Cleaning up our act
It's hard to say what was worse: the way the Pawtuxet River smelled, or the way it looked.
The smell is easier to describe. Particularly at the end of a hot, dry summer, when the water level was low, it had a musty stench that seemed to suck the air right out of your nostrils.
``It smelled like sewage, like a wastewater treatment plant smells today,'' says Jim Fester, who monitored water quality for the state in the 1970s.
How it looked varied from day to day, depending on what was happening upstream, where the textile mills and chemical plants dumped dyes and wastes into the water.
The river might run red, or yellow, or blue. Detergents dissolved in the water upstream churned into foam in Pawtuxet Village, forming thick curds of dirt-streaked suds at the base of the falls.
When it got really hot, and the water was starved for oxygen, great mats of algae would bob to the surface. ``You'd have these black floating masses coming over the dam,'' Fester says.
Plant matter would die, and rot beneath the murky surface; intermittently, the gases would erupt rudely. ``The river would burp every summer.''
Something had to give.
THE PAWTUXET RIVER pollution was just the most visible of the threats facing Narragansett Bay in the 1970s. Some of the others:
Power. Business interests wanted to build an oil refinery in Tiverton, a nuclear power plant at Rome Point, in North Kingstown, and a liquefied natural gas terminal on Prudence Island.
Population. Few cities in the nation's most urban state had adequate sewage treatment; the Field's Point plant in Providence -- state-of-the-art in 1901 -- was a barely functional patronage dumping ground 70 years later.
Pollution. For generations, factories and mills had been flushing toxins into the water; the jewelry industry added cyanide and heavy metals to the mix. The new highway networks of the 1960s meant more and more petroleum waste washing off the roads and into the water.
It's not that Rhode Islanders didn't love their Bay. As far back as World War I, they made it illegal to pollute its waters. But the laws were so widely ignored that by World War II, it wasn't safe to eat shellfish caught anywhere in the 147-square-mile Bay.
Sewage plants built in the 1950s and 1960s helped some, but by the 1970s, problems were widespread. ``It was really disastrous,'' recalls fisherman Paul Bettencourt. ``Every time it rained, they would close the Bay.''
But new ideas were circulating, ideas best articulated by Rachel Carson in her chilling book Silent Spring : if humans continue to poison the environment, they too may sicken and die.
In small groups, in different locations, Rhode Islanders began to worry about their Bay. They got together, and they made plans.
ON A SUMMER NIGHT in 1970, eight people gathered in Louise Durfee's knotty-pine kitchen, in Tiverton.
They had all seen the slick brochures being passed out by Northeast Petroleum Industries, which wanted to build an oil refinery on a North Tiverton hillside overlooking Mount Hope Bay.
Cut your taxes in half , it promised; most of the town liked the sound of that.
Durfee and her friends didn't. She was a Yale-educated lawyer and member of the Tiverton Town Council, one of just three women holding municipal office in Rhode Island.
Though it seemed hopeless, they formed an organization called Save Our Community and set to work. With few environmental laws on the books in those days, all Northeast Petroleum needed was a zoning change -- which had to be approved by a majority of the town council.
For six long months, as the council held extensive hearings, Save Our Community fought like ferrets to convince the people of Tiverton the refinery was a ticking time bomb. Bit by bit, public opinion swung their way.
In the early hours of Jan. 21, 1971, after hours of impassioned debate, the council killed the refinery. The vote was 4 to 3.
ACROSS THE BAY, another small group was paying close attention.
The Natural Resources Group was an informal gathering of citizens that included scientists and professors from the University of Rhode Island, as well as Dan Varin of the state Department of Environmental Management.
Impressed by Carson's book, they had started thinking about Narragansett Bay in the late 1960s. They met Friday nights at a private home in East Greenwich, where ``they would sit on the porch, drink very good whiskey, and talk about what they should be doing about these problems,'' says Stephen Olsen, who had just graduated from Oberlin College.
They told Governor Frank Licht the Bay needed to be managed as an entire ecosystem. He set a governor's task force, on which a number of the Natural Resources Group members served.
