CT DEEP will help to remove a defunct dam from the Pequabuck River located in Bristol, CT, restoring 8.5 miles of free-flowing river for fish passage and removing contaminated sediment that has accumulated behind the dam.
This article was originally published in December 2022 as part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law fact series.
The Middle Street Dam, located on the Pequabuck River in Bristol, CT, will be demolished and removed in order to restore 8.5 miles of unobstructed river. The Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (CT DEEP) will lead the removal project with the help of a $1.6 million grant from Long Island Sound Study (LISS). The grant will be funded using allocations from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL).
A granite dam was originally built at the site by the Bristol Brass Company in the 19th century to divert water to its factory. In the late 1960s, the current owner, the Connecticut Department of Transportation, smoothed over the dam and reinforced it with cement. The dam no longer provides any benefits, including flood protection, but it does require frequent maintenance and a yearly inspection.
As part of the dam removal process, contaminants that have accumulated behind the dam, including heavy metals and PCBs, will be fully removed from the site. Construction crews will then begin to remove the dam itself, which spans 95 feet across the river at a height of seven feet and a width of 15 feet. Once the dam is fully removed, which is expected by 2024, additional crews will plant native vegetation along the riverbank. Large cobbles will be placed on the sides of the affected riverbank to model the appearance of the environment just upstream. The area, including the site that was previously contaminated, will be restored to healthy wetland conditions, which will make it habitable for fish and other animals living near the banks.
The Middle Street Dam completely prevents migratory fish from being able to travel from Long Island Sound to the upper parts of the Pequabuck. Once the dam is removed, important fish species like alewife, sea lamprey, and the American eel will be able to migrate from Long Island Sound to stream habitat that can be used for foraging and spawning.
A restored river also will have community benefits. It should help enhance a proposed greenway along the river that passes the dam site. The proposed greenway also goes through a city-owned brownfield, a contaminated property city officials hope to clean up and develop into the park.
The Long Island Sound Study and its partners have reopened nearly 430 miles of rivers and streams for fish passage in Connecticut and New York since 1998.
Every fall, volunteers from all over the world, including in Long Island Sound, conduct coastal cleanups and report their findings to the Ocean Conservancy as part of the International Coastal Cleanup. The cleanups around Long Island Sound are coordinated by the American Littoral Society in New York and Save the Sound in Connecticut.
The Long Island Sound Study also compiles data on the amount of trash in pounds at these cleanups and the total trash collected/per mile for the Marine Debris Ecosystem Target. There is also a Marine Debris by Category supporting indicator, which includes cigarette butts as a category.
What is the most commonly found ocean litter? (noaa.gov)
Aug. 24, 2023 is Shell Day in Connecticut. Scientists and resource managers will join forces with community-based water quality monitoring organizations to help maintain a #healthyLISound. They will be sampling for coastal acidification in 10 of the Sound’s bays and harbors.
Acidic or near acidic coastal waters can weaken oyster and clam shells, harming the marine life and the economy.
The carbon dioxide that humans release to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels is changing the chemistry of the ocean by increasing its acidity. Nutrient pollution can also increase the acidity of coastal waters by stimulating algal blooms.
Read the fact sheet, prepared by Lauren Barrett, a Ph.D. candidate in marine sciences at the University of Connecticut, for more information.
The Steps to Resilience webinar for Long Island Sound communities in September will be the first webinar in a series of planned resiliency trainings and workshops. Over the coming months you will have the opportunity to learn how to develop impactful resilience projects, be inspired by other communities and projects from around Long Island Sound, and set your community up for funding success.
Steps to Resilience will set the stage for getting started with resilience planning and include information on local climate impacts and projections, resilience planning strategies, and climate certification programs for both NY and CT.
Please note that this webinar is being held twice: once in the evening on Tuesday, September 19, and then again in the daytime on Thursday, September 21. You are welcome to attend both, but the content will be the same for both webinars.
For the September 19, 2023 webinar from 7-8:30 PM, register here.
For the September 21, 2023 webinar from 9:30-11 AM, register here.
The trainings and workshops are organized by extension professional staff of the Connecticut and New York Sea Grant Programs in conjunction with the Long Island Sound Study. Please reach out to [email protected] with any questions.
This news release first appeared on the Connecticut Sea Grant website.
