that was contaminated with hazardous human and industrial waste. 

The Sewage Pollution Notification System is NOT working.

What Happened?

It rained fast and furiously on Tuesday, August 8th. We witnessed an intense burst of heavy downpours. Arlington Conservation Commissioner David White measured 2 1/2” of rain in 2 hours at his house. Many local streets were flooded.  This type of storm is becoming the new normal due to Climate Change.

Cambridge, Somerville, and Massachusetts Water Resource Authority’s inadequate combined sewer systems were quickly overwhelmed by stormwater and dumped millions of gallons of untreated human sewage into the Alewife Brook. The brook overflowed its banks and flooded the Alewife Greenway, a popular transportation corridor that runs through multiple Environmental Justice Community neighborhoods.

Neighbors, unaware of the sewage discharge, jogged, pushed baby carriages, and rode bikes through the contaminated water.

The law is being abused.

Although state and federal law requires that the public be notified when sewage is dumped into the brook, the existing warning system failed. Residents were not notified in a way that prevented their exposure to untreated sewage.

Our neighbors had no idea that millions of gallons of untreated sewage had been dumped 500 feet upstream of the water they were wading through.

The Massachusetts Sewage Notification law requires local Boards of Health to post Public Health advisories after being notified of a sewage discharge. A physical sign must be posted to warn the community. By 1:00 PM Tuesday, public email discharge notifications from MWRA and local sewer operators had been issued. Yet there was no warning posted.

Public Health Advisory.

Where’s the required Public Health Advisory? The answer is: nowhere. State regulators are not enforcing the law.

There are overlapping State and Federal Public Notification requirements. In addition to the State law, the National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit for the Alewife sewers also requires that the public be notified when sewers overflow.

The public must be provided with same-day, on-site notice of sewage discharges. This is standard practice elsewhere and should be afforded to our community.

Our neighbors deserve to know!

_{Out of frustration Save the Alewife Brook’s David Stoff posted this sign to warn neighbors about the sewage.}

he State of Massachusetts, through its agency the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, unfairly uses Alewife Brook poor water quality to justify not spending money to end sewage pollution. 

How does this make any sense? Well, it doesn’t. So here’s an analogy which might help the reader to better understand the MWRA’s poor thinking on the matter:

Imagine that it’s a rainy day and the city of Cambridge is driving a car on Route 16. Cambridge comes to the stop light at Mass Ave, rolls down the window, and throws a bag of stinky diapers onto the side of the parkway. MWRA is driving in a car behind them, sees Cambridge’s pollution and thinks, “Hey, why should I pay to properly dispose of my stinky adult diapers when I can just toss them out the window? There’s already some pollution here!” 

This is how the Alewife Brook’s poor water quality has been weaponized by the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority. The MWRA’s spurious argument against investment in improving public health conditions in the Alewife has been that the Brook is polluted and eliminating untreated sewage pollution will not yield a great enough improvement in water quality.

The Alewife Brook Concrete Open Overflow Sewer. Photo courtesy of MWRA.

The Causes of Poor Water Quality

The major causes of poor water quality in Alewife Brook are combined sewer discharges (which contain untreated sewage), stormwater runoff, stormwater outfalls (which may also contain sewage), and accumulating contaminated sediments. The sediment contamination comes from sewage, stormwater, and discharges from local industry. It accumulates in the Alewife Brook’s concrete channel, and compounds the problem over time. Further upstream, pollution from Belmont flows from Winn Brook to Little River to Alewife Brook.  

These factors all contribute to poor water quality, but their relative importance is not clearly understood. Some observations can be found in the MWRA water quality report of 2014.¹  Figure 4-9 of that report shows that the CSO and stormwater control work performed from 1989-1991 and from 2000-2014 has significantly reduced E. coli counts in all conditions, especially in heavy rain.²  But on average, wet weather level counts are about ten times those of drier conditions. Dry weather counts are down some but are still above the violation threshold. It does not appear that stormwater is the only problem, rather that it is more complicated, and improvements are needed in many areas.   

³

Solutions to Improve Alewife Brook Water Quality

Sewer Separation

The cities of Cambridge and especially Somerville need an aggressive plan to separate stormwater from sewage.

Virtual Elimination of CSOs (25-year Level of Control) or a CSO Treatment Facility

The MWRA needs to come up with a plan to achieve what they call “Virtual Elimination of CSOs”, using alternatives including underground stormwater storage tanks on State land. Alternatively, the MWRA could build a CSO treatment facility for the Alewife CSOs to treat the sewage before it is discharged into the brook.

Green Stormwater Infrastructure

The cities of Cambridge and Somerville, the Department of Conservation and Recreation, and the Department of Transportation, need to use GSI to biologically improve stormwater water quality before it enters the brook.

Dredging, Dechannelization, Bank Restoration

In 2022, the EPA wrote to MWRA, asking the agency to work with the Department of Conservation and Recreation to remove sediment from the brook. Currently, water quality remains poor even on dry weather days when a lack of CSO and stormwater discharges should mean better water quality. Dredging sediment would improve water quality by removing contaminants and reducing bacterial counts in the water on dry weather days. 

Because the Alewife is such a small and slow-moving river, nothing more than a narrow concrete channel in some places, it has accumulated several feet of CSO-contaminated sediment. During most conditions, the sediment lies beneath a foot of water. During last summer’s drought, however, there were only a couple of inches of water above the sediment in places, and the stench was unbearable. High bacterial counts likely exist because the sediment contributes to the poor water quality.⁴

^{Alewife Brook dechannelization and restoration sketch from the Department of Conservation and Recreation’s  2003 Alewife Master Plan.}

Footnotes

1 “Summary of CSO Receiving Water Quality Monitoring in Upper Mystic River/Alewife Brook and Charles River, 2014”, MWRA Report 2015-06. https://www.mwra.com/harbor/enquad/pdf/2015-06.pdf
2 Note that the vertical graph scale is logarithmic with each marker being ten times greater than the one below it.
3 The dotted line shows the state geometrical mean standard for recreation of 33 counts/100 ml.The state single sample limit is 235 counts/100ml. It is that later standard that is used in determining the water quality grades.  
4 Ibid.

On May 17th, students from Cambridge’s Fayerweather Street School rallied to end the sewage pollution that is destroying our environment. They marched from their school to the Alewife Brook, where the 3rd & 4th Grade students leading the year-long watershed project had installed an educational public art exhibit.

Students also wrote letters to state legislators asking for their support of pending CSO bill House.886, and Representative Steve Owens was at Fayerweather to hear the speeches and singing, which preceded the students’ march to the river.

Photos courtesy of the Fayerweather School

Students Produced Powerful Messages

The signs that students carried on their march said:

Students Created Educational Environmental Art

The students installed an art exhibit near Cambridge’s worst Combined Sewer Outfall, CAM401A, behind the Alewife T parking garage. This space is owned by Green Cambridge, who generously offered it to the Fayerweather Street School for their inspiring project.

Thank you, Fayerweather Students!

Following the Fayerweather Street School’s March and Art Installation, Save the Alewife Brook has received many new signatures for our Petition to End Sewage Pollution.

On Saturday, April 22, 2023, Save the Alewife Brook volunteers met for an Earth Day Clean-up and environmental tour. We collected trash near three of the Alewife’s Combined Sewer Outfalls. 