In short order they produced a report which drew national attention; then drew up a legislative proposal that would have stripped coastal communities of much of their control of the shoreline, creating something called the Coastal Resources Management Council (CRMC).
When it hit the State House, the sheer effrontery of it -- not to mention its naivete -- provoked shrieks of laughter. A bunch of quahog-huggers taking on development interests? Fahgeddaboudit!
``It was declared dead on arrival, and it was,'' says Olsen.
Then the refinery proposal cropped up in Tiverton, and Save Our Community became the mouse that roared. In October 1970, the West Bay people joined forces with Save Our Community; they called the new group Save the Bay.
Other proposals, including Narragansett Electric Co.'s plan for a nuclear plant at Rome Point and the proposed LNG terminal on Prudence Island, were on the drawing boards.
Politicians realized they might want to have laws on the books to block proposals they didn't like. State Rep. John Lyons, of Tiverton, resurrected the CRMC legislation that had died such an ignominious death the year before.
On the last day of the 1971 Assembly session, it passed.
The new CRMC was one of the first coastal regulatory agencies in the country. The next year Congress passed the Clean Water Act, which provided money for planning.
``It became a very good David-and-Goliath act,'' says Olsen, who was hired by the CRMC. A proposal would come before the council; be investigated exhaustively; publicized heavily in all the towns affected; and, more often than not, would be withdrawn.
Proposals that went down the tubes included a massive plan to dredge the Bay, more nuclear installations proposed for Charlestown, and an ambitious plan to develop Quonset/Davisville.
Olsen today heads the Coastal Resources Council at the URI's Graduate School of Oceanography. Without Save the Bay's early efforts, he believes, by now Narragansett Bay ``would have been pretty thoroughly trashed.''
ACCORDING to Save the Bay:
Narragansett Bay is an estuary 25 miles long and 10 miles wide, holding 706 billion gallons of water at mid-tide. Estuaries, where fresh water from the land meets the sea, are among the most diverse habitats on earth -- even more so than tropical rainforests.
The Bay supports more than 40,000 species, from flounder and lobster to oysters, seals, and waterfowl. It's fairly shallow, averaging 26 feet deep; due to tidal action and water flowing in from rivers and sewage plants, its water is completely replaced about every 26 days.
Nearly two million people live in its 1,853-square-mile watershed, which is drained by three main rivers -- the Pawtuxet, the Blackstone, and the Taunton.
In the 1800s, when the mills of the industrial revolution were running at full tilt, untreated waste poured into those rivers, and from them into the Bay. Raw sewage clogged the upper Bay in the 1800s, and epidemics of typhoid and cholera were common. In 1901 the Field's Point sewage treatment plant was a step in the right direction.
But by the 1970s, it was clear much more had to be done.
``THE WATER WAS polluted. How do I put this politely? You had little balls of (human) waste floating around, landing on the shoreline. It was light tan-colored stuff. . . . People were starting to complain.''
Paul Bettencourt, 76, has been a fisherman his whole life. He remembers the 1930s, when there were oyster farms as far up as Rumstick Point and the Salty Sea plant processed clams and oysters off Gano Street, where the Brown University boathouse is today.
Narragansett Bay oysters were the best in the world, he says.
At first, the pollution was good for fishermen. ``The pollution spawned plankton, and that drew in the menhaden, which drew in the big fish,'' like bluefish and bass.
But the menhaden also drew huge fishing boats from New Jersey, Virginia, as far away as North Carolina. ``We called them the green monsters. They were pillaging our Bay,'' he says. ``No one was thinking of conservation.''
Finally the menhaden were fished out, and the big boats went away. Local fishermen switched from species to species, depending on price; when flounder got expensive, quahoggers started dragging for flounder.
He says the local fishermen are just as greedy as the outlanders, and that the Bay will never recover until the state sets commercial and recreational quotas -- and makes them stick.
``Narragansett Bay is probably the most beautiful Bay in the whole world, and the most accessible,'' he says. ``The best thing Rhode Island could do would be to make the Bay a fin-fish sanctuary.
``We've got to take care of what we have out there.''
EDDIE MARANDOLA would go along with that; he just took a while to get there.
