Saugatuck Test Sites Show Good Up-River Results

By Frank Luongo  - The Westport News, August 12, 2005

If you live near stretches of the upper Saugatuck River, the water quality might be good enough for swimming, earning a "B" rating under state designation for that form of recreation.

That is not an "AA" or even an "A" rating, but tests conducted last spring and this summer suggest that the upper Saugatuck River and its many tributaries are relatively free of pollution, not returnable, perhaps, to a pristine state of nature, but preservable at an acceptable level of environmental quality.

"There is a good, solid foundation and a rare opportunity to maintain a good river, if you can keep it. Most other rivers are flunking," Dick Harris said recently about the upper Saugatuck.

He is the well-known and highly regarded director of the Harbor Watch/River Watch program at Earthplace, The Nature Discovery Center in Westport.

That initiative started in 1986 and since then has been monitoring the water quality of Norwalk Harbor and the lower Saugatuck and Indian River watersheds, which are vulnerable to "point-source" pollution from commercial activity and high-density residential development.

"With that kind of pollution you can see a drain pipe spilling into the waterway and trace it back to the source," Harris said, indicating that the source might be a known industrial site or a condominium complex.

In the fall of 2004, the Southwest Connecticut Conservation District, which fosters the preservation and protection of natural resources in Fairfield and New Haven Counties, named Harris one of its seven "conservation partners of the year."

Having completed a report in May on a three-month study of the Sasco Brook Watershed from January though March of this year, Harris turned his attention to the upper Saugatuck with a commission from the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) through state funding under the U.S. Clean Water Act of 1977.

Like the Sasco Brook project, the new Saugatuck watch, according to Harris, is looking for signs of "nonpoint" pollution from a myriad of sources, rather than the single, knowable polluter.

That really includes, Harris likes to say, all the ordinary activities of people going about their daily lives within striking distance of the river system.

That problem provides its own solution, according to Harris, because the same people who cause this kind of river pollution can just as effectively take steps to prevent it, especially with good land-management strategies.

With his Earthplace staff, a full squad of college and high school interns, volunteer senior citizens and teachers, Harris has been conducting multiple water quality tests of the upper Saugatuck since May and will continue to do so through September.

Then the process repeats itself next spring and summer, followed shortly thereafter by a final report to the DEP.

Are homeowners cleaning their septic systems on a regular basis and keeping them from failing? Harris and company will know when that is not happening by charting the amount of e. coli and fecal coliform bacteria.

Are property owners planting and maintaining lawns clear down to the riverbank, cutting down natural riparian buffers that absorb runoff? Conductivity tests of the ionic strength of the water can discover this in irregularly high residues of the limestone and magnesium compounds used in gardening.

The testers also take the pulse of the river system by measuring oxygen levels in the water that can be adversely affected by weather or pollution. They are ready to identify "hypoxic" conditions of low oxygen that kill fish and other living organisms in the food chain.

So far their samplings and laboratory analyses have uncovered two pollution hot spots in the vicinity of Cobbs Mill Inn in Weston.

"We don't know exactly where it's coming from, perhaps from a couple of ponds in that area," Harris said. And so the work continues with more results to follow.