The event began with a reading of Governor Maura Healey’s message to the volunteers. We distributed t-shirts and Kolsvart Swedish Fish. We then began the clean-up at Cambridge’s CAM401A, which is one of the worst sewage-spewing CSOs in the Alewife. It is located behind the deteriorating MBTA parking garage.

In 2021, the CAM401A CSO discharged over 21 million gallons of untreated sewage pollution into Alewife Brook. We stopped for a moment to reflect on this. Greg Harris from Green Cambridge and Friends of the Alewife Reservation was one of the Earth Day volunteers. He talked about the potential for replacing the deteriorating parking garage with Green Stormwater Infrastructure. There could be a stormwater wetlands there! A stormwater wetlands would clean and slow down stormwater during large storm events. 

We proceeded to clean up trash in the area and on the other side of the path over by MWR003, the MWRA’s Alewife CSO. In 2021, the MWRA discharged over 6 million gallons of untreated sewage pollution from that CSO. Here we met Rene Morin from Department of Conservation & Recreation. Rene was there to make sure we had a great Earth Day / DCR Park Serve Day and dispose of the trash we collected, including any hazardous materials. Sadly we needed his sharps container for the multiple syringes we found in the area. 

Guess what we found on Earth Day!

Volunteers found a discarded bra!

We then walked north along the Alewife Greenway towards Mass Ave, picking up trash along the path in Arlington. BABAM (Boston Area Brigade of Activist Musicians) marched up the path with us, playing protest songs.

BABAM crossed the brook with us to Cambridge and played, while we picked up trash over by David Stoff’s GHOST FISH art installation.

It was a wonderful event – we made new friends! And Rene Morin from DCR hauled away two big truckloads of trash... and quite a few syringes that he picked up!

Thanks to the Volunteers!

Alex Simmons * Ann McDonald * Annie Thompson * Audrey Bennett  * Beth Melofchik * Betty Widerski * Bob Tosi * Brian McBride * Claire Odom * Clare Nosowitz  * Cody Casanave * Courtney Gurll * Daniel O’shaughnessy * David Stoff * Ed De Moel * Elizabeth Burke * Erin McLaughlin * Gene Benson * Greg Harris * Gwen Speeth * Harvey Fenigsohn * Ian Forsythe * Imanuela Costiner * Jennifer Ingram * Jessica Kinner * Joel Snider * Judy Lyons * Kate Schell * Kristin Anderson * Lida Junghans * Lizzie Linn Casanave * Luchy Roa * Maeve Whitty * Mark Jewell * Mark Paglierani * Marsha Turin * Meredith DiMola & Family * Michael Cerone * Michael Everman * Peter Frumhoff * Rebecca Behizadeh * Robin Johnson * Ruth Loetterle * Samantha Barth * Sara Billingsley * Shaina Blitt * Steve Forrest * Sumita Austen * Suzanne McLeod * Toby Karlsson * Vincent Baudoin & Family * Zach Forrest * Zoe Simmons

Thanks to the band!

BABAM (Boston Area Brigade of Activist Musicians)

Special Thanks to Department of Conservation & Recreation!

Matthew Perry for helping to set up the Alewife Park Serve Day and to Rene Morin, who removed two DCR truckloads of trash!

Save the Alewife Brook Steering Committee Members:

Gwen Speeth, David Stoff, Gene Benson, Kristin Anderson, David White

Sunday, May 7th, 1:30–5:00

The Rindge Ave Greenway Plan Proposed by Friends of Jerry’s Pond

Music * Bangladeshi Dance * Food *
Arts & Crafts * Native American Fish Weir * Activities for Kids & Adults!

Meet your neighbors to celebrate the planned reopening of Jerry’s Pond!
Meet members of the IQHQ team and community groups.
Make art, see Audubon’s animals, remove invasives, weed native gardens, clean around pond.

Meet at Russell Field Parking Area
1:30-2:00 Music, Food & Art
2:00-2:30 Bangladeshi Dancing, Gathering & Intros
2:30-4:30 Projects & Activities
4:30-5:00 Back to Parking Area & Wrap Up

Sponsored by: Friends of Jerry’s Pond facebook.com/jerryspond
Cosponsors: Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui, IQHQ, Mass Audubon Society,
Green Cambridge, Mothers Out Front, Just-A-Start Inc., Devine Native
Plantings, History Cambridge, Many Helping Hands 365, North
Cambridge Arts, Cambridge City Growers, Highlands-Quad
Neighborhood Association, Fresh Pond Residents Alliance, Save the
Alewife Brook, Alewife Study Group

Join us Saturday morning, April 22^nd, for an Earth Day Alewife Greenway Path Clean-Up and CSO Tour! We’ll be working to gather trash along the path next to the brook. While we’re there, we will provide a tour of the Concrete Sewage Death Channel and the CSOs. Come see GHOST FISH art and listen to Babam the brass band!  

• Bring gloves, water, & garbage picker, if you have one. We’ll provide bags.
• Meet at Thorndike Field Dog Park at 9:15 am on Saturday, April 22^nd
• We’ll proceed in intermittent/light rain. No rain date.
• Free t-shirts for volunteers to help spread the word! (while supplies last)

Participants take individual responsibility for their own safety, avoiding touching any suspect items.

Sign up for this event here:

Exciting news! New state legislation, HD3316, has been filed that would greatly improve water quality in the rivers and streams throughout the Boston area as shown on this map. It would limit the dumping of untreated sewage pollution and potentially leading to the building of new treatment facilities. 

This legislation would bring the same level of sewage pollution reduction in the Alewife that is afforded along the bay in Boston Harbor, which makes recreational swimming possible on Boston beaches. This is something that the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority and the cities can do, and this legislation gives them ten years to accomplish this for the Alewife Brook.

Huge thanks go out to Representatives Dave Rogers and Adrian Madaro for introducing this legislation and to Representative Sean Garballey, for co-sponsoring! 

Dave Rogers Adrian Madaro   Sean Garballey

We’d also like to thank the Arlington Select Board for supporting this legislation. Co-Chair Diane Mahon, in particular, deserves our gratitude for her continued leadership on this issue.

Diane Mahon

A Huge Improvement for the Alewife Brook!

If it passes, this law would eliminate untreated discharges from CSOs except in larger storm events – meaning 25-year storms or larger. That would be a huge improvement for the Alewife Brook! To make sure the reduction in untreated CSOs can be achieved , the legislation gives the CSO permittees a decade to either reduce or eliminate CSO discharges, or to add treatment facilities.

to Tonight’s

CSO Powerpoint Presentation

Which is Meant to Make You Think that Alewife Brook Sewage Pollution is a Good Thing

Annotated Slides by David Stoff

Meeting materials can be downloaded from the documents tab here.

By “occasionally, excess flow”, they mean 51 Million Gallons of Untreated Sewage Pollution was dumped in the Alewife Brook in 2021.

Remember …

When they say “Sanitary Wastewater”, what they really mean is hazardous untreated sewage.

When they say “sewer overflows can’t be eliminated“, what they mean is the money they save by not fixing the problem is more important than you are.

When they say the stormwater is so dirty that it is a waste of money to eliminate sewage pollution discharges, what they mean is that they get to keep using the Alewife Brook as an open sewer until it’s so clean you could wade through it and not get sick.

Lastly… This Land is Your Land.

The Alewife Brook and its parkland is owned by the people. It was established in 1893 by the Metropolitan Parks Commission, under the guidance of visionary landscape architect Charles Eliot. Charles Elliot’s intention was to preserve parkland connections for the public which would

“provide fresh air, scenic beauty, and opportunities for quiet repose – antidotes to the ills of urban life.”

