10.17.2024 South Watuppa Pond Meeting

couple minutes past 6 here uh we'll get this started so uh tonight we'll run through uh some of the work that we've done uh and some of the things that have come about this year uh and what we're looking for for the future uh first off I'd like to thank uh all of our partners and it starts with the three guys that are right up here um we have uh rep Paul

Schmidt the mayor and uh Senator Mike Rodricks uh who have all been great big supporters of this project they see the uh benefit of the uh of the South wer and improving the water quality for recreational uh and uh and water use in the future so um Senator I don't know if if you want to say anything I want to say anything I know you do so good evening everyone thank you very much

Paul Mr Mayor representative it's great to see everyone uh as we continue having our conversations about improving the water quality uh in South wupa Pond um it's been many of you know I spent my entire life up around and on the pond I always joke that back in the 70s I I like to say when I was 12 um but back in the 70s uh giving water skiing lessons uh on on South wupa Pond um and

um and I've seen it through uh it's EB and flows I can remember uh the the days of it looking like pea soup um we were out there swimming and skiing and S haing on the pond um I remember when kerill when this kerill burnt uh in January of 87 and they pumped so much water out of the pond I think they pumped over two inches of water it was

iced over it was frozen over but they pumped about two inches of water uh out of this Pond um trying to extinguish uh that fire but thank you to the work that Paul has done and under his leadership and working with rep Schmid we've been able to secure some State funding U to provide the studies and the research um to improve the water quality so I'm anxious to hear uh where we stand um and

what the new uh new research has shown and uh thank you all for your interest and for being here thank you thank you representative thank you you know I've had the honor of uh representing Westport and uh Fall River for 14 years and working with people like Senator Rodrick he's been a wonderful wonderful friend and partner uh people like mayor Coogan and also uh Steve wette who's in the audience who's

been a selectman in Westport for a number of years but getting projects like this done is really what it's all about and I am going to miss this job uh as I go back to my farm but I'll go back to the farm knowing that maybe I've made a little bit of a difference in some small ways so thanks very much and over to you mayor yeah uh absolutely southw Tupper

Pond is a team effort um I was on the phone I I know um Paul May mention this but last night I was on the phone with Senator Mary's office we're in line for a huge earmark on South with Tupper they I think it's called the deactivation of phosphorus uh they're they waiting till after the election to pass the budget it is sitting in the budget it's going to help this project immensely down the road um

Paul furland does a great job with water in the city of Fall River he's on top of all these projects from lining a water main on Charles Street to a massive project like southw Tupper to protecting the northw Tupper where I'm still trying to make sure we have powerboat racing on the weekends and I'm only kidding I'm only kidding Paul and I joke about it all the time but these are the resources we're

going to save for years and years to come uh he does a great job and I'm sure this is another going to be another feather in his cap when this project comes to fruition uh people like Senator Rodricks Paul Schmidt they're invested in this um they're committed to seeing this through to the end projects sometimes Move Along slower than all of us would like but this one's going to

keep going until we get it done and it's going to be under the leadership of Paul fand and the crew at the water department in Fall River so I really appreciate your efforts and I really want to thank everybody for coming out tonight it's very important to see you all here thank you all right thank you very much for that you know we do have other partners uh in the State uh and federal

government that definitely recognize this project uh recognize the benefits that we have here on South with Tupper Pond uh recreational and uh other that uh that this that this provides to the whole entire region uh as everybody knows this is a partnership really between the city of Fall River uh Westport and Idan as we all border the pond and all uh contribute to what goes into the pond uh and what happens in the

pond so some of the other partners that we have I just want to run through them I know most of you have seen this but BOS bank they uh provided initial seed money to start this project four four years ago uh UMass Dartmouth has been a partner with us uh doing sampling in the pond and doing uh different analysis uh and you'll hear you'll hear some about that tonight um and uh you know rep

Edwards from Rhode Island has also partnered with us uh through this project um my point my computer has

frozen there we go okay uh so some of the other partners that have contributed Liberty Utilities uh they provided uh some funding through a mitigation project that they had to do um so we were able to use that funding towards uh South wup of pond the MVP program Municipal vulnerability preparedness program through the state who's uh funded through the state budget um that has provided grants uh with the future

potential for additional grants coming into this project uh groundwork South Coast worked on the project last year uh in education of the public of what goes on in South witha pan Atlantis Charter Schools is looking at the educational benefits since they are a neighbor to the pond uh and some of the other runoff areas that come down to the pond uh Viva for River has also been uh a partner and

we hope to be able to use them in the future for public education public Outreach now the one that we did forget from this slide as well is sured uh they partnered with us with the current grant that we have uh with that involves the yield study of the South wupa and the other water supplies that that we have within the region so for NE right now I'll turn it

over to uh Zack Henderson from UD and curan uh to go over and run through the agenda and some of the basic slides and then we'll get to hear from some of the real experts that uh that really understand this uh and are going to help us uh better the water quality of the South wupa so thank you so I think I'm only a part partial expert is that is that the inference

that I got here now we have some great uh speakers tonight um nice to see some of you again I've been involved with this for I think the last four or five years it's been a real pleasure and honor to be a part of this a really important resource I understand from all of you and uh just happy to be here my name is Zach Henderson from uh the engineering and science company Woodard

and Curran and um I'm going to talk a little bit about what we've done uh we're going to bounce to UMass Dartmouth to talk a little bit about what they've been doing related to um the more recent sampling and chemistry and for many of you that have been with us over the last several years some of this will be a little bit of going over where we've been before but we're going to add in

some new stuff we have a couple uh very smart folks definitely the experts on a few of the new things that we've studied uh that'll they'll talk about what we're currently doing and then what what we still have planned for the future and there's some exciting opportunities there so just kind of as a reminder maybe for some folks how many folks were here a couple years ago in a really hot

room over at the uh at the okay great all right so we've had a we've had a a good so thanks for continuing to come we got a much nicer space here I don't no offense to them but it was not nearly as hot um so at that time we had not even started the basic evaluation of the Watershed really looking at what's going on in this wed which really revealed

