Won’t Cease Without Dedicated Money Pipeline

According to published reports, a two-year reauthorization of the $38 billion Water Resources Development Act — legislation woven into a military spending bill approved by the House last week — allocates $100 million for several communities along the Merrimack River that have struggled to fix combined sewer overflows.

Those communities, which include Lowell, Lawrence, Methuen, Haverhill and Fitchburg, would each receive $20 million under the proposal, which must still pass the U.S. Senate’s muster before receiving President Joe Biden’s signature.

U.S. Rep. Lori Trahan, a Westford Democrat who advocated for the funding, said it would help reduce pollution from CSOs in one of the region’s largest sources of drinking water.

An estimated 600,000 people get drinking water from the Merrimack River.

“Substantial federal investments are essential to complete long overdue sewage system upgrades across our district,” Trahan said in a statement. “I look forward to seeing this legislation signed into law so we can get to work securing funds through the appropriations process in the months ahead.”

These funds could be combined with other financial resources if state lawmakers have their way.

A $3.76 billion economic development bill, approved by the Legislature and signed by Gov. Charlie Baker in November, includes $115 million for drinking water and sewer system upgrades; it specifically targets $15 million for projects in “nitrogen sensitive” areas along with state’s waterways.

While the prospect of a possible $20 million-plus injection of funds into a municipality’s sewage discharge problem seems promising, it must be kept in perspective.

Without considerable federal assistance, the resolution to CSOs could be two decades — and hundreds of millions of dollars — away in the Merrimack River Valley alone.

It’s been well chronicled that Lowell, like other communities along the Merrimack River, has experienced extensive combined sewer overflows in the past, which discharge contaminated water into the river.

In the last 15 years, the city has invested more than $150 million in CSO control projects, which has reduced the annual discharge volume by about 60%.

However, the sewerage system has still dumped millions of gallons of contaminated overflow in recent years.

Designed and built years before the passage of the Clean Water Act in the early 1970s, these obsolete treatment systems collect storm water and sewage in a single stream, with pipes designed to overflow — instead of backing up — when they become inundated, usually due to heavy rain.

Large and frequent overflows pose health risks to those who use the river for boating and swimming, as continued on page 27

Editorial continued from page 25 well as communities that draw drinking water from it.

Raw sewage also causes algae blooms, which can be toxic to people and deprive water bodies of oxygen, killing fish and other marine life.

There’s also another complicating factor.

In the Merrimack River’s case, CSOs are an interstate issue, which means any improvements made in Massachusetts could be compromised by New Hampshire’s inaction.

As Lowell state Sen. Edward Kennedy previously stated, “It does not matter if we are able to stop CSOs in Lowell and Lawrence if they are still occurring upstream in Manchester and Nashua.”

As of 2021, the Manchester plant deposited the most untreated wastewater into the Merrimack, 221 million gallons of combined water and sewer annually on average, with Lowell next at 194 million gallons.

That’s in contrast to Nashua at 21 million gallons, Lawrence at 39 million gallons and Haverhill at 30 million gallons.

We might think of CSOs as a state or regional concern, but it’s a far more widespread problem.

It’s a dilemma many wastewater systems across the country face.

As a consequence, the competition for federal funds — the principal source of CSO mitigation dollars — is fierce.

Though we have a strong ally in Trahan, she’s up against hundreds of other members in Congress pressing for the same funds.

Should that $100 million piece of legislation pass, we’re certainly not going to look that gift horse in the mouth.

But it will take a herd of similar gift horses to make a discernable CSO difference in Lowell’s wastewater system alone.

Reprinted with permission from the lowellsun.com n