From The Trustees of Reservations website

Charles Elliot did not intend for the Alewife Brook and its parkland to remain a dangerous open sewer that makes people sick.

Alewife Sewage Pollution Control Public Meeting #2
Thursday, December 15th at 6 pm Zoom Register Here

1. EXPRESS Gratitude for Addressing Climate Change

We thank Cambridge, Somerville, and MWRA for agreeing to include Climate Change Projections in the updated sewage pollution control plan. If applied properly, this is a huge win for the Alewife Brook!

2. CALL FOR IMMEDIATE ACTIONS

Because the great cities of Cambridge and Somerville, and the MWRA are asking for an additional 36 months for their planning work, we are calling for:

3. CALL FOR IMPROVEMENTS IN NEW SEWAGE POLLUTION CONTROL PLAN

To date, we have collected 1000 petition signatures from good folks in Cambridge, Somerville, Arlington, Belmont, and Medford. The public demands the following improvements to the Alewife Brook sewage pollution problem:

* A hydrological, dredging, and dechannelization study will help determine important next steps. Sediment removal through dredging could improve Alewife Brook water quality and reduce flooding. Such a study will also lay the groundwork for applications of Federal and State funds to help restore the Brook.

In their 05/11/2022 letter to MWRA, EPA stated, “The channelized nature of Alewife Brook, as well as the amount of sediment in the Alewife constructed channel that takes up flood storage capacity (this sediment volume was estimated by USGS in 2005 to take up approximately 0.5 million cubic feet), exacerbates the flooding issue. MWRA has the technical staff and state public authority status to take a leadership role in convening additional agencies such as the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation (owner of the Alewife Brook and Mystic River Reservations) to start to identify potential projects.”

** Grey infrastructure might include a CSO treatment plant at the Alewife T, underground CSO detention tanks, and improved and accurate CSO volume and flow metering.

Alewife Sewage Pollution Control
Public Meeting #2
Thursday, December 15th at 6 pm
ZOOM REGISTER HERE

There is huge news about a new plan to make desperately needed improvements to the sewage pollution problem in the Alewife Brook. The Massachusetts Water Resources Authority has promised to include Climate Change projections in their planning of new area combined sewer infrastructure, in response to the Alewife Brook’s hazardous raw sewage pollution problem.

Including Climate Change projections in the planning of new sewer infrastructure modeling should be a huge win for water quality in the Alewife Brook and for the Environmental Justice Populations who are affected by it.

Thanks goes out to everyone who has stood up for Environmental Justice in the Alewife Brook. Note: we need to see you all at the Second Public CSO meeting, tentatively scheduled for December 15, 2022.

The weather should be good today. Take a three minute walk from Massachusetts Avenue, north along the Alewife Brook. And check out the kid-friendly Alewife GHOST FISH art installation and Somerville’s sewer outfall!

Before there was a sewer outfall at this location (behind the Homewood Suites Hotel), there was a second brook that met the Alewife Brook. 19th Century Cantabrigians called it the “Tannery Brook“. The Tannery Brook was used to discard hog bodies and other tannery waste products which polluted the water. Nowadays, the Tannery Brook is (un)dead and buried in a pipe that is attached to the sewer outfall. In 2021, this sewer outfall dumped 17.98 million gallons of untreated sewage pollution from Davis Square into the Alewife Brook.

A century before Cantabrigians polluted the Tannery Brook, the Alewife Brook was known by the native people as the Menotomies River. And it was the best place to catch Alewife fish! So plentiful were the Alewife fish, that the fish were used mainly for agricultural purposes, to fertilize soil for growing crops. The colonial settlers sited a fish trap, which is known as a weir, at this location. The settlers likely sited their fish weir on the remains of the native Pawtuckeog people’s fish weir.

Can you see the GHOST FISH? Can you hear the Pawtuckeog people and the sound of their Menotomies River?

The native people and their lost river are here, too.

How to get to there:

Take the Alewife Greenway behind the Homewood Suites Hotel at Mass Ave and Rte 16. The brown “x” marks the spot of the Ghost Fish Halloween Installation. This is a three minute walk from Massachusetts Avenue.

On Sunday October 9, 2022, thirty supporters of Save the Alewife Brook marched in HONK! Fest from Davis Square in Somerville to Harvard Square in Cambridge.

 Sara Peattie’s Puppeteers Cooperative marched with us, leading the way with a family of sea horses and the huge four-person puppet named Big Blue, the Goddess of Clean Water. Following the puppets was Kara Casey and her two water protectors, as the “Mermaid in Mourning”. The Mermaid was crying because she was covered in trash and other brook debris, dragging a long, clanking trail of bottles and cans. Following the Mermaid was a school of hand-made GHOST FISH swimming upstream, carried by folks in bright red shirts emblazoned with Alewife fish, chanting:

“STOP DUMPING SEWAGE IN THE ALEWIFE BROOK!”

There were thousands and thousands of people along Mass Ave, as we marched into Harvard Square! What an amazing day for a parade – there was not a cloud in the sky! Everybody was out to see the bright and noisy spectacle. SAVE THE ALEWIFE BROOK distributed hundreds of stickers and collected more signers for our email petition to end Alewife Brook sewage pollution and flooding in the face of Climate Change. 

Thanks to everyone who participated:

Cecily Miller, Sara Peattie, Kara Casey and family, Alida Castillo, Sue Janowitz,
Ann McDonald, Crystal Maier, Maggie Starvish, Beth Melofchik, Gilbert Martin, Matthew De Remer & family, Cullen Malone, Gerda Brown, Thomas Close,
Joel Snider, Veronique Bailly, Monique McNally and Barg, Gerda Brown,
Sandy Durmaskin, Diane Martin, Paige Gromfin, Jonathon Forbes, Jean Devine, David Stoff, Gwen Speeth, Kristin Anderson,
& The Mystic River Watershed Association.

Former President of Friends of the Alewife Reservation

Dear water protectors to Save the Alewife Brook,

After 20 years, your water quality campaign for watershed conservation is a great boon to the residents of the Alewife Upper Basin in Belmont, Arlington, Cambridge, Somerville and to the downstream Medford and Chelsea Creek communities, and for the protection of our Atlantic Ocean coast line as well.

We started our Friends of Alewife Reservation in 2000 to bring attention to watershed matters. Now 20 years later the group is with Green Cambridge. At that time, we did not have the scientific means to advocate for the area in the way you have now enlightened us in measuring the vast amount of pollution increase coming from fully discharging CSOs, or those that were not separated in 2013 by Cambridge. It is also true that today, there is the increased flow of dreaded pathogens coming through our towns and cities on the Mystic River watershed especially in the Alewife subwatershed of Belmont, Arlington, Cambridge and Somerville where, you point out in your reports and news briefs, much of Little River and Alewife Brook pollution comes from. 

By galvanizing caring community members to note the great open space and benefits and dangers posed by the Alewife waters, and our green corridor to Boston Harbor and the ocean, you show foresight of our New England climate change future. By providing proper mitigation demands which are part of the Boston Reports and city agreements regarding adaptation measures to prevent the severity of climate change flooding. Greening the corridor would do that as will cleaning out the river and brook toxins, and provide habitat for our well-established animals, birds, insects.  