quite a bit for us so that Watershed assessment understanding where water's coming from and how it's getting into this Pond is very important and there are some unique things about this Pond largely related to the interceptors that protect North wopa pond so there's some interceptors that bring water down to us in South wopa that uh we've been studying quite a bit uh as part of that

process we were look at pollutant Source identification so where do we think um problems are coming from we have a much better understanding now based on Dr Wagner's work which he'll talk about tonight um UMass Dartmouth now has three years of sampling data and and I think also this past summer as well so now four years of water quality sampling data pretty extensive monitoring uh

really excited about that and then what we did at that time is we looked at opportunities for pollutant Source control those are very important it's things that you all can do it's things that the city can do related to keeping nutrients out of the out of the pond right protecting from erosion sediment uh Leaf litter pickup on the streets in the fall you know F being careful with fertilizer all those types of things

very important related to keeping things from getting into the water and into the pond and then we've also looked at over the years several different opportunities to mitigate storm water runoff which can be a major contributor and problem in the Watershed so all that was what we did initially and that's kind of got us to to where we are today and I'll come you'll come back to me in

in a few minutes but I'm going to turn it over now to to David finger he's going to talk a little bit about what you Dartmouth has done and what they've been doing hello um Dave slesinger I'm a research associate at UMass Dartmouth um and and I was in this project from the very very beginning I think I've been out there almost on the water almost every time somehow um but uh we finished uh year

three in uh 2023 um we've been collecting waterc column data um monthly we would take dissolved oxygen and temperature profiles uh samples for nutrients and uh for chlorophyll um and other markers like total carbon total nitrogen which is another way to uh talk about phytoplankton in the water what's the biomass of phytoplankton um let's see we did do some phytoplankton monitoring in 2021 looking

at the types of uh uh phytoplankton and cyanobacteria that were in the water um these uh next four things we haven't done done um it's still to be determined the plant surveys muscle surveys Beth themetry and uh the sediment surveys um the uh Watershed delineation is primarily with with you guys right y yeah um so uh we're um as far as data that's been put out we have uh Tech memos for 21 and

22 um um 2023 tech report is still on its way um it should be um the end of the month um let's see come on where's good enough oh all right or not um well at least it's not me I guess we'll take three of

us this is your computer isn't it yeah there you go all right okay all right so um so we've completed the three um years of monthly water quality sampling um in 2023 and uh in September we put out a continuously monitoring um sand a device that measures oxygen temperature salinity chlorophyll depth every 15 minutes um because obviously if we're out there once a month we're ke missing

a lot right um a lot of times a pond will uh the health of the pond for the season can be determined in just a week of um anoxia um so we wanted to see if we could capture some of those events by having a continuous monitoring and that monitor was placed at S sw1 at the um northern reach of the pond so uh we put the sensors um 30 cm from the

bottom so we were looking at the bottom water oxygen and how that affects the sediments um what we found was uh beginning at the beginning of our deployment there's zero oxygen and you can see that where's nope there um in the first few days then uh so zero oxygen then uh for the rest of the time it's up near saturation it's as much oxygen as you could dissolve in the water if

you uh bubbled air through it um the question is that we're trying to look at is whether or not anoxia creates um these blooms or if rainfall creates the blooms is it from an external source is it nitrogen coming in from streams or is it uh coming off the sediments um very hard to tell we had two huge rainstorms uh on the on the right you can some of you might remember that from June

14th um or sorry July 14th of 2023 um the entire uh uh Waterfront was flooded um in beginning in uh around the 11th we got 8 inches of rainfall over the course of five days very hard to separate the two what we did find is that this Bloom this Bloom was related to the appears to be related to the rainfall um previous to the deployment uh there was oxgen in the water and at

on the 1 when we had our monthly sampling so the period perod of anoxia that could create phosphorus in the water column are are rare uh let's see so to date um yeah the water quality is impaired um it it is suffering from phosphorus um overabundance the there are there could be an oxic events that cause sediment release we're uh I think that's still up in the air um most of the population of the back of

the phytoplankton are cyano bacteria and and the counts are very high um often resulting in closures um I know that there are signs up there um at the ramp nearly the entire summer um so not not fantastic Noe um so what can we do in the future um we weren't funded to do any work last summer um I'm not really sure exactly where things are headed uh hopefully I'm going to learn some more tonight

um one thing that we could offer is a sediment nutrient regener ation study we know that uh from Ken's work that there's lots of phosphorus in the sediment um the question is whether or not the phosphor is released and under what conditions um there are a lot of things that can um mitigate phosphorus release like nitrate in the bottom water um or the presence of Manganese um so shortterm inoxia doesn't

necessarily result in phosphorus release and uh I think that by having a a study of how the nutrients are released from the sediment will give you guys enough information to form priorities if it's possible if there's um only enough money to do one thing or another better to know that 10% comes from say uh the Watershed and 90% comes from the sediment or the opposite right now I don't think we really know

um but to attack one uh when it's not the predominant cause would rely uh would probably result in a delay of what probably couple years funding wise um and what I guess now turn it over back to you huh yeah I'll take thanks David so we we did we have done a little bit more work and and Ken Wagner's here and he'll talk a little bit about some of his findings as well doing some of the

the modeling to look just at that ratio of of loading and some of what we understand from sediment uh today in the bottom um so I think for some of you who've already been here so we we did have the study that was funded by the vulnerability preparedness uh grant program great program in Massachusetts and we have started to look at ways to mitigate this this runoff portion of the

load uh it's a big complicated Watershed it's hard to do all of that at once it's very very costly uh to address storm water runoff it takes a lot of work there's a lot of engineering involved we've identified several projects that uh funding dependent can be uh designed uh or or the designs are complete can be constructed in the future so we've have we have a demonstration project at the

boat ramp we have a project in tton on the border of Fall River and also a project in wet Westport those have all been designed it's a matter of like funding the actual construction of those the other thing I'm going to talk a little bit more about tonight and I have a a a a uh panel in the back that I'd be happy to talk to anybody about because we're looking to get funding through the