More information:
Judy Benson, CT Sea Grant communications coordinator, [email protected], (860) 287-6426
Melissa Pappas, Save the Sound ecological communications specialist, [email protected]; (480) 212-6630
New Haven (Aug. 7, 2023) – Now in its seventh year, the #DontTrashLISound campaign will kick off August 12 with a cleanup of the Long Wharf area led by Connecticut Sea Grant and Save the Sound.
The five-week campaign of cleanups and social media posts, part of the Long Island Sound Marine Debris Action Plan led by the Connecticut and New York Sea Grant programs, will target a highly visible area of the New Haven shoreline next to Interstate 95 and a popular area for food truck vendors.
The theme of this year’s campaign is “Love the Coast—Pitch the Plastic,” a message intended to encourage people to show appreciation for Long Island Sound by making conscious choices to reduce their overall use of plastics, which are harmful to wildlife and people as litter in the environment.
“Unfortunately, it doesn’t take long to find plastic items and pieces littering our beaches,” said Nancy Balcom, associate director for Connecticut Sea Grant. “It’s an ongoing effort to find ways to minimize the use of plastic in our daily lives, and to take the time to pick up plastics and other trash whenever and wherever we see it on beaches and along roadsides.”
The campaign’s purpose is to motivate people to switch to reusable items instead of single-use plastic ones, and to dispose of trash properly to protect humans and wildlife. This year’s addition to the series of colorful “Protect Our Wildlife” stickers for reusable water bottles and travel mugs given out as part of the campaign will feature the horseshoe crab. Stickers introduced in previous years include images of osprey, harbor seals, blackfish, squid and other animals that depend on clean marine waters for their survival.
“We are excited to dive into our Connecticut Cleanup season at Long Wharf, supporting the #DontTrashLISound campaign,” said Annalisa Paltauf, Save the Sound’s cleanup coordinator. “Our Cleanup Report, which summarizes data from 2017 through 2022, highlights plastics—both macro and micro—as major hazards. Plastic leaches toxic chemicals into our waters and can cause starvation and suffocation in wildlife. We can prevent a lot of plastic from becoming hazardous by simply consuming less of it and disposing of it correctly.”
Volunteers from Reimagining New Haven are expected to join in the cleanup, which will take place from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. Other volunteers are welcome to join. Volunteers should meet at Long Wharf Park, near the schooner pier. Parking is available along Long Wharf Drive.
To sign up for this and other cleanups across Connecticut, fill out this form. For more cleanup information, visit Save the Sound’s cleanup webpage or contact Annalisa Paltauf at mailto:[email protected]. Past #DontTrashLISound campaigns have begun with cleanups at various shoreline locations, including Bluff Point State Park in Groton, Sherwood Island State Park in Westport and Seaside Park in Bridgeport. The campaign will continue until International Coastal Cleanup Day on Sept. 16, when volunteers will pick up trash at dozens of shoreline and inland locations statewide. Save the Sound continues to clean up locations across the state through October.
Cleanups will also take place on the New York side of Long Island Sound, hosted by New York Sea Grant and the American Littoral Society. These will include several on International Coastal Cleanup Day Sept. 16 and a Halloween Beach Cleanup on Oct. 28 at West Meadow Beach in Stony Brook. Volunteers are invited to wear costumes to the cleanup. To sign up for one of these cleanups, tap the QR code on the American Littoral Society Beach Cleanup Flyer. For more information about cleanups in New York, email Jimena Beatriz Perez Viscasillas, Long Island Sound outreach coordinator for New York Sea Grant, at: mailto:[email protected].
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This document describes the governance of the organizational structure and functions of the Long Island Sound Study in advancing actions for the protection and restoration of Long Island Sound under the Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan (CCMP). See PDF.
Note: The Request for Proposals has been extended to September 11.
NEIWPCC, in cooperation with Long Island Sound Study, the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, and other partners, is seeking a Request for Proposals for the continued development of the Long Island Sound Best Management Practices tracking tool. The BMP tracking tool for nonpoint source and stormwater pollution will focus on the Connecticut portion of the Long Island Sound watershed. The objective of the RFP is to further develop and implement a tracking and accounting system (Phase II, Part-2) based on the recommendations of Phase I, and the comments received during Phase II-Part 1 of the project. The results of the project will advance the tracking and reporting of a nonpoint source and stormwater tracking tool in Connecticut. This project will build upon the previous phases of this project while dovetailing with ongoing modeling and tracking projects being completed by others in the Long Island Sound watershed.