The noted environmental firm Horsley and Witten provided my organization with an important Upper Basin report and spoke to the State House regarding the importance of the Belmont/Cambridge Forest which was removed for a developer. I hope you will sustain your outreach and ally with others who care about the urban wild, river, brook, ponds and increasing climate change, noting that the MBTA Alewife metropolitan transit artery is extremely low in water rise elevation, and the area is predicted to flood in 2050 by future climate specialists. 

Well-established hazard warning signs in the River and Brook by Cambridge and Somerville may assist in alerting the public to the dangers in the water quality. I hope you will have better results than my then organization had in gaining municipal support and extracting the needed funds from federal, state and municipal sources. Cleaning up this section of the watershed will continue to bring safe recreational, educational benefits, and protect our health and diminishing species in this densely populated region so rich in floodplain. Wishing you the best.

Ellen Mass

Cambridge
Former President, Friends of Alewife Reservation

Join us on Sunday April 24th at 6 PM

We have an opportunity now to promote our vision for a safer and more beautiful Alewife Brook. Please join us to discuss this on Sunday April 24th at 6 pm for Save the Alewife Brook’s April Community Meeting.

April Meeting Agenda:

• Draft Scopes for the new Alewife CSO Plans from MWRA, Somerville, & Cambridge.
• Climate Change & the MWRA’s “Typical Year” CSO Performance & Planning Model.
• Our Green & Grey Infrastructure “Crayon Sketches”, at MWRA’s request.
  

Our Vision for the Alewife…

• A Safe, Beautiful, Fishable Brook for the Residents and for Wildlife
• Separated Sewer Systems to keep Sewage out of Stormwater
• Elimination of all Alewife CSOs to End Sewage Pollution
• New Green Infrastructure to Clean the Stormwater
• An Additional Alewife Pumping Station Near Little River
• New Grey Infrastructure to Reduce Flooding in the Face of Climate Change

Join us Saturday morning, April 23^th, for an Earth Day Alewife Greenway Path Clean-Up and CSO Tour! We’ll be working with Everywhere Arlington Safe Streets to gather trash along the path next to the brook. While we’re there, we can show you the CSOs you’ve been hearing so much about. You’ll know us by our new red Save the Alewife Brook t-shirts. 

• Bring gloves, water, & garbage picker, if you have one. We’ll provide bags.
• Meet at Thorndike Field Dog Park at 9:15 am on Saturday, April 23^rd
• Steady rain date: Sunday, April 24^th (we’ll proceed in intermittent/light rain)
• Free t-shirts for volunteers to help spread the word! (while supplies last)

Participants take individual responsibility for their own safety, avoiding touching any suspect items.

Sign up for this event here:

On Saturday, 04/09/2022, the Boston Globe published our letter in response to the op ed, “The cleanup of Boston Harbor is incomplete”. (Note that we have subsequently determined that the 2021 Alewife discharges were over 50 million gallons.)

Arlington’s Award-Winning Town Engineer, Wayne Chouinard, also had a letter published about the CSOs:

In addition to being Arlington’s Town Engineer, Wayne Chouinard is also the Chair to the MWRA’s Wastewater Advisory Committee. We are very excited about his ideas for green infrastructure throughout the Alewife Watershed!

Note: Mr. Chouinard states that 90% of all MWRA CSO discharges are disinfected. But this is not true in the Alewife! Despite the amount of flooding, the MWRA continues to discharge hazardous untreated sewage into the Alewife Brook. After major flood events, this results in painful digestive disease in the area’s Environment Justice populations who risk a more adverse outcome to exposure to untreated sewage.

Would you like to help flyer a neighborhood in Cambridge or Somerville that is connected to the sewer outfalls on the Alewife Brook?

Please help our grassroots effort in North Cambridge and West Somerville, hanging our “Please don’t flush when it rains” flyers. We will be visiting neighborhoods that are still hooked up to the 19th century combined sewage pipes that are polluting the Alewife Brook.

Many people believe that the MWRA and the cities of Cambridge and Somerville have fixed the problem of the combined sewage pollution. We need to let everyone know that the problem of sewage pollution in spite of some efforts has become exponentially worse because of Climate Change. And we need more people from Cambridge and Somerville to sign our new Email Petition to End Sewage Pollution!

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Register for Flyering Volunteering

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It’s fun to walk around and explore new streets and meet new people! And the weather is so nice now. Please bring your friendly children and your awesome dog. You can check out the map that is linked at the button below. We will be flyering the “D37”, “D39”, and “D41” neighborhoods of North Cambridge.

At the March 4th, 2022 Massachusetts Water Resources Authority’s (MWRA) Wastewater Advisory Committee meeting, core activists from Save the Alewife Brook learned something awful about Belmont’s sewage.

In 2015, the MWRA reconstructed a Combined Sewer Outfall (CSO) known as MWR003 in the Little River/Alewife Brook. They did this as part of the 2006 Long Term Control Plan that closed the CAM004 CSO. However last year, MWR003 dumped 20 million gallons of sewage pollution into the Little River / Alewife Brook (although their model predicted 1 million for a typical year). The project also cost the MWRA rate payers $3.7 million.

The MWRA tied sewer trunks from Cambridge and Belmont into this CSO to provide “hydraulic relief” for their failing and over-capacitated system downstream. So now, when the MWRA’s Alewife sewage system is inundated with rain, Cambridge’s and Belmont’s sewage gets dumped into the Little River / Alewife Brook.

We think that as part of the original Long Term CSO Control Plan, this “solution” to the CSO problem was not much of a solution at all. The MWRA has basically shifted the problem around and not fixed the systemic problem of their failing sewage system throughout the Alewife.

Here’s a link to Cambridge’s super cool online viewer which you can use to see the sewer lines into the CSO known as MWR003: https://gis.cambridgema.gov/map/Viewer.aspx?state=418621675429

Reminder:
Join us on Tomorrow – Sunday Night! March 13th at 7 PM

Please join us on Sunday March 13th at 7 pm for Save the Alewife Brook’s March Community Meeting!

Talking Points

THURSDAY FEB 17th at 10 AM
CLICK HERE FOR MWRA’s online meeting!
Access Code: 2331 962 5386
Password: February17

The Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA) is holding a briefing at 10 am on Thursday February 17 for their Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) project’s Final Report. 

This meeting is a final milestone in the completion of the several decades’ long project to clean up Boston Harbor.

As part of that miraculous effort, half of the CSOs in the Alewife Brook were closed. But six Alewife CSOs remain. In 2021, those CSOs discharged 50 MILLION GALLONS OF SEWAGE WATER into the Alewife Brook. That’s the same volume as they discharged in 1997, before any work was done. This is a serious health problem in the Alewife area because it is naturally flood-prone. Known as The Great Swamp, the Alewife has been flooding for centuries. And sewage-contaminated flood water enters resident’s homes, yards, and parks.

FLOODING & COMMUNITY HEALTH ISSUES ARE IGNORED
The MWRA has been ignoring the health impacts that the CSOs have on Alewife residents when it floods.

• There are an estimated 5000 residents living in the Alewife’s 100-year flood plain.
• Hazardous sewage-contaminated flood water enters the homes, yards, and parks of area residents during major storms.
• Untreated sewage contains pathogens including Hepatitis, Salmonella, COVID-19, cholera, dysentery,  bad headaches, bloody diarrhea, abdominal cramps, fever, nausea, vomiting, and dehydration.
• The community living in the 100-year flood plain is the area’s most vulnerable and diverse population. This population is also the most susceptible to bad health outcomes from exposure to pathogens in the untreated sewage flood water. This is an Environmental Justice issue.
• Because the Alewife is naturally flood prone, the residents who live near the Alewife CSOs are disproportionately impacted by these particular CSOs in the MWRA’s system. Therefore, we must have a plan to end all Alewife sewage pollution.