next round of vulnerability preparedness grant program and we'd love to get your support on this one is uh for the the so-called sucker Brook Wetland restoration project that was um we did some concept designs in the last phase of work um we're also looking for this kind of Engagement with uh groundwork South Coast Atlanta charter school and the Viva uh Fall River folks as part of

that that Grant application so I know this is very hard to see but I just want to introduce it to you this area is um is really and I can go to this next slide and bounce back but for folks that know where Spectrum Lighting is um right here the Atlantis Charter School is right about here this is sucker Brook that comes in from the left to the right

and enters the water body this is a very large subwatershed that comes from Rhode Island uh comes from Stafford Pond and and Ken's worked quite a bit on Stafford Pond as well um and so this's a big large area that loads uh the the the southw top of with nutrients um and it's probably one of the more considerable sources um all of this flows to this massive Wetland complex um just next to uh Spectrum Lighting and

the and the mill facility there um there's some flooding problems there um there's also a massive invasive species there called fragm mites it's a 10 foot tall Reed uh that's come from overseas and has has invaded many of our our waterways for folks that know the Meadow Lands that's what all of that is very hard to eradicate but we have looked at some opportunities to potentially do

some restoration there and that's what we're looking for the funding for is to restore some of the the marsh land in that area you know enhance programming for the Atlantis Charter School and mitigate flooding for those neighborhoods that's the the plan and I'll just go back to the concepts back in the back on that board again after this I'd be happy to talk to folks a little bit about what we've been

thinking about none of those are set in stone the goal of the next phase of work would be a more extensive public participation component where we can really talk about uh opportunities so each of these projects really would address that storm waterer runoff component that we all know is a big part of protecting the long-term uh sustainability and resiliency of the of the water

body so this just kind of goes over what I just kind of said and again we're excited about some of the opportunities here especially related to kind of community engagement and really kind of fixing an area that's really kind of under uh underappreciated at this point in time uh within within the city uh some of the other completed work these are some of the the assessments necessary for restoration that we've

talked about at previous meetings uh some of the internal Lake sediment sampling has been done um I think what uh uh David seser was talking about was a little bit more lab analysis to really kind of simulate those conditions in a laboratory to see what releases which would be helpful um and we've done uh a fair amount of work on both of the Interceptor drains this was us out just

a few weeks ago uh training a new program in Fall River around how to sample for water chemistry uh how to be uh you know clean water operators for our Wastewater facilities really great program uh called XL conservation and we were working that Westside Interceptor to really kind of understand what was coming in on that side and that's related to this illicit discharge program as well um land use

codes are ongoing and policies uh have been enacted in all communities to really try to minimize the impact of new development and Redevelopment on the pond and that's very important for for moving forward so I think at this point I'm going to turn it over to Ken to talk a little bit about about what he's been involved in uh last year related to kind of nutrient sampling and what his

understanding is of chemistry and Dr Wagner and I have been working together for a number of years and and really appreciate his work he done a lot for lakes and ponds across the country really hi Ken okay Kell get I'm I'm Ken Wagner sort of the missing partner in this I've only been out to the lake a few times but what I do is work with data for the most part I like to let the

data do the talking but in a group like this showing you a whole lot of figures and tables is going to cause people to at least at least fall asleep if not run for the doors so I'm going to try to make this as simple as I can to give you the basic understanding of what we've gotten out of this I was involved in two parts of this project one was looking at

the internal release of phosphorus how much phosphorus is likely to be a factor in causing those algo blooms that's already sitting in the pond and how much other things might contribute from a model using the available data so two separate things that just have one slide on each so there's a picture of the lovely sediment that's on the bottom I wouldn't recommend bringing it to a

dinner party it's pretty foul smelling um what we looked at is that there's low oxygen at the sediment water interface over close to a th Acres of this Lake that's a lot it's not always anoxic as Dave pointed out there there's it comes and goes now it can be anoxic right at the ciment water interface a lot more than even a foot above it where they're making the measurements so there's

probably a tremendous oxygen demand and you may have an oxia lack of oxygen right at the siment water interface a lot of the summer but not really much in the winter um and it comes and goes in Spring and fall and it is temporary because this lake is not deep enough to have what they call strong stratification a wind storm can mix the whole thing up a much deeper Lake could

put another 10 or 15 feet on this Lake you'd have a chunk that would sit there all summer long and not really interact with the overlying water but you're about 23 F feet you know about the maximum it it it's going to mix that's almost a worst case scenario because if you have the high oxygen demand and now you have this phosphorus sitting in the bottom and it starts getting released

and then you get a mixing event It all becomes available Course once it gets up in the oxygenated Waters it phosphorus mostly being released from Iron compounds and they recombined so feric iron becomes Ferris iron and back again and they called it joking terms the feris wheel you know going around and around it goes but the catch is when you're this shallow there's enough light

penetrating to the bottom that the algae can grow right on the bottom the phosphorus doesn't have to get up in the water column they're sucking it up right there on the sediment surface at which point the Blu greens the cyanobacteria after they've accumulated enough can actually produce gas vaces gas pockets in their cells and float up to cause the bloom so that can happen now once they

get up in the water column if there's not all that much phosphorus in the water column the bloom will die out between 1 and 3 weeks but if there's plenty of phosphorus in the water column which is where your waterers shed loading and all those storms comes in now you can prolong the bloom over and over and get a succession of types so there's a lot of things going on here

what we started with was just looking at the sediment how much phosphorus is there in the upper 4 in or so that might be recycled again numbers may not mean much to you for units but you're somewhere between five 5 and 10 G of phosphorus per square meter now to put that in perspective value less than one is not too bad I'd like it to be more like 0.