Applicants who are eligible to submit proposals in response to this RFP include: federal (non-EPA), state, or local government agencies; interstate agencies; private non-profit organizations and institutions; for-profit organizations; and academic or educational institutions. Partnerships are allowed. There is $250,000 available for this project and it is anticipated that one successful project will be chosen.
Proposals must be submitted by no later than 12:00 PM EST (noon) on July 31, 2023. The RFP is available on the NEIWPCC website.
June 16 is World Sea Turtle Day! The Sound provides habitat for five of the seven species of sea turtles that swim our oceans. One simple way to help sea turtles is to keep plastic pollution away from our waterways.
Every 10 days from mid-spring to mid-fall George Hoffman gets up early in the morning to meet three of his colleagues with the Setauket Harbor Task Force. At the harbor around 5:45 am, they join the captain of a small boat who takes them out on the water to monitor the ecological health of Port Jefferson and Setauket harbors.
Rain or shine, these volunteers navigate by GPS to their designated water quality stations to measure the water quality of their part of Long Island Sound. They take readings with a monitoring probe called a multiparameter sonde to help detect whether the impact of pollution from excess nutrients entering coastal waters as well as warm temperatures can lead to algal blooms and declines in oxygen. Low dissolved oxygen levels can result in hypoxia, or anoxia (no oxygen at all), making it difficult or impossible for fish and other aquatic life to breathe. Algal blooms can block the sunlight needed for eelgrass, an important underwater grass, to grow. Some harmful algal blooms can even be toxic to wildlife, humans, or pets.
In six years of monitoring, Hoffman recalls the task force members only missing one or two days of monitoring—due to heavy fog. The early morning alarm for monitoring–a requirement of the UWS that monitoring be conducted within three hours of sunrise when hypoxia is easier to detect—has not been a barrier for participation.
“People love to be out on the water and the earlier the better,” said Hoffman. “I thought at 5:30, 6 o’clock it would be a problem, but I never had anyone quit.”
Dedicated volunteers are not unique to Setauket and Port Jefferson harbors. The local group is part of the Unified Water Study, a soundwide monitoring program established by Save the Sound and financially supported by the Long Island Sound Study through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Since the UWS was created seven years ago as part of a handoff of a project called the Long Island Sound Report Card, it has grown into the largest community coastal water quality monitoring program on the Sound, and probably one of the largest in the northeast.
“I think what’s important about being a participating organization in the monitoring is that it really has given us a lot of credibility in terms of dealing with our local governments,” said Hoffman, a semi-retired legislative and local government official who helped start the task force in 2015 with a mission to reduce harmful bacteria in Setauket Harbor so that shellfish could once again be harvested. The task force has since expanded to include water quality issues related to the Unified Water Study. “I think a lot of people know that this is a large community of (groups) doing this on harbors on both sides of the Sound.”
Hoffman said the group’s ability to collect quality data has helped them gain the respect of local, state, and federally elected representatives, who in turn have helped to secure grants for public works projects to reduce the amount of polluted stormwater runoff entering the harbors. The Task Force is particularly concerned about polluted runoff and sediment from stormwater and sediment originating from Route 25A, a heavily used road near the shoreline.
The early morning alarm for monitoring–a requirement of the UWS that monitoring be conducted within three hours of sunrise when hypoxia is easier to detect—has not been a barrier for participation in Setauket, Port Jefferson or elsewhere.
Since its 2016 start as a pilot project with three groups, the UWS has grown to 27 groups, ranging from all volunteer organizations like the task force to local government organizations and the Interstate Environmental Commission. The groups will monitor 46 embayments in 2023. Around the Sound, these water bodies have several names, including bays, harbors, coves, and inlets, and are associated with local references, such as Setauket Harbor, in the hamlet of East Setauket in the Town of Brookhaven on Long Island and Scott Cove in Darien, Connecticut.
As participating organizations under the UWS, programs like the Setauket Harbor Task Force agree to collect the same data using the same procedures through a Quality Assurance Project Plan. The QA plan is a requirement by EPA to receive federal funding, but it is also designed to assure that the data are scientifically trustworthy and can be used by decisionmakers. While the program’s data is standardized, each of the participating organizations have their own unique reasons to monitor their local waters.