SEWAGE POLLUTION IS WORSE THAN STREET WATER RUNOFF / STORMWATER
The MWRA believes that the CSO sewage pollution is OK because the street water runoff / stormwater in the brook is not clean.

• We are obviously way more concerned about the much worse health impacts of exposure to untreated sewage than we are to street water / stormwater runoff. But, let’s end the sewage pollution and tackle stormwater water quality at the same time, through a new CSO plan that includes green and grey infrastructure!
• Arlington has been investing and continues to invest in improving its stormwater through the work of its Environmental-Award-Winning engineer, Wayne Chouinard, and its MS4 program. Other municipalities along Alewife Brook are doing so as well.

THE ALEWIFE NEEDS A NEW CSO PLAN THAT ENDS SEWAGE POLLUTION IN THE FACE OF CLIMATE CHANGE
In six weeks, the MWRA, Somerville, and Cambridge will have to submit new CSO Long Term Control Plan (LTCP) plans. The MWRA’s old CSO plan ignored Climate Change effects.

• The first CSO plan eliminated half of the Alewife CSOs. The new plan should eliminate the other half, fully eliminating Alewife sewage pollution.
• Cambridge got a beautiful constructed wetlands park on state land which cleans their stormwater and reduces flooding. Somerville and Arlington should have the same thing. We want to see stormwater improvements through green and grey infrastructure in a new Long Term Control Plan!
• The original CSO plan is over twenty years old and ignored Climate Change. A new plan must take into consideration the changes in precipitation due to Global Warming.
• The MWRA’s Alewife CSO (MWR003) discharged 20 million gallons of sewage water in 2021. It needs to be eliminated by installing a pumping station.  Cambridge and Somerville CSOs need full sewer separation and green and grey infrastructure to clean the storm water and reduce flooding.
• Climate Change will lead to an increase in CSO activations and even more sewage pollution. There will be a snowball effect, where it gets worse faster and faster. Therefore, all Alewife CSOs must be eliminated.

THURSDAY FEB 17th at 10 AM
CLICK HERE FOR MWRA’s online meeting!
Access Code: 2331 962 5386
Password: February17

By Kristin Anderson and David White
This article was originally published Sunday, January 16, 2022 at Cambridge Day

Fifty million gallons of sewage-contaminated stormwater were discharged into the Alewife Brook from the cities of Cambridge and Somerville in 2021, according to websites for those two cities and the Metropolitan Water Resources Authority. There was as much sewage-contaminated water discharged into the Alewife Brook last year as in 1997, before the implementation of a $200 million plan to modernize the area’s antique combined sewer systems.

Pollution persists in the Alewife sub-watershed because the area, already prone to flooding, is densely developed with impervious surfaces including pavement, rooftops and sidewalks. To make the matter worse, during major flood events when the Mystic River rises, it flows backward into the Alewife Brook, reversing the brook’s direction. This conveys the contaminated floodwater containing untreated sewage back upstream through vulnerable neighborhoods in North Cambridge and East Arlington, into the Little River and Belmont, and into residents’ homes, yards and parks. The situation is expected to get worse due to climate change.

Cambridge shares the concerns of environmentalists watching the discharge levels and in the past 20 years has completed more than 20 large sewer separation and stormwater holding tank projects, said Kathy Watkins, the city’s assistant commissioner for engineering. “It’s a continuous improvement program we’re committed to.”

But last year was extraordinary in its power to overtake the improvements the city has made: “The latest data I’ve seen shows 2021 was the 16th wettest year on record, and July was the wettest on record since 1895,” Watkins said. “The [work since 1997] has been an incredible success, but the work is not done.”

Cambridge staff also parts ways with some advocates on the emphasis placed on floodwater management. It’s made decreasing flooding a priority with the installation of a dozen stormwater tanks, including the latest at Parking Lot 6 on Bishop Allen Drive, which captured roughly 3.5 million gallons of stormwater last summer that gets stored and pumped into the system when it’s safe, Watkins said. The next project is a 1.3 million gallon tank and 100,000-gallon bioretention basin at the Tobin School campus.

“Sewer separation does not address flooding. In some ways it can actually exacerbate flooding. So when we’re looking at reducing flooding, we look at things like stormwater tanks, we look at how our system is designed, we look at how properties are designed when people are redeveloping their property,” Watkins said.

Many alarmed by sewage-contaminated discharges have a different focus: combined sewer overflow.

What is a CSO?

A combined sewer overflow is the discharge of untreated sewage mixed with stormwater into local waterways. These overflows happen when heavy rains or snowmelt overwhelm a sewer system where sewage and stormwater pipes are connected. Normally, these pipes send sewage to the Deer Island treatment plant, but when they overflow, sewage flows out through the stormwater pipes into rivers and brooks such as Alewife Brook and the Little River.

Cambridge and Somerville have been sending untreated sewage mixed with stormwater directly into the Alewife Brook through sewer outfalls – a pipe or conduit that carries stormwater (sometimes combined with raw sewage) into a body of water. These sewers, relics of combined sewer systems from the 19th century, are known as “one-pipe systems.”

The combined sewer system carries stormwater, industrial wastewater and untreated domestic sewage away in a single pipe out to the Deer Island water treatment plant. This one-pipe system is often overwhelmed during and after storms, when a mix of untreated sewage and stormwater is discharged, via outfalls, directly into the Alewife Brook. Rains, tides and river currents carry the pollution to Boston Harbor via the Mystic River.

As a result of the landmark Conservation Law Foundation Boston Harbor cleanup court case in the 1980s, the Environmental Protection Agency enforced the Clean Water Act and required that the CSO pollution end. The act created federal standards for discharges of pollution. The state Legislature then created the MWRA to manage and modernize the Boston water and sewer system, including building the sewage treatment facility at Deer Island. It was determined that the cost of totally replacing the existing CSO system would be very expensive and burdensome to the ratepayers, especially in less affluent communities. Thus a political compromise was made to only do part of the work.

The 12-year plan to fix CSOs

For the Little River-Alewife Brook watershed, the plan was to eliminate half of the Alewife CSOs and create a wetland in Alewife Reservation to clean some of the discharge. According to the DEP’s 2019 Alewife Mystic Final Variance Fact Sheet, the initiative promised the public an 85 percent reduction in sewage pollution while satisfying a Department of Environmental Protection requirement that improvements were being made. The Long Term CSO Control Plan split this work into seven large projects that took more than a dozen years to complete. All of this work was finished by 2015.

Victory was declared at a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the newly created Alewife Reservation Constructed Wetland in North Cambridge. This celebratory event marked the completion of the first LTCP for remediating the CSOs. Cambridge had good reason to celebrate: This project is a rare example of cutting-edge bioengineered green infrastructure.

The wetland collects stormwater from Cambridge’s Huron Village neighborhood north to Fresh Pond Parkway. The stormwater is pumped from the surrounding commercial and residential areas into a holding tank known as a “forebay,” in which sediment settles before the water is released into the wetland to be biologically filtered for contaminants and conveyed into the Little River just above where it becomes the Alewife Brook at the Minuteman Trail footbridge.=

To many people, this beautiful park appears to be an urban wild, with its trails, 119,000 native plantings, great blue herons, ducks, swans, eels and other wildlife. But it is so much more than that. The wetland provides flood relief and reduces sewage pollution via bioremediation while helping to protect Cambridge’s water supply at Fresh Pond. Built wetlands are tertiary treatment systems that use natural processes involving wetland vegetation, soils and their associated microbial assemblages to improve water quality, according to the EPA.