five but one is not terrible we're at 5 to 10 five is considered high 10 is considered outrageous so you were somewhere between high and outrageous with the amount of phosphorus sitting down in the bottom it's a time bomb as Dave pointed out if if it there's no Oxygen problem it's not really getting released there's a little bit of oxygenated Decay that goes on but that Ironbound phosphorus which what we're

measuring stays put but when you get enough organic loading which comes from the Watershed it sucks the phos sucks the oxygen out and that can release the phosphorus I believe from the data I'm seeing and from what we measured when I went out on the lake which was not nearly as much as these guys have done that that's occurring quite a bit more than you might think from say the

continuous buoy operation which was only you only started in September with that it did yes it wasn't there in July and August when a lot of that occurs but even then a foot off the bottom it's not so bad most of the time we got it at I think 16 feet and down we got some low oxygen so that's still it's between 16 and 23 feet that's a pretty good chunk

of the lake a th000 Acres but it's not always at that situation so not all that phosphorus is going to get released but that time bomb that's sitting there is a pretty big bomb um a general rule of thumb typically in most lakes about 10 10% of that gets red released in a in a summer that's still way too much so we've got an issue there um if we were to try to inactivate that phosphorus

keep it in there you have three ways to do it you can dredge the sediment out that's a lot of bake sales it's just ridiculous amount of money it doesn't happen too often and when you take it out getting rid of it it's another problem so that's probably not realistic you can put oxygen in make sure the oxygen stays there mix the lake add oxygen whatever to keep it oxygenated that's workable a lot of

water suppliers do that in Water Supplies because they can get better treatment they'll get better quality water and spend less on treatment but that's not what this lake is it's a recreational lake at this point so you'd have an ongoing you'd have initially large Capital cost and then an ongoing management cost which is pretty staggering the third option is to inactivate the phosphorus with something

that binds it up instead of the iron and won't let it be released when the Oxygen's low there's a number of compounds that can do that most commonly we use versions of aluminum so the aluminum just replaces the iron in it and you would need something around 75 to 85 grams per square meter to inactivate that terms of cost that's going to be at least $3,000 an acre we're talking about something

approaching a th000 Acres we're talking millions of dollars that's a bit tough to swallow now if you did it once and it cured the problem for a long long time that'd be wonderful I have lakes that have gone 20 years not bad I have not a lake to go 40 years I've had a couple make 30 but you know it's gradually going to wear off partly because you still have stuff coming in from the

waterers shed so there's an issue there with spending that kind of money if you haven't stopped the external inputs which are ultimately what fuel the internal input so the analogy I use is a leaky boat we all like our boats get out there boats got some leaks in it you come out one morning it's full of water pretty useless if it didn't sink it's it's still in trouble you can't go out

and use it the lake is the boat the water shatter the leaks the water already in the boat is that internal load if I bail out the water the boat will be usable for some time until the leaks allow water back in it if I patch the leaks but I don't bail the water out of the boat it's still not useful so you got to do both they're both it's it's

like the old beer commercial you know less filling tastes great it's both you have to deal with the internal load and you have to deal with the external load the question becomes which one's more important or how balanced are they that's the next piece of what we're doing and that's to look at a lak loading response model and it is a model never confuse a model with reality but was Yogi barison and prediction about

the future is difficult prediction is difficult particularly about the future you know to do this sort of thing you got to build a model and say does the model adequately predict what's going on now can I take a step back now and say let's put all the land back into non-human uses Forest Wetland whatever does it predict what we would expect under Prine conditions and then okay if we believe the model's adequate what

does it tell us will happen if we do certain things and that's what I I did here using all the data we had available uh the image there is basically the watered broken down into like 10 different subbasins that go into it what we found is that about 48% of the phosphorus per year is coming from the internal load and about 46% from external I wouldn't make those different the point is the

two of them are dominant the atmospheric stuff that comes in the wildlife that comes in a few septic systems things like that they're dropping the bucket and I want to say they're completely important because over time they build up but they're not the driving force it's runoff from The Watershed and internal Recycling and the internal recycling is fueled by the runoff from the waterers shed but taken together

they are literally 90 plus% of the source of the phosphorus that's causing the Alo Bloom problems so then we play those what if games if I inactivated the phosphorus like I mentioned before it would get about a 50% reduction and that would move us current phosphorus concentration is around 50 micrograms per liter again the the number in the units may not mean much to you 10 is a really good number 20 is a passable

number 30 is not good 50 is really bad and the most you ever see is around 100 so it could get worse but it's not good enough to just put a little dent in it and if we inactivated it we went with the number around 27 higher than the 20 we'd like it would improve conditions and immediately it would probably switch you away from cyanobacteria you would get other types

of algae that could be consumed by zo Plankton which get eaten by fish which we catch so it's not terrible productivity is not a bad thing it's only bad when the algae that are being produced can't be used and that's mostly true with the cyanobacteria so if we did inactivate the phosphorus we'd be taking out the big chunk that only really available during the summer and early fall and it would shift the ratio of

nutrients such that we would get less of the problem algae but we would still have too much phosphorus and we would still get a fair met algae I have two Lakes I'm working with nail that have had such a treatment but they had just so much other stuff going in again neither of them is having cyanobacteria blooms neither of them has the kind of clarity I would really like to see so

there's a limit um if we looked at extensive Watershed work now you've heard about some of the stor storm water things I'm looking at literally everything you conceivably do in the Watershed forget about money forget about jurisdiction you've become dictator you do anything you want in this Watershed to make it better if you did that it would also roughly cut it in half not too impressive because that's

millions and millions of dollars and of course you don't have jurisdiction everywhere you can't make the dairy farm go away you know you you can't tell people to move out of their homes and reforest the area you can buy it I suppose but it's a challenge if we looked at what's reasonable what you could really do in a watershed with the program you could get down near that 20 micrograms actually somewhat below it

maybe as as low as 14 so you'd be in a pretty good Zone but you're not going to completely eliminate problems in the lake probably wouldn't have the cyanobacteria blooms and you wouldn't have the really low Clarity and surface scums that you get so it's positive uh but it's a lot of work to get there now another way we use the inactivation as an interim thing again money's an object here it's

expensive but if you did that sort of treatment you would buy some number of years probably not a decade probably at least five years where you would get better conditions but again think of that leaky boat analogy your leaks are not a couple of loose rivets RI rivets they're also not a huge gash in the hull but they're big enough that if you don't keep bailing out you're going to have a

