February 6, 2005

WHAT:  Review of stormwater management plans for nine towns — Weston, Wellesley, Dedham, Needham, Newton, Waltham, Watertown, Brookline and Cambridge —whose stormwater flows into the lower Charles River.  All cities and towns with storm drains are required to have permits for stormwater discharges as regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). The permits call for towns to follow a basic set of practices to ensure that stormwater discharges do not violate the Federal Clean Water Act. Though improvements have been made, stormwater remains one of the factors causing the river to exceed state water quality standards for fishing and swimming. Testing of storm drain water shows that there are still serious problems in some communities. 

WHO: Representatives from EPA, DEP, the nine towns mentioned, and clean water advocate organizations.

WHEN: Tuesday, February 15, 2005, 1-3 pm.

WHERE: The O’Neil Building, 10 Causeway Street, Boston, MA

BACKGROUND: A decade ago, Earth Day 1995, the Clean Charles Initiative kicked off with the goal of making the Charles River fishable and swimmable by Earth Day 2005.  A coalition of public and private groups was established by the EPA to clean up the river, with specific focus on polluted stormwater.  By then, it was acknowledged that the pollution carried into the river by storm drains was causing the river to violate the standards set for fishing and swimming after even moderate rainfall. 

Today, nearly ten years later, the Charles is cleaner then it was when the Earth Day initiative was put into place. Persistent problems with Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs, which are designated pipes along the river that discharge a mixture of sanitary sewage and stormwater from old systems where the two are combined), contaminated sediments that get stirred up in heavy rain, and polluted stormwater still cause the river to exceed safe water quality levels 10 – 20% of the days in an average year.

The progress of this clean-up project is the subject of the hearing on February 15, 2005.  It is an opportunity to review the progress of nine Charles River towns on one of the most critical steps towards the 2005 goal—cleaning polluted water carried into the river by storm drains that cause the river to violate the standard set for fishing and swimming.

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One of our country’s first watershed organizations, CRWA formed in 1965 in response to public concern about the declining condition of the Charles River.  Since its earliest days of advocacy, CRWA has figured prominently in major clean-up and watershed protection efforts that have dramatically improved the health of the Charles.