It is hard to imagine how much worse off the area would be without the work that was completed in 2015, local environmentalists say.

Pollution persists

The “PL6” stormwater tank in The Port is seen under construction. It came online in 2020. (Photo: City of Cambridge)

How is it possible that after all the work to reduce discharges, 2021 saw the same volume of hazardous pollution as before the investments and CSO activations that are six times worse than the original plan promised?

Environmentalists say the answer is probably a combination of factors such as climate change and the wetness of the year, construction with rooftops, roads and parking lots made of impervious materials, vanishing trees and vegetation that used to slurp up groundwater and new developments tied into combined sewer system lines that reduce system capacity.

There is a problem with “illicit connections” at developments – where construction connects to a stormwater system instead of a drainage system – that communities are required to identify and remove, Watkins said. (Belmont, which has a system flowing to the Alewife Brook, is under an Environmental Protection Agency consent order to address illicit connections.) In Cambridge, larger development that tie into the sewer main must remove four gallons of water from the sewer system for every gallon they put in, Watkins said.

In April 2019, Cambridge introduced a Ten Year Sewer and Drain Infrastructure Plan that includes eliminate sanitary sewer overflows and reducing CSOs among its seven priorities and objectives.

Some environmentalists propose a second Long Term Control Plan that would expand on the original’s sewer separation and green infrastructure, including bio basins, bioswales, planter boxes, rain gardens and permeable-asphalt roads, as well as closing the remaining Alewife Brook outfalls and adding a holding tank for stormwater with extra capacity and another bioengineered wetland park with trails and native plantings.

In addition to sewer infrastructure upgrades, experts say improvements around the Mystic River must be made to reduce flooding. An important key to controlling Alewife area flooding is the proper operation, maintenance and upgrades at the Amelia Earhart Dam. If the Amelia Earhart Dam is breached or flanked during future storms, a surge of water will be pushed up the Mystic into the Alewife Brook and into the neighborhoods of vulnerable populations.

“I always see these things as ‘yes, and,’” Watkins said. “Sewer separation is a part of it. Reducing combined sewer overflows is certainly a part of it. But there are other strategies as well that are important and may have a more significant impact on decreasing flooding and improving water quality.”

Topography and flooding

A review of federal flood maps reveals an estimated 3,500 Cantabrigians, 1,200 East Arlington residents and 300 Belmont residents living in the Little River-Alewife Reservation’s 100-year floodplain – a number that does not count the 643 residents in housing on the former Belmont Uplands/Silver Maple Forest site who could be stranded and surrounded by water in the event of a 100-year flood.

The Mystic River and Alewife Brook are below the mean high-tide level of Boston Harbor and have historically been tidal, with the water flow direction changing with the tide. For many years, this tidal flow was used to power mills.

Because of pollution and malaria concerns, the river flows were changed in 1909 with the construction of the Craddock Dam and tidal gates at Medford Center. This dam was replaced in 1966 by the Amelia Earhart Dam and pumping station at the mouth of the Mystic that pumps water into the harbor as needed to maintain a predictable water level.

The Amelia Earhart Dam is considered key to reducing flooding in the Mystic River and Alewife Brook. If the Mystic rises too high, water can flow backward in Alewife Brook toward Cambridge and Belmont. With global warming and sea-level rise, this dam will have to be reinforced to continue to protect the Mystic and the Alewife.

“The dams are critical in terms of providing protection to upstream communities,” Watkins said. The past year saw good progress in working with other municipalities and the state on what it would take to raise the dams by 4 feet and providing relief to a dozen communities with more than 108,000 residents and $60 billion-plus in real estate value. “We are we are working incredibly hard in terms of making sure this is a priority for the state.”

A version of this story appeared originally on the Belmont Citizens Forum.

Marc Levy contributed to this report.

This article was originally edited by Jeff North and published at the Belmont Citizens Forum: Fifty Million Gallons of Sewage Released

Discharges to Alewife Brook Have Persisted for Two Decades

By Kristin Anderson and David White

Fifty million gallons of sewage-contaminated stormwater have been discharged into the Alewife Brook from the cities of Cambridge and Somerville in 2021, according to websites for those two cities and the Metropolitan Water Resources Authority (MWRA) for the Alewife/Upper Mystic Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO). There has been as much sewage-contaminated water discharged into the Alewife Brook in 2021 as there was in 1997 before the implementation of a $200 million plan to modernize the area’s antique combined sewer systems. 

Pollution persists in the Alewife sub-watershed because the area, already prone to flooding, is densely developed with impervious surfaces including pavement, rooftops, and sidewalks. To make the matter worse, during major flood events when the Mystic River rises, it flows backward into the Alewife Brook, reversing the brook’s direction. This conveys the contaminated flood water containing untreated sewage back upstream through vulnerable neighborhoods in East Arlington and North Cambridge, into the Little River and Belmont, and into residents’ homes, yards, and parks. The situation is expected to get worse due to climate change. 

Sewage discharges continue for decades

The reported 2021 discharge volume shows no reduction in the volume of discharge compared to the base year of 1997. That’s the year that the MWRA chose as the standard in its original Long Term CSO Control Plan (LTCP) to reduce the amount of combined sewage discharge in the Alewife/Upper Mystic River Basin.  

What is a CSO?

A combined sewer overflow (CSO) is the discharge of untreated sewage mixed with stormwater into local waterways. These overflows happen when heavy rains or snow melt overwhelm a sewer system where sewage and stormwater pipes are connected. Normally, these pipes send sewage to the Deer Island treatment plant, but when they overflow, sewage flows out through the stormwater pipes into rivers and brooks like the Little River and Alewife Brook.

Cambridge and Somerville have been sending untreated sewage mixed with stormwater directly into the Alewife Brook through sewer outfalls. An outfall is a pipe or conduit that carries stormwater (sometimes combined with raw sewage) into a body of water. These sewers, relics of combined sewer systems from the 19th century, are  known as “one-pipe systems.” 

The combined sewer system carries stormwater, industrial wastewater, and untreated domestic sewage away in a single pipe out to the Deer Island water treatment plant. This one-pipe system is often overwhelmed during and after storms, when a mix of untreated sewage and stormwater is discharged, via outfalls, directly into the Alewife Brook. Rains, tides, and river currents then carry the pollution to Boston Harbor via the Mystic River. 

As a result of the landmark Conservation Law Foundation Boston Harbor cleanup court case in the 1980s, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) enforced the Clean Water Act and required that the CSO pollution end. The Clean Water Act created federal standards for discharges of pollution. The Massachusetts Legislature then created the MWRA to manage and modernize the Boston water and sewer system, including creating the new sewage treatment facility at Deer Island. It was determined that the cost of totally replacing the existing CSO system would be very expensive and burdensome to the ratepayers, especially in less affluent communities. Thus a political compromise was made to only do part of the work. 

The 12-year plan to fix CSOs

For the Little River-Alewife Brook watershed, the plan was to eliminate half of the Alewife CSOs and construct a wetland in Alewife Reservation to clean some of the discharge. According to the DEP’s 2019 Alewife Mystic Final Variance Fact Sheet, the initiative to close and control the CSOs promised the public an 85% reduction in sewage pollution while satisfying the DEP requirement that improvements were being made. The  LTCP split this work into seven large projects which took more than a dozen years to complete. All of this work was finished by 2015. 