hard time fish you get a bail with one hand and fish with the other because the wood is still you know coming in the nutrients are still coming in it's both and again I've had some Lakes where it was 90% internal load and only 10% waterers shed and I've had others where it was 10% internal load 90% waterers shed and bailing out makes no sense at all this one's squarely in the middle

now we don't have enough data to be super sure of every Last Detail um as I mentioned I know how much phosphorus is available to come out things like the uh incubation of sediment cores in a lab can tell you how much really comes out in any instant in time when it goes an oxic or when it's not that is a useful thing to know we're working with about a dozen samples over

a thousand acres I think I was going to spend $3 million I'd want to invest a few more tens of thousands to get that nailed down a little better but the reality is we didn't find that much variability the dose is pretty similar everywhere in that area of course it's kind of a big flat Bowl in there it's not too surprising in that regard and you've got stuff coming in from all over

it's not one Smoking Gun that's the other thing we looked at all the different subw sheds going in it it wasn't like one stood out Above All the Rest they're all significant uh none of them are huge none of them are that tiny to be ignored so there's work needed everywhere and I know they've working out priorities and what things to hit and there's always some smoking guns to

be had when we worked with tton on on Stafford pond we had real issues with the dairy farm uh turned out that we were able to get nrcs money and actually improve the way things were handled there it curtailed the inputs the lake got somewhat better but it still didn't improve enough until we did an aluminum treatment and KN it back and they've been in good shape for the last four

years now there's still things going in there it's not going to last forever I don't know how long it will last but I think they'll get at least a decade maybe longer out of that one you could do something similar here but of course bigger Lake more phosphorus sitting in the bottom more expensive to do it an interim measure it would give you great relief initially but right now with the

data we have I can't tell you how long that would last but my guess is not a decade that's a lot of money to spend you know so it's like the kid in the Dyke you you you patch you plug the leak or bail out and the answer is probably both but if you can only do one thing at a time you probably have to deal with the water shed a bit more before you're

ready to do something in the lake and expect some longevity the results so that's where we're at on those two pieces um I've got lots of facts and numbers and such if you want to glaze over they'll be happy to answer questions but we can move on I think Neil fantasy's up

next thank you very much that's uh a lot of information and you know I think he was able to bring it down to level that I could understand so um you know that's that's one of the tough things next I'd like to introduce uh Dr Neil fennessy uh this is a little bit different than talking about the algae within the pond but it's definitely still involved within it U one of the things that we've been

working on is uh what we call a yield study uh for all of our watersheds and I just got to switch slideshows here so just quick second um so I just wanted to bring this into this conversation because I know everybody that's here really has a love for the pond has led for the Watershed has love um for everything involved so I just wanted to really bring this uh bring this information to you guys

there's some history on how the Watershed and the ponds were used and then we'll go into some of the some of the reasons that we're doing this yield study for all of our wat sheds throughout the whole entire entire area so with that I'll turn it over to Dr Neil fennessy thank you thank you there's the pointer well thanks for um inviting me to this Paul um Paul is probably one of the hardest working

Municipal um managers that I've ever met in my career he's a former student of mine at UMass Dartmouth and he'll probably honestly tell tell you that I was his favorite Professor um what was such a treat about meeting Paul way back when was it it was clear he knew where he was going he wasn't the guy who was after the a he was the guy who was after the knowledge

and as I followed his career since that time it's been amazing how he's just taken the bull by the horns and charged I am stunned at what he's accomplished in these few years with the city and so it's an absolute trait to be working for him as opposed to him working for me so um we actually started talking about the study of this sort maybe back in 2016 or so I had approached uh the

people up in the ASA wamps at Pond complex uh to consider funding you Massa study of this sort uh and in fact never got a response but that's how it goes Paul however was much more enthusiastic and receptive to it especially given the progress that's been going on with the work of water quality so for several years the city's been involved in water quality studies you've just heard quite a bit about it I

haven't been to a lecture uh as the sort that Paul or um k has just given uh I was totally thrilled and learned a lot and as I mentioned uh Paul and I had entered conversations about doing a a water supply vulnerability study uh with respect to potential climate change and thanks to the MVP program uh the study was funded we basically got underway um in Midsummer this year

so the major Focus was on uh looking at the potential impacts on system yield and reliability due to potential climate change and thanks to that flexibility the study has actually become a a wider planning study than had been initially intended so I'm I thought like Ken rather than Crush you with numbers and math and stuff uh we'd give it more of an an historic emphasis tonight I think

it'd be a lot more interesting for everyone so during the 18th and 19th centuries North and South witha ponds are essentially a single hydraulic entity and both sources provided potable and Industrial water supply sources in 1873 the city lays its first water mains in 1908 the narrow Gate House is built so this is a modification to what had been increasingly filled in the Narrows uh in order to provide a stable

bed for trolleys and then by the late 1880s or so electric trolleys between Fall River in New Bedford in 1909 the city acquires North wupa Pond Watershed to protect the water quality uh at this point in time uh folks in Massachusetts have absolutely determined that um Advanced water treatment for bacterial control is absolutely necessary and the city is right here on The Cutting Edge uh buying up the water

shed to protect that water quality is the simplest way to go about it then the southw up upon and the Qui aen River now become the source for nonpotable manufacturing water needs on 1924 the city's given the rights to 11.5 million gallons per day from Long Pond and Freetown which is part of the aamet pond complex that in turn is shared with the city of Taunton and the City of New

