(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries and letters to the Editor of The Somerville Times belong solely to the authors and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville Times, its staff or publishers)

By Tyler Mourey

As a resident of West Somerville, I frequently use the wooded refuge of the Alewife Brook Reservation to briefly escape from urban life. After a stressful commute home in Boston traffic, a jog across the boardwalk that runs along the brook, past wildflower meadows, mute swans, and great blue herons, is often all it takes to soothe my nerves that have been frazzled by staring at brake lights, surrounded by irate commuters and blaring horns.

My typical running route takes me up Broadway, past the Stop and Shop on Alewife Brook Parkway, and across the street, with a right turn onto the Alewife Brook Reservation walking path. If I run along the brook after heavy rainfall, however, a pungent smell is likely to rip me out of this escapism, back to reality. With summer 2023 being the second wettest on record across much of New England, this past year saw numerous occurrences of municipal sewage overflowing into the Alewife Brook, turning the idyllic reservation into a smelly, polluted mess.

This slow, shallow brook, bordered by a lush riparian habitat has endured many changes throughout its natural (and unnatural) history. According to Mass.gov, in pre-colonial times, the region surrounding the brook was wetland, all part of the regional Great Swamp. This expansive wetland stored water from storm runoff and served as a massive biogeochemical filter for the local watershed. Urbanization and industrialization saw fit to change that, and the wetland was drained in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, resulting in over 90% of the surface area of the original Great Swamp being lost to development. With the decline of this gargantuan natural water filter, water that would originally have been stored in the marsh now has nowhere to go, causing it to backflow into homes and businesses unless allowed to overflow into the Alewife Brook, along with municipal sewage.

These discharges of sewage into the brook are known as Combined Sewage Overflows, or CSO’s. State law requires local municipalities to alert residents when CSO’s “create a risk to public health,” with occurrences being reported on town websites. In Somerville, residents may sign up for a notification system; receiving emails when CSO’s occur, with a detailed notification plan revised as recently as June, 2023. Despite these plans, many residents seem unaware of the issue. I do not believe the current method for notifying the public is efficient or timely enough to reach residents who may be unaware of the occurrence of CSO’s and be put in harm’s way by utilizing a public greenspace.

On August 8th, 2023, torrential rains and subsequent CSO’s caused the brook to overflow onto public walkways with many residents continuing to run, bike, and push baby carriages through the contaminated water, unaware of the unsavory, and unsafe nature of the water they were walking through. This spurred outcry from some local residents, culminating in an online petition and letter being written to the EPA, that dismissed the existing CSO notification system as a “failure,” and firmly expressing that residents “need to know immediately if the discharge has made using the Alewife path unsafe” and that “they also need to know when an elevated level of risk has passed.” The letter also stressed that effective methods of communicating CSO events have been implemented in other locations. For example, the Potomac River in Washington D.C. has four separate CSO indicator light stations, that glow red when CSO events happen. Similar indicator lights, with interpretive signage, could be an effective method of warning users of the Alewife Brook pathway.

Even though municipalities are complying with the legal obligation to publicly post when CSO’s occur, it does not seem to effectively reach the masses, which is gross negligence of local governments to fulfill their responsibilities to their residents. I personally was not aware of the occurrence of CSO’s until I heard about them through word-of-mouth and took it upon myself to research the issue online. This should not be how someone learns about a serious environmental and public safety issue in their own community. Residents walking through untreated wastewater with infants in carriages shows that the way this information is disseminated to the community needs to be fully reevaluated.

As a local resident with a professional and academic interest in climate change and resiliency, I am particularly concerned with how this issue is going to develop as annual rainfall totals are expected to increase with climate change. How will this impact the Alewife Brook Reservation’s recreational amenities? Personally, my proximity to this greenspace adds significant value to living in the area. If there is no transparency regarding how CSO’s will be controlled and mitigated by governing bodies, the attractiveness of living in this area will certainly be negatively impacted.

Local municipalities have profited immensely off the development and urbanization of the Great Swamp, to the detriment of the local ecosystem and those who seek to enjoy it. They now owe it to the citizens they serve to stem the negative consequences of this development and act as responsible stewards for a fragile natural resource. At the very least, they can find a better way to tell people when their local park is flooded with untreated sewage.