Some of the local monitoring programs participating with the Unified Water Study have existed for decades. Many, such as the Coalition to Save Hempstead Harbor, and Harbor Watch, which monitors waters in Norwalk Harbor, have been collecting data that have led to successful efforts to reopen shellfish beds and remove sources of bacterial contamination. But prior to the UWS there has never been a regional approach to studying some of the most vexing problems affecting coastal waters, including the role nutrients play in impacting oxygenated waters.
“Nothing to this scale has everyone out in the water, same time in the morning, and using the same instruments, using the same standards collecting very important environmental health metrics, including dissolved oxygen,” said Peter Linderoth, Save the Sound’s water quality director, and its manager for the UWS since its start. “Just like we need oxygen to breath, animals in the water need oxygen.”
In contrast to the near-shore waters, the Long Island Sound Study has been funding coordinated efforts to monitor water quality in the “open water basins” and “narrows” of the Sound from New York City to eastern Connecticut and Long Island since 1987. Water quality data from that effort as well as from New York City were used by LISS, EPA, and the states of Connecticut and New York to help develop a plan to reduce nitrogen discharged from wastewater treatment plants. Water quality monitoring of the open Sound is ongoing in order to track the response of the nitrogen reduction plan as well as track other impacts, including increasing water temperatures, to the health of the Sound.
For the public and for policy makers, the results of the Unified Water Study monitoring efforts are available through the Long Island Sound Report Card, a project Linderoth works on with a team of scientists and UWS staff, and which is supported through The John and Daria Barry Foundation. Nearly a decade ago, Save the Sound took on the biennially produced report card from the Integration and Application Network, a program of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. IAN had received funding from the Long Island Sound Funders Collaborative to use existing water quality monitoring data to provide a report with letter grades to make it easier to evaluate the effects of restoration, conservation, and management on the Sound’s ecosystem. The letter grades were modeled after a similar report IAN developed for Chesapeake Bay and has since been replicated around the world. The initial report IAN produced for Long Island Sound with 2013 data focused on the Sound’s open water basins, but IAN also included grades for two bays as a model for future reports to have an expanded section for bays. When Save the Sound took over, however, it decided at first to remove the bays from the report card, and instead focus on creating and growing the Unified Water Study.
“(When) we became the group that releases the Long Island Sound Report Card we almost immediately took the embayments out of the report card and stopped extending the open water grades into bays and harbors,” said Linderoth. “We knew and know still that those waterbodies are incredibly relevant to the neighborhoods that surround them and to the communities that surround them, not just the specific neighborhoods. So, we needed to generate high quality comparable data to fuel bay grades for those bays and harbors because we see them as an incredibly important part of Long Island Sound of course and to really relay their conditions to lay people we needed to improve our monitoring program to get data to fill those gaps.”
The first report card with bay data was for 2020. Of the 50 bays and bay segments monitored by 22 groups, 56% received a grade of C, D, or F, and only six received a grade of A. The report highlighted the outsized impact that pollution from communities have on coastal waters, especially where tidal exchange from the ocean-influenced open Sound is low and pollutant loads from the rivers and streams are high. The grades showed that hypoxia was the biggest problem followed by excessive macroalgae or seaweed, a companion stressor.
Elected officials took notice. The report card played a role in congressional efforts to increase funding for Long Island Sound’s restoration. After the report card was released in October 2020 Connecticut Senators Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy cited the findings that more than half the bays received “low water quality scores” when it delivered a letter to the Committee on Appropriations and the subcommittee on Interior, Environment and Related Agencies that called for a “request for robust funding” for Long Island Sound.
As for the Long Island Sound Study, the Unified Water Study has helped to accomplish a long-term goal for developing a soundwide embayment monitoring network. In 2011 that became a priority when the LISS Management Committee requested proposals from scientists to evaluate existing embayment monitoring programs and provide recommendations on how to develop the network. At the time, the LISS management and scientific committees were seeking more information on the sources of nutrients coming from coastal lands that impacted the near shore, but also the open waters of the Sound. They desired to “improve access by Long Island Sound Study (LISS) partners’ to quality-assured embayment water quality monitoring data, and ultimately to improve scientific understanding for a more holistic management of the Sound.” The LISS committees also recognized the need to address pollution in the near-shore areas that had the most immediate impact on communities, including through beach closures, shell fisheries closures, and nuisance algae blooms. The resulting report, published in 2013, called for creating new water quality monitoring positions to help develop the network. It also included a proposed budget, but there were no funds at the time to implement the network.