Bedford in 1938 the city acquires the rights to Lake nooke which is on the the border between Fall River and Westport and the purpose of this was to track the Firestone TIR and Rubber Company uh which needed 20 million gallons of water a day for their manufacturing needs so the city acquired the source and attracted Firestone who stayed with the city for many years by the mid 1960s Route 24 upgrade

changes the Hydraulics of the South wupa and quian river in 1953 a dam had been proposed uh at the headat of the quick aan uh to basically deepen um South wupa Pond um plants had been set forth but I think with um Route 24 being upgraded and then uh route I95 all that changed so in 1971 in response to the 1960s drought construction of the copicut reservoir is completed uh plans began for this

project in the late 1950s but the drought of the 1960s made it necessary in 1971 Firestone Tire and rubber leaves fall river they had been manufacturing cushions and foam rubber and apparently found it no longer profitable this is a significant one that many of you especially those fans of the Fall River history are probably probably unaware of in 1985 the Massachusetts Water Management Act is

enacted the city has so-called registered withdrawals from North and South with UPA Pond and copicut Reservoir but their registrations do not include Long Pond or NOA choke and the reason for that is the city didn't use these sources during 1981 to 1985 so my focus here principally is firm yield and uh water supply engineers and modelers such as me have defined this instead of safe yield which some of you

might be more familiar with it's a maximum possible sustainable average daily withdrawal from a surface water supply system during a prolonged drought so firm the analysis is virtually a daily water accounting procedure where a reservoir is analogous to a bank account the math is exactly the same the balance of your bank account is equal to the deposits and the withdrawals only in this case the bank

account holds a finite amount of currency this being what's called active storage so this sort of analysis um over the last 30 plus years uh since I wrote the manual for the state of Massachusetts it's a computer-based math model which steps the reservoir through Decades of daily weather inflows withdrawals discharge spills subject to operational rules the firm yield is determined when

that withdrawal rate completely empties the models active storage for a single day so here's an example of a small Reservoir small in the sense that the active storage relative to the Watershed is a very small ratio and what we see

here most of the time this thing is full so it's 100% but down here it dried out for one day and it looks like it's just about 1965 see November or December 1965 and then it recovers so there's a few other ups and downs and so forth um we'll get into a little detail this is a large reservoir uh here we've got the same contributing Watershed but now we've got

a much larger active storage and we can see this thing is not full for much of the time it languishes less than full quite a bit and some of the preliminary analysis shows that uh northw up upon the hes like this a bit uh so it tends to stay down it doesn't jump right back up and it tends to stay down and languish uh one of the other water bodies we're doing in this study is a

Somerset Reservoir so prelim preliminary work with the suet Reservoir is that's virtually full refill every year um very different kind of anim so part of my emphasis here of course is on climate change and I don't want to kill you with this sort of detail either so scientists basically agree that the earth's climate is changing faster than it ever has due to greenhouse gas emissions atmospheric CO2 concentrations

have risen by nearly 50% since the late 1700s within the last month the new SAT light has been launched it's actually uh tracking Point sources of both methane and carbon dioxide globing absolutely stunning results you can actually find this stuff on YouTube and you can see what looks like you know smoke from fires that are actually carbon monoxide and CO2 from uh feed Lots in Texas Pakistan carbon

dioxide plume from South Africa and so forth no joke so the Earth which modelers consider as ly and atmosphere is heated by incoming solar energy and this is referred to as shortwave energy and after that solar energy each stuff up on the surface including lakes and rivers some of that energy this is called longwave radiation is radiated back into space so you're considering the Earth is kind of a mirror hot stuff

comes down to the Earth surface heats the Earth surface some of that goes back up it's now cooled off so these are theories that have these are theories that have been around for 150 years so as CO2 and greenhouse gas levels rise this longwave radiation energy is trapped so rather than going back into space it bounces back to Earth some of that longwave radiation gets bounced back to Earth by clouds but it's

this atmosphere if it's trapping it and that's why it's causing things to eat up so first question I would ask if I were you well I read about this in Newsweek and see stuff about it on Facebook but what does that have to do with me is it happening here who's wondered that H come on all right well what's amazing is yes we're very fortunate and it's the blue hill Observatory that's located in

canas is the nation's oldest weather Observatory and they started recording temperature back in um 1830 so what a tremendous Rec and over this period of time particularly from 1885 to 2021 um the average annual air temperature has risen by 4.2 de so that's roughly 2° C for those of you who like to do that kind of conversion uh the different lines here are simply different ways of averaging

this data so the blue line is What's called the 10year moving average so I take the number of either 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 take an average of that move aheading here here 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 take an average and I plot that and then this other one here that's red this is a 30-year moving average so year 1 through

year 30 year 2 through year 31 average those and what this does is it Smooths it because otherwise you might have a little difficulty so seeing a trend although I certainly don't that's Rising here

now what's surprising is the effect that uh this has had on precipitation um totally amazing to me um so between 1885 and 2021 the average annual precipitation is risen by nearly 9 in which is about 20% of what it was so this means things are wetter it's hotter but it's also wetter now being a water supply kind of guy I'm ined in well okay well let's take a look at some of these

significant events that occurred during history because to me an awful lot of the interest that I have is not only the technical part but the history and you're probably going to be sick of hearing me talk about that as the year goes on it turns out there was a rather sign ific dve time between 1900 and 1918 and what you can see is using this long-term average hor on line as a

reference you can see that for year after year after year the average annual temperature being this is the average of 365 days for each year and then the next year then the next year they're all below this for literally 18 years so back uh in the 19 1930s and the 1940s this was a drought of record that was used to help through a yield analysis for public water supply systems during the War

years we actually had a couple of really tough times during the War years but we were really busy doing other stuff so we weren't concerning ourselves about this so much so in the 1940s we had significant deficits in average in rainfall that persisted again for several years popped up over that long-term average for one year then back down again and fairly dramatic down perous the one that those of us in the

business talk about a lot is the 1960s drought we call that the drought of record what's interesting about this one to me is you can see we're below the long-term average only a handful of years but we can see the drop is lowest of all of these in the record that we have uh I know for a fact that this was significant because my family's well dried up during the drought of the

