CRWA in the News

Group honors conservation effort 

By Patrick Lally / Daily News Tribune

Sunday, December 18, 2005

MENDON -- Shirley Smith’s path to activism began down a quarter-mile trail through the woods from her back yard to the Mill River.

For years, Smith knew the river as a place teeming with wildlife. Her three sons -- Gary, Billy and Tracy -- spent countless summers fishing, swimming and following muskrat tracks along the banks.

One day, Gary returned from the river empty-handed and told Smith "there doesn’t seem to be any fish."

The principal water supply for Hopedale and Mendon, the Mill River is taxed to its limit. The old swimming hole is dry, the heron and turtles gone and the days when her sons could throw their fishing lines into the river and pull out trout and pickerels are long over.

"I didn’t go down there very much" when the children were younger, Smith admits. "But now I go down there a lot...I get very upset when I see the river with a very low stream flow."

It’s a visual that spurred Smith to take a job as Mendon’s water commissioner and also to volunteer gathering water samples for the Charles River Watershed Association. Last week, Smith was honored for her efforts as a volunteer, educator and activist, at the group’s annual banquet.

"It’s for the time that she devotes to volunteer monitoring and it’s also for the time she devotes to protecting her environment in her town with her work," said Robert Zimmerman, executive director of the nonprofit group.

"It’s sort of a ’Way to go Shirley’ for standing up for things that matter."

In her third year as Mendon’s water commissioner, Smith can be credited with turning the town’s operation around, which was in "serious trouble" when she arrived. Working with fire officials, she flushed and cleared the town’s hydrants. Smith completed a variety of long overdue tests required by the Department of Environmental Protection. And, stressing conservation over expansion, Smith successfully fought off an attempt by Milford Water Department to privatize Mendon’s system.

But according to Smith, her biggest accomplishments are her education initiatives. She has distributed countless information on water conservation tips to residents and brought in a children’s theater group to local schools to teach students about the water supply. Through these methods, Smith hopes to bring about a change that would restore the water flow to the Mill and other rivers.

"Water departments were never meant to be irrigation departments," she said. "when our drinking water is sacrificed for having green lawns, there’s something wrong."

"We need more people like her passing the word around," said Anna Eleria, the Charles River Watershed Association’s project manager.

For a little more than a year, Smith has been working with Eleria, collecting monthly water samples from the Charles River in Milford that are tested for bacteria. But Smith "wears many different hats" for the Charles River Watershed Association, making herself even more valuable through her roles as a spokesperson and activist, Eleria said.

Smith, in turn, finds inspiration from the organization that honored her. She marvels at the work its members have done for the Charles River, the water supply for much of the Milford area and points east into Boston.

What was once an "open sewer," Smith said, has come far, though there’s still work to be done.

"It’s really important to think about the rivers," she said. "If the rivers go dry, the ground water goes. It’s the rivers that recharge the groundwaters."

"It’s for the time that she devotes to volunteer monitoring and it’s also for the time she devotes to protecting her environment in her town with her work," said Robert Zimmerman, executive director of Charles River Watershed Association.

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