Fast forward to 2023, and the data collected through the Unified Water Study is being used by Long Island Sound Study’s partners. CT DEEP, for example, is using data to assess whether near shore areas are meeting the state standards for dissolved oxygen levels. Data from the near shore areas through the UWS also will be used to supplement CT DEEP’s data collection effort designed to develop scientific models for establishing new targets to reduce nutrients in Connecticut’s priority bays and harbors. CT DEEP anticipates that once the models are completed and corrective actions are implemented, the frequent monitoring of bays by the UWS groups will also be valuable to help track the response of the system to change over time.
Kelly Streich, a CT DEEP analyst working on the model, said that having a quality assurance plan was essential for the state’s ability to use data collected by community-based organizations.
“That makes a big difference.” said Streich. “We know it is quality assured, we know that the UWS monitoring groups were trained, and the data is validated through the UWS program before it is made available for use by Save the Sound.”
You can request the 2022 Long Island Sound Report Card, and download previous report cards, on the Save the Sound website. Long Island Sound Report Card – Save the Sound
Ten years ago, a Long Island Sound Study-funded report outlined steps to establish a soundwide network of community-based groups monitoring for near-shore waters. It also highlighted a major challenge toward its creation.
Community-based volunteer groups, said the study’s authors, were highly supportive of joining a network, but “this is dependent upon the provision of necessary resources in the form of training, equipment and supporting funds.”
Save the Sound, which eventually took on the role of creating the network through the Unified Water Study, has met that challenge through its Equipment Loan Program.
Originally run by Harbor Watch, an early member of the Unified Water Study, the Equipment Loan Program was taken over by Save the Sound in 2017 at a time when about 12 groups were participating. Managed by Elena Colon, the program provides equipment ranging from sophisticated water quality sensors to supplying data sheets and buckets. The most unusual loan is a boat, an Amesbury Dory, donated to Save the Sound from a supporter, and provided to the Bronx River Alliance on loan for six months a year to conduct water sampling on the Bronx River, including an outermost station near the Western Narrows of Long Island Sound.
During the monitoring season, the groups collect data, including readings from a device with a sensor called a multiparameter sonde that measures dissolved oxygen, temperature, water turbidity, and chlorophyll a (a pigment in plants that helps in coastal waters to indicate the abundance of microalgae and its need to use nitrogen to grow). It also collects physical samples of chlorophyll a. At The John and Daria Barry Foundation laboratory, part of Save the Sound’s New York office in Larchmont, Colon analyzes the samples and ensures that all the data that has been collected is validated so it can be used for scientific study and for reports such as the Long Island Sound Report Card. Thanks to funding from the Long Island Sound Study the supplies have been able to keep pace with the growth of the UWS, which will monitor 46 embayments through 27 groups in 2023.
Peter Linderoth, director of water quality for Save the Sound, describes the Equipment Loan Program as a game changer in helping UWS expand around the Sound.
“With the equipment loan program, Elena and the team are getting this equipment all the way out to eastern Connecticut and Long Island and west to New York City,” he said. “It really is an impressive feat.”
Through funding from The John and Daria Barry Foundation, Colon also is now able to conduct in-house analysis of the physical samples instead of contracting out to a third party laboratory, which has often resulted in long wait-times to get results back. A new discrete analyzer will be particularly useful for “tier 2” monitoring groups, a subset of the UWS monitoring groups that have the capacity to collect samples of nitrogen, phosphorus, and other substances that provide more detailed measures of the Sound’s water quality. The in-house work will save money, and the faster turnaround should help the monitoring groups get information faster to make corrections if necessary and “fine-tune” their sampling techniques.
Each April, Colon and Linderoth also provide training for the groups on how to use the equipment and how to collect data that meets the program’s Quality Assurance Project Plan. Colon also is available during monitoring season from May to October to answer any questions.
“I am basically a built-in tech support for everyone,” she said. “So, I make sure that all of the equipment is running. I make sure to order, purchase and replenish inventory. I make sure that when any of the groups run into problems I am there, and I am going to fix it for them. “
Colon also has noticed that the groups are not just talking to her. They are getting to know each other through training sessions, conferences, and video chats, and exchanging information and collaborating to improve their skills.
“There is something to be said when you are all part of the same study of this scale,” said Colon. “It is just kind of like you are all in the trenches together. It is so great (for them) to be able to exchange stories. ‘How did you do that?’ ‘How was it for you?’ It really brings people together.”