Marandola is the president of Victory Finishing Technologies Inc., a Jewelry District electroplating company founded by his father in 1941.
Victory was the largest of about 200 Providence companies that poured toxic wastes into the Bay up until 1984, when the federal government finally issued rules prohibiting such pollution.
``When I started, there were no environmental rules at all,'' he says. In the 1970s Rhode Island was a major center in the jewelry trade, with big companies like Coro and Speidel leading the way.
``People were electro-platers, not wastewater-treaters,'' says Marandola. ``Nobody knew anything about it.''
By the 1970s, the handwriting was on the wall. Connecticut and Massachusetts passed laws cracking down on the metals business, requiring manufacturers to clean up their wastes.
``It was very scary for a lot of them, including me,'' he says. ``We knew how to make the waste. We didn't know how to clean it up.''
Rhode Island's manufacturers dragged their feet. ``Many people were trying to sell us equipment, and we didn't know what would work,'' he says. ``For many of us, it would be the biggest investment we would ever make.''
Yet Marandola had a boat, and he liked to fish. He kept his boat in the lower Bay, because he knew how awful the water got above Warwick Light, and how it started to smell around Field's Point.
The federal Environmental Protection Agency banned the dumping of acids in 1978, and gave electroplaters until 1984 to remove cyanide and metals from their wastes.
When Marandola didn't meet the deadline, the EPA slapped him with a $10,000-per-day fine, and said they were going after anybody else who didn't clean up their act.
Marandola said it wasn't fair, that he was being singled out as a warning, and that the EPA had changed its rules so many times that Victory hadn't been able to buy waste-treatment equipment that would meet government standards.
After a flurry of charges, both sides settled; Victory installed $1 million worth of waste-treatment equipment.
Today Marandola is a trustee of Save the Bay. He's also a former member of the board of directors. He concedes he could have acted more quickly, but notes the business is very competitive and nobody wanted to be the first to make such major outlays.
He sees some irony in what has happened since.
``We have all, in this industry, made a commitment to clean up the environment,'' he says. ``Our foreign competitors haven't.''
And now, he says, ``they're taking all the business.''
PEOPLE CONCERNED about keeping Narragansett Bay healthy say all the easy fixes have been done.
The big polluters have been stopped; oysters are coming back, as far north as Goddard Park; eelgrass is being replanted, in an effort to restore the habitat that once made scallops plentiful.
The job now gets much harder. For all the fixes in the past 28 years, the pollution from wastewater treatment plants has only been cut in half. During heavy rains, water still overwhelms some treatment plants, dumping 3 billion gallons of untreated sewage into the Bay each year.
One plan to clean it up would cost nearly $400 million.
And there are scores of other ways pollution gets into the water, from failing septic systems to highway runoff to recreational boaters. As more and more people want to live near the water and boat on the Bay, those pressures will only increase.
URI's Olsen, who has tried to apply the lessons learned in Narragansett Bay to developing economies in Central America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, says he has seen what happens when people ignore environmental degradation.
``It is frightening.''
The damage to Narragansett Bay occurred over 250 years, he says; in the developing world, it's taking 20 to 30 years to do that kind of damage, ``at an unbelieveable human cost, and the rate of change is accelerating.''
By comparison, Rhode Island is doing pretty well, though he frets about the future if we continue to value consumption over conservation. ``We worship this god of growth, on a finite planet. It's not sustainable.''
Is the glass half-full, or half-empty?
At least the water in that glass is no longer dyed and stinking.
ON A SEPTEMBER evening, fisherman John McCullough stands on the bridge over the Pawtuxet River, at the spot where it enters Pawtuxet cove.
He heard the shad were biting, and he aims to get some. Since he retired from the Providence School Department, he figures he fishes at least 20 hours a week.
The tea-colored river, swollen from rain, rolls smoothly over the waterfall and slides under the bridge, its tracery of foam disappearing like snowflakes on a hot stove. The cool air rising from the water's swirling surface smells of fresh earth.
McCullough has been fishing for 30 years, and he remembers the bad old days. He knows things are better today ``because the fish are here -- if it was a bad atmosphere for them, they wouldn't be.''
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