1960s and we were hauling water from a mountain spring this period here is also significant in terms of Water Resource Management in Massachusetts I made some mention about the Massachusetts Water Management act uh others of you have you heard about this a couple all right well what the deal is is during 1981 and 1982 we kind of have a a fairly short duration but sharp drought and what was significant

about this is the ipswitch river which is north of Boston dried up and the consequence of the ipswitch drying up was legislators got in U uh basically lined up and said hey we got to do something about this this is also following hot on the of the passage of what was called the intervent transfer act that was also that was enacted in 1981 so now Water Resources management in Massachusetts uh it's really becoming

more public rather than just Boston and the MTC uh the next one that I chose to point out here was in about 2016 and 2017 uh so the people were affiliated with the university you've been there for some period of time all the ponds on the cape were down 3 ft well Cedar Del Pon dried up and the consequence of this was people who lived on Cedar Del Pon which

is at the on the UMass campus were freaking out so I got called in on that so we're going to talk talk about modeling climate change just a little bit again it's not my goal to crush you but to give you a flavor as to what it is um I was involved with the development of the second generation of climate change models back in the 1980s uh they've come along ways uh what

these are are computer-based math models that have multiple layers of atmosphere multiple layers of land and multiple lay layers of ocean and they're all together so this is a really cool kind of overview of what the model is and this is telling us that the horizontal grid is comprised of fractions of latitude and longitude so everyone's heard about that and then the vertical layers um in terms of the atmospheric

portion uh can be either height or pressure so for example the atmospheric pressure here on the Earth surface is 1,000 mbar so the next level on a GCM might be 950 mbar all the way up to virtually space so the modern models are basically looking at all these what are called fluxes so it's movement of moisture as water vapor or liquid so these modeles rain or evaporate water and it's that

process where energy is transferred around around the earth so everyone is aware of the horrendous hurricanes that have just taken out North Carolina and Florida in large part because the Gulf of Mexico is really hot well in order to transfer that heat to the atmosphere it's evaporation the hotter the atmosphere the warmer the atmosphere the more moisture it holds and the more it fills

up and the more it heads North where it starts to cool off it's got to a dump full load and that's what is happening and happening with Rising frequency and intensity so major goals in my study here is to determine the potential impacts of global warming on firm yield and what that's going to do to the reliability of the surface water supply systems here in the greater crater Fall River

area we're basically going to be rescaling the drought of 1960 uh using temperature and precipitation change results from a handful of gcms and downscaling them here to Fall River I'm going to examine the various systems operating rules to see if we can make improvements especially in light of the above so we'll be working with not only Fall River principally but also t and Somerset and we're going to take a look

at the perspective Regional water supply sharing strategies to better meet the deeps of Fall River and the surrounding communities into the future and as Paul has already anticipated considering emergency water supply hookups major major work that Paul and Ward and K has accomplished and heads up to them for being so forward with thinking about this so uh what I did was go into the

record that uh Paul found at the water treatment plant uh last spring I guess it was and I spent an awful lot of time pounding on this stuff and some of this Paul hasn't seen yet because I thought it'd be one one for you and we've got a surprise for him at the end and if he took if you to if you took a look at my slides then it already

knows so um when we're talking about how healthy North wppa is it's reference to full pond uh which is 0 in so with the old intake plant um or the old intake house so there's a pipe that's going through the floor of this and leading to the old pumping plant uh there's actually a ruler called the staff gauge that sticks into the water and so here's a blow up of that

staff gauge and when Paul and I were out doing surveying a couple weeks ago you can see the water level here is at the slightly wider Mark that would be zero so when the water level is at this point it's considered full pwn and there's a remote sensoring Telemetry work in the narrow Gate House it actually reports this back to the city so they don't have to have somebody standing here in the

rain watching it so that day it happened to be down about 4/10 of an inch despite the fact that it was windy so we we Crossing into all around so I went back into the record uh and this is actually just to tell you the sorts of the sorts of things that Paul has accomplished he found this uh dot matrix print out that probably you know dates back to 1983 it was a Mainframe paper do Matrix

print out nobody had the digital file so uh Paul contracted with Woodard and current to scan this stuff and then digitize it into something that I could actually do it's been a great help but what it did what it did uncover was that there were lazy operators all through history here oh I don't think I'll take temperature data or water level data this one okay so um the first significant

draw down occurred in November of 1950 again the record starts in 1947 there are missing months in this down 6 6 in so about 5 1/2 ft below full pond I should mention that part of the operational goal is to make sure that South wupa is down lower than North wupa who's got an idea as to why that's important see you shaking your head sir yes the anybody else can it won't flow that

way it's lower it won't flow into so groundwater flow just like you on your bicycle it wants the coast downhill everybody get that idea what happens if you want to go uphill on your bike you have to Pedal right well water is the same way to go up hill you got to pump it but it's happy to flow down downhill and it goes through the sand and gravel of the Narrows so the consequence is is

to keep the cyano bacteria and all the other stuff that Ken and Ward and K have been finding we've got to make sure that there's this differential level 1957 this is another short nasty drought that i' never heard of until I started playing with the spram flow data some 40 years ago bit four feet down 1964 so the great drought of the 1960s is underway now we're down 50 in and

notice this is all happening later in the year here part of that consequence is there's water demand water demand tends to be higher in the summer runoff tends to be higher or lower in the summer because of the VAP of transpiration and those sorts of processes so the low points tend to be late in the fall oh Merry Christmas 1965 down 6 ft you're shaking your head do you remember that yeah I am stunned that's awesome

this is a sort of history that water people really worry about how frequent is this sort of thing going to happen again and that's the whole point of my study is it going to be more often is it going to be less often I don't know and that's what's so fun and exciting for me about this sort of undertaking 1966 the drought continues this thing lasted for a good chunk of

time as I mentioned my family H water from a mountain spring 1971 down 66 in sometime during 1971 remember Firestone Tire and rubber has left Fall River but they're pulling water out of out of South Wata that's been pumped into South wupa from NOOA so this system is completely independent of what they're doing other than possibly providing some um portable water that they might have

required I don't know if that's all been split up 1980 short nasty drought the one that launched the Massachusetts Water Management act again in November down four feet 1981 late summer down 5T and here comes all I have talked about this one a number of times oops back uh later in the fall 1981 down 5 ft but the worst day of all was July 7th 1981 we were down 81 and a half