In 2015, victory was declared at a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the newly created Alewife Reservation Constructed Wetland in North Cambridge. This celebratory event marked the completion of the first LTCP for remediating the CSOs. Cambridge had good reason to celebrate: this project is a rare example of cutting-edge bioengineered green infrastructure. 

The wetland collects stormwater from Cambridge’s Huron Village neighborhood, north to Fresh Pond Parkway. The stormwater is pumped from the surrounding commercial and residential areas into a holding tank known as a “forebay,” where sediment is allowed to settle before the water is released into the wetland to be biologically filtered for contaminants and then conveyed into the Little River just above where it becomes the Alewife Brook at the Minuteman Trail footbridge. 

To many people, this beautiful park appears to be an urban wild, with its trails, 119,000 native plantings, great blue herons, ducks, swans, eels, and other wildlife. But it is so much more than that. The wetland provides flood relief and reduces sewage pollution via bioremediation while helping to protect Cambridge’s water supply at Fresh Pond. Constructed wetlands are tertiary treatment systems that use natural processes involving wetland vegetation, soils, and their associated microbial assemblages to improve water quality, according to the EPA.  

It is hard to imagine how much worse off the area would be without the excellent work that was completed in 2015.

Pollution persists today

How is it possible that in 2021, after all the work that was done to reduce the CSO discharges, that we are now experiencing the same volume of hazardous pollution as we did before making any investments in green and gray infrastructure? 

It has been a wet year, but that cannot completely explain the fact that the CSO activations are six times worse than the original LTCP promised. Sometimes just one inch of rain can activate a CSO in the Alewife Brook. 

Is the rate at which the rain fell in 2021 to blame for the unexpectedly large volume of CSO discharge? Is it because the ground absorbs less water, as developers continue to build one new building in the area after the next, with impervious rooftops, impervious access roads, and impervious parking lots? 

How is it possible that we are now experiencing the same volume of hazardous pollution as we did before making any investments in green and gray infrastructure? 

Is it that new developments are tied into the combined sewer system lines, further reducing system capacity? Is it due to the vanishing trees and vegetation which normally used to slurp up groundwater as the roots aid infiltration and send the rainwater into the water table (where it becomes a resource rather than a waste product)? Are we experiencing more storms because of climate change? 

The answer is probably a combination of these factors, but it is clear that we are losing ground. We must continue the work of modernizing the sewer systems and employing green infrastructure and other nature-based solutions or the problem will get worse.

Improvements have to be made to reduce the damaging impact of the CSOs. There have been no investments since that ribbon-cutting ceremony in 2015. But there is now an opportunity to create a second Long Term Control Plan, which we will call LTCP2. 

LTCP2 should include everything that was part of the first LTCP:

• Sewer separation
• Closing of the remaining Alewife Brook outfalls 
• Green infrastructure including bio basins, bioswales, planter boxes, rain gardens, permeable asphalt roads 
• A holding tank for stormwater with extra capacity to help relieve flooding
• Another bioengineered wetland park with trails and native plantings

This plan would take a big step towards climate change resiliency. 

In addition to sewer infrastructure upgrades, necessary improvements in the Mystic River must be made to reduce flooding. An important key to controlling Alewife area flooding is the proper operation, maintenance, and upgrades at the Amelia Earhart Dam. Looking into the future, if the Amelia Earhart Dam is breached or flanked during future storms, a surge of water will be pushed up the Mystic into the Alewife Brook and into the neighborhoods of our most vulnerable populations. 

A review of FEMA flood maps reveals there are an estimated 1,200 East Arlington residents, 3,500 Cantabrigians, and 300 Belmont residents living in the Little River-Alewife Reservation’s 100-year floodplain. This number does not count the 643 residents living in housing on the former Belmont Uplands/Silver Maple Forest site, who could be completely stranded and surrounded by water in the event of a 100-year flood. 

There will likely continue to be flooding in some extreme events, but antique combined sewer systems make flooding much worse by contaminating floodwaters with raw sewage. We can close the outfalls. Six have already been closed on Alewife Brook, and there are six more to go.

Topography and flooding

For the Mystic River and Alewife Brook, topography is destiny. Both streams are below the mean high-tide level of Boston Harbor and have historically been tidal, with the water flow direction changing with the tide. For many years, this tidal flow was used to power mills. 

Because of pollution and malaria concerns, the river flows were changed in 1909 with the construction of the Craddock Dam and tidal gates at Medford Center. This dam was replaced in 1966 by the Amelia Earhart Dam and pumping station at the mouth of the Mystic that pumps water into the harbor as needed to maintain a predictable water level. 

The Amelia Earhart Dam is the key to reducing flooding in the Mystic River and Alewife Brook. If the Mystic rises too high, water can flow backward in Alewife Brook towards Cambridge and Belmont. With global warming and sea-level rise, this dam will have to be reinforced to continue to protect the Mystic and the Alewife.

​​Kristin Anderson is an Arlington Town Meeting member whose home was occupied by the untreated sewage flood waters of the Alewife Brook during more than one 100-year flood event within a two-year period. David White is an Arlington Conservation Commissioner and member of its Waterbodies Working Group. David has been involved in environmental activities for many years.

Combined Sewer Outfalls (CSO) are where sewage overflows occur when the combined sewer system is overwhelmed by stormwater during rainy weather and sewage mixes with stormwater and overflows or discharges into a waterbody like the Alewife Brook. CSOs are a relic of outdated Combined Sewer Systems (also known as “one pipe systems”) from the 1800s, when flush toilets were an exciting technology that was being quickly adopted. Many older systems such as in Cambridge and Somerville were built this way.  Arlington’s was built later and has no combined sewers and no CSOs.

During dry weather, the sanitary sewage, which is what you flush, goes to the wastewater treatment plant (“POTW” or publicly operated treatment works). During wet weather, sanitary sewage mixes with stormwater in the same pipe and flows over a weir, or dam, and out into the receiving waterbody.

How should the sewers work?

Stormwater runoff, which is rainwater from the street, should be filtered through rain gardens or wetlands, where the water is naturally filtered and cleaned, and then it should flow through storm drains into our rivers and eventually out to sea. Sanitary sewage should all go to the waste water treatment plant.

How many CSOs are there in the Alewife Brook?

Twenty years ago, there were twelve CSOs in the Alewife Brook. As part of the landmark Boston Harbor Cleanup court case, Cambridge and Somerville closed six of the CSOs over the period of a decade or so. They didn’t close them all because they couldn’t afford to do them all at once. So they closed half of the CSOs and we now have six CSOs that discharge untreated sewage water into the Alewife Brook.

Don’t we have to have CSOs if we don’t want sewage backing up into people’s homes and businesses and roads?

We do not have to have CSOs. They are a relic of very old and aging sewer system which is begging to be upgraded. If the sewer system infrastructure is updated by being separated and possibly by adding capacity, then the sanitary sewage can be pumped out to the wastewater treatment plant and it will not end up into homes, roads, or businesses.

