Rhode Island’s Most Important Waters are Drowning

Posted by Wayne G.Barber

Stormwater from a supermarket parking lot and other pollution inputs have filled this stream, which feeds the Clear River, with nutrients that spur the growth of algae and bacteria. (Frank Carini/ecoRI News)

Development and rising seas take their toll on state’s dwindling wetlands.

The success of Slater Mill inspired others to build mills throughout the Blackstone River valley, in both Rhode Island and Massachusetts. To take advantage of the river's hydropower, new mill villages were built. To make way for the needed infrastructure, impervious surfaces replaced fields, forests were clear-cut, wetlands re-engineered and species lost.
.
Clear impacts
By the early 1800s, Burrillville, a rural community in the northwest corner of Rhode Island, had become a hub of manufacturing activity, as its eight villages attest.
The Clear River was tapped for water power to run saw and grist mills, and, as Paul Roselli, president of the Burrillville Land Trust, noted, just about every river in the area was dammed, blocked, diverted, drained and/or engineered to power textile manufacturing.

A supermarket parking lot in the village of Pascoag rushes stormwater directly into an unprotected wetland. This pollution-carrying runoff is negatively impacting the stream below. (Frank Carini/ecoRI News)

All these mills provided plenty of jobs during the Industrial Revolution, but they also employed children, and operated with no environmental or worker-safety controls. These mills also polluted many of the state’s rivers, streams and brooks. Much of that pollution legacy remains buried in sediment, as newer problems created by 20th-century urbanization, sprawl and carbon pollution have surfaced.
The nearly 10-mile-long Clear River is classified as “impaired” by DEM. Much of the river is polluted by enterococci — fecal contamination from wastewater treatment plants, cesspools, stormwater runoff and animal waste, both domestic and wild.
“The rivers up here have historically been impaired,” said Roselli, a member of the land trust since 1999. “Back in the day you knew what color clothes were being dyed in the mills because that would be the color of the river that day.”
The days of unregulated and free-for-all polluting maybe over, but Rhode Island’s wetlands are still hurting, and threatened, most notably from development pressures. For about a decade, until the town of Burrillville, in 2007, in a forward-thinking transaction, transferred a 16-acre parcel across the street from Wallum Lake and transversed by the Clear River to the local land trust, developers longed to drain the wooded property and build houses.
The state, in a recent move in the opposite direction, has celebrated the construction of a new natural-gas power plant near the banks of the Clear River. Like naming a gas-guzzling SUV after a pristine natural resource, this new fossil-fuel facility is named after the river it will likely help keep impaired.
When construction of the Clear River Energy Center is complete, it’s expected to employee 25 full-time workers.
Working mills along the Clear River have gone the way of the passenger pigeon — and most of the structures have since been lost to fire — but the wetland that eventually follows into the Blackstone River is still in recovery. It likely will be for a long time.
Besides being polluted by stormwater runoff from a matrix of impervious surfaces, its riverbanks host the Eleanor Slater Hospital — complete with riverside laundry and wastewater facilities — a plastics manufacturer, an older fossil-fuel power plant, a school-bus depot, a closed landfill and the Burrillville Sewage Treatment Plant.
This type of human impact isn’t unique to the Clear River. Such waterside usages stress much of Rhode Island’s wetlands. Roselli noted there are neighborhoods in Burrillville that still have no catch basins, sending runoff into the Clear, Branch and Chepachet rivers.
During ecoRI News’ recent afternoon exploring the Clear River with Roselli, we followed a path along the chain-link fence of the Burrillville Sewage Treatment Plant to a new canoe launch. The air reeked with what Roselli called “the perfume of modern living.”
The conservationist used to regularly paddle the Clear River, but it’s been about 20 years since he last did so. It is a difficult river to navigate, but Roselli said the river’s impaired status is the bigger deterrent — for him and others.
“It’s a gorgeous ride, but nobody uses the river anymore,” Roselli said. “A river in rural Rhode Island is rarely used for recreation because of the bacteria count. Rivers in urban centers are even more impaired and don’t stand a chance of being improved unless we mount a concerted effort to fix the problem. No matter how much we say we love our rivers and waterbodies, we continue to throw and dump stuff into them.”
All that dumping — from a supermarket parking lot that sends runoff directly into a stream that feeds the Clear River to a pipe from a roof that drains directly into that same stream to air conditioners that drip into a wetland below — creates an cumulative impact.
Those three examples, all avoidable and fixable, are concentrated in the downtown area of the Burrillville village of Pascoag, where taxpayer dollars were recently spent to showcase this polluted waterway. The money was used to build a new bridge and a beautiful riverwalk. Impaired water, not safe for human contact, continues to flow beneath both.
“Impacts to wetlands aren’t hidden. They’re right out in the open. We forget about the impact of runoff from things like roofs and decks. We forget about allowing stormwater from a parking lot to run directly into a waterbody, when, perhaps, a vegetated buffer would have been a better idea,” said Roselli, a resident of Harrisville village since 1983. “It’s almost a shame this pretty walkway was even built. There are days when you look out from here and it’s not that appealing. Some days it looks like a running sewer.”
     

Paul Roselli, president of the Burrillville Land Trust, is keeping a close eye on the health of northwest Rhode Island wetlands. (Frank Carini/ecoRI News)Add caption

Restoring and protecting the Ocean State’s remaining coastal and inland wetlands will require making difficult decisions and exhibiting strong leadership. It also will take some small sacrifices, like easing up on the amount of lawn chemicals we throw around. Roselli mentioned the idea of putting a 5-cent tax on lawn fertilizer and using that money to fund the kind of projects being done by the Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council, Groundwork Providence and the Green Infrastructure Coalition.
“We need to stop using lawn fertilizer and start planting vegetated buffers like blueberry bushes,” he said. “You never see anyone using these beautiful, fertilized, green residential lawns sprayed with insecticides, herbicides and grub control because they’re poisonous waste dumps.”