In a recent YourArlington.com article about the new ARPA funding, Representative Sean Garballey was quoted as saying, “As the chair of the House Committee on Global Warming and Climate Change, I was proud to work on and help secure $100 million toward infrastructure for communities to adapt and become climate resilient, $100 million for water-and-sewer projects including resources to address combined sewer water flow into our waterways, and investments in housing, health and human services, and education.”

also from the YourArlington.com article:

“Environment, climate-change mitigation”

“Building on the House’s commitment to the environment and clean energy, the bill includes investments for environmental infrastructure and development spending, with a focus on environmental justice communities, climate change resiliency and clean energy. This bill includes $100 million for port infrastructure development and revitalization to facilitate economic activity and support the offshore wind industry.

Other investments include $100 million toward infrastructure for communities to adapt and become climate resilient; and $100 million for water and sewer projects, including those to remediate combined sewer overflow into waterways.“

read the entire article here:

House OKs using $3.8B in surplus, ARPA for Covid needs, recovery (yourarlington.com)

The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection’s GIS map is a resource that displays information about all Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs) throughout the Commonwealth. Each CSO is marked with a link to a pop-up window that displays a wealth information, including: the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit ID, the system that it belongs to (Cambridge, Somerville, or the MWRA), the CSO ID, the location, and a link to the permit which allows for the legal discharge of sewage contaminated water into the receiving water body.

By Michelle Liebtreu and Daria Clark The Mystic River is cleaner today than it has ever been. The Clean Water Act has been a major environmental success story. But the work is not yet done. As the …

Source: Stormwater Threatens Our Waterways

After receiving notification of multiple Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) activations in the Alewife Brook, filmmaker Clare Nosowitz grabbed her video camera and her rain coat and headed out the door. The date was October 26, 2021 and the Alewife was experiencing rain at the start of a gusty autumn Nor’easter.

On this day, less than an inch of rain fell before activating Somerville’s lone Alewife Brook CSO, known as SOM001A. According to Somerville’s DWP website, just .92″ of rain caused SOM001A to discharge for 45 minutes. This resulted in an estimated 1.42 million gallons of untreated sewage contaminated water, all from Somerville, discharging into the Alewife Brook.

Currently, there are six CSOs in the Alewife Brook, which discharge sewage contaminated stormwater during some rain events. The worst CSO is SOM001A, Somerville’s only active CSO in the Alewife Brook.

But Somerville was not the only neighbor discharging untreated sewage water into Arlington’s Alewife Brook on that morning. Further upstream, the MWRA and Cambridge were also discharging sewage water into the Alewife Brook. In fact, five of the six Alewife CSOs, SOM001A, CAM001, CAM401B, CAM401A, & MWR003, were activated, discharging an estimated 2.5 million gallons of sewage water into the Alewife Brook between 6 and 8 am.

Here is video of the filthy water moving quickly in the Alewife Brook, towards the Mystic River. The film maker caught this shot while heading upstream from SOM001A, towards Massachusetts Avenue.

Further west, at the mouth of the Alewife Brook, Cambridge’s CAM401A is physically the first CSO in the brook. It defines the start of the brook and it is hidden (out of sight, out of mind?) behind the cylindrical parking ramp at the Alewife T. CAM401A discharged .7 million gallons of sewage water for 90 minutes on that morning.

Fortunately, the Alewife did not experience any flooding on this day. New England’s favorite meteorologist, Dave Epstein said of this storm, “If this storm had occurred at the time of astronomical high tide, we might be looking at record-breaking flooding in Boston.”

View recent CSO activations in the Alewife Brook:
Alewife Brook Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) Control | City of Somerville (somervillema.gov) *
Combined Sewer Overflow Reporting – City of Cambridge, MA (cambridgema.gov)
MWRA’s CSO Reporting Page

* Note: SOM001A was activated again just four days later, on October 30th, 2021. However, Somerville does not update their CSO notification page within 48 hours of their CSO activations. This is why, at the time of this publishing, that on 11/2/2021, there is still no mention of this most recent CSO activation.

Here is a link to Arlington’s Interactive Wetland Regulations GIS map. If you click on “layers” and select the FEMA Hazard Zones, you will see which of our neighborhoods are expected to get flooding in 100 year storm events.

https://tinyurl.com/arlingtonfloodmap

You can also download PDFs of the flood maps:

The Save the Alewife Brook group hosted a “Spooky” Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs) tour of the Alewife Brook in East Arlington on the lovely morning of Saturday, October 16. Twenty Arlington residents, including some Town Meeting Members came out for the event.

 The goals of the group are summarized in a petition that was distributed:

During major flood events, the Alewife Brook washes onto the yards and into the homes of Arlington residents. Most of those flood events also include sewage contaminated discharges from the active Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs) from Cambridge and Somerville.  Climate change, with its wetter rainy seasons, more intense storms, and sea level rise, is expected to increase the severity and frequency of these events.

Therefore, we want the cities of Somerville and Cambridge and the MWRA, to stop discharging sewage pollution into the Alewife Brook by closing the existing CSOs. We also want the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to invest in making necessary improvements to the Mystic River and Amelia Earhart Dam so that it is resilient to the effects of climate change.

Here is a link to the Petition to Stop Sewage Discharges & Flooding in the Alewife Brook – Save the Alewife Brook  and the Info Sheet that was also distributed.

Initial discussion topics included flood control improvements at the Amelia Earhart dam and regional Climate Change initiatives. There was talk of the long history of the CSOs events and the improvements that have been completed in the last two decades. But CSOs are still discharging sewage polluted waters.

The group arrived in Cambridge. Hidden behind the round Alewife T parking garage, they discovered that the start of the Alewife Brook is marked by the ugly mouth of CAM401A –  the first of the Alewife Brook CSOs.

CAM401A most recently discharged 1.1 million gallons of untreated sewage-contaminated water into the Alewife Brook on September 28^th, 2021, during a 1.6” rainstorm. Four weeks earlier, on September 1^st, the CSO discharged 2.95 million gallons of untreated sewage-contaminated water.

While observing CAM401A, East Arlington resident David Stoff lamented, “This is the saddest place I’ve ever been.” And then he pointed out that the “floatables” control was not working well – a piece of toilet paper and a used condom hung from a dead tree branch in front of the outfall pipe.

The group then headed back along the Alewife Greenway, to find the other active CSOs. The walk ended at the worst offender: Somerville’s CSO, named SOM01A. It was noted that the “floatables” control was not working: toilet paper hung from a dead tree branch in front of the outfall. We also noted that on 9/2/21, 6.07 million gallons of untreated sewage-contaminated water was discharged on a single day, from this one CSO.

All of the walkers came away with a better understanding of the continuing pollution problems of Alewife Brook and motivated to work for improvements.

People who are interested in these problems can visit the group’s website and/or join the Google email list for periodic events and updates.

The Save the Alewife Brook “Spooky” Walk was organized by Town Meeting Member Kristin Anderson, Pct. 13 (who was flooded out by Alewife Brook), and David White of the Arlington Conservation Commission and Town Meeting Member from Pct. 21

During major flood events, the Alewife Brook washes onto the yards and into the homes of Arlington residents. Most of those flood events also include sewage contaminated discharges from the active Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs) from Cambridge and Somerville.  Climate change, with its wetter rainy seasons, more intense storms, and sea level rise, is expected to increase the severity and frequency of these events.

Therefore, we want the cities of Somerville and Cambridge and the MWRA, to stop discharging sewage pollution into the Alewife Brook by separating their sewers and by closing the existing CSOs. We also want the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to invest in making necessary improvements to the Mystic River and Amelia Earhart Dam so that it is resilient to the effects of climate change.

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Thanks for your support!