in this is a lot and very concerning and Paul has mentioned this and what he's mentioned about this is really kind of scary because at the time this happened in order to bring water levels up in North wupa the pumps can only reach so far down into the water that's why this is great concern to us the water levels obviously have to be below the inlet of the pumps otherwise the city is totally

out of luck for water supply so the consequence was is um conveying water through the Narrows Gate House backwards rather than spilling it into South wupa they open the gate so that South Wata is now spilling in North Wata but hanging bags of copper sulfate to try and treat the algae and the sort of nasty stuff that's in South w oh but look at this 3 days before it the water level

was at 52 and4 in the day after was 51 and 3/4 of an inch so who believes that the water dropped 30 in in 3 days let's see how many acres is that 2,000 about 2,000 3T time 2,000 who can convert acre feet into million gallons and then recover nah unfortunately this is another one of those tragic typographic key entry errors from the data that was key punched in 1983 through no fault my friends at

Woodard and current they did exactly what they were supposed to do do but beating through this data has been a hell of a challenge to create the kind of climate that I need to drive my work so sorry to bring that up B but if Terry is around you want to have a we should go out for beers and talk about this all right so there it is you happy to take questions

all right thank you Dr fennessy really do appreciate that you know again like I said one of the things I wanted to do with uh bringing that in is really be able to uh show the connection of North and South with Tupper it also involves Stafford Pond which K Ken Wagner talked about and they did treatment on sorty Pond uh Deval Pond and how they all come into uh the pond that we all love and how

climate change is going to affect us and you know we're looking at the overall project right now um you know with southw tuer and better in the water quality but different things that we need uh in involved with that so uh think this point this was leading into uh Dr fenes but uh I think what we'll do now I'll turn it back to Zach for a couple of the future Pursuits that we've

uh that we've looked at in the past and uh then we'll go into some of the things that we're doing uh in the future so Dr Fen you're only part of the way through on this on the study correct barely getting going so you'll you'll have an opportunity to see a lot more of this guy moving forward which is great uh fascinating stuff thank you for that I mean it's really amazing to kind

of think about when you turn on your tap water these are the things that are happening to get it there it's only part of the story it's prettyy fascinating I'm going to go fast I don't think anybody cares about the Yankees game but I'm just going to try to move along here um just to give you a little sense of some of the some of the future Pursuits we've already talked about the storm

water controls and how important those are in this water body um there's a number of other things including that additional MVP grant program this uh the restoration project we again we have letters in the back if you'd like to support that we'd love to get a letter from you that was one of the pieces of feedback that we got from the funding agency is like is there community support for this type of an activity

uh to consider restoration projects and storm water control and Public Access projects um and then the in L and storm water treatment options so uh a little bit about what Dr Wagner talked about our opportunities for us as a part of the solution only a part of it and really a temporary solution but something that could make a difference and then um a number of other things that are always important in a watershed

uh cooperating with agricultural producers there is a dairy in this Watershed that has a potential to to to uh uh you know contribute uh phosphorus um all of us contribute as as Citizens um we all have something to do about that so there's a number of uh kind of education and Outreach programming that can help again to kind of mitigate some of that that runoff um and so really the key takeaways and I don't know if

anybody else wants to add anything to this but the internal nutrient load is significant may be manageable for some period of time uh with nutrient inactivation approaches uh the watershed's large and complicated uh long term storm water control and septic management to some extent although fairly low uh inputs related to septic but long-term storm water control is going to be important very difficult and

costly to do um but can be done uh with the right Cooperative partners and then all of these are super critical for future water supply and I think Dr fenny's talking about this I mean in future climate if northa is not capable of providing the water that you guys need to turn your tap on this water body may be what's necessary for that and right now it's got a lot of algae and it

makes it very hard to treat and so I'm gonna turn it back over to Paul I'm done for the night you don't have to listen to me anymore but we'll let Paul talk a little bit about excellent thank you you know these guys this whole entire team that we've put together is some of the best in the industry um you know so we're lucky to be able to have all them

working on this project um you know they all have a real interest in the project and um you know they they putting in the extra time extra effort to be able to get the information that we need to be able to move forward with the project um so some of the funding opportunities uh and this is this is where I come back in um you know because this is one of the

things that I I really manage push for you know um and work with uh MVP program they've been great they've funded uh work on the southw Tupper they're funding the yield study uh we did put in for them for a grant this past year uh which is the uh which is the sucker Brook project um they had a uh they had a lot of uh of submiss submission Statewide um we were very close to

making it but we didn't fully make it uh above their funding line so we had a conversation with their uh with the uh with the managers of that of the MVP program how we could strengthen our application one of the thing one of the things that they mentioned was uh public input um so we're going to be working out a program to be able to um display more information out to the public uh

through the project that we're working on within this particular sucker Brook project uh we'll be partnering with different organizations to do uh focus groups to try to understand what people might want in that that area and we're talking a lot about sucker Brook but sucker Brook is one of those projects that um you know is one of the Watershed projects so you know sucker Brook comes

down from Stafford but there's a lot of runoff that comes from both divid and full River into that stream the way that the that whole entire um area works the Wetland area now with the frag Mighty is in it really doesn't help filter out and do what a wetland is supposed to do to protect the South with up a pond so that's one of those Watershed projects that needs to be done as well as many

other throughout the whole entire Watershed so afterwards right over at the board there if you have any other questions Zach should be over there to be able to answer them we have pre-done letters for letters of support that we'd like to submit with our application U moving forward so feel free to either sign one tonight take one with you if you want to look it over uh you you I

think most of you probably have my email address you can email it to me give them to your neighbors give them to whoever uh around the pond that's interested uh and I think uh letters of support when we submit our application the next round is is really going to make a difference uh for us so MVP program they've been uh they've been great Partners uh the city uh submitted some American Rescue plan

we talked about that that funded some of the prior research uh that both UMass uh Dr Wagner has done as well as uh woodwi in curring so those are great great programs arpa is coming to an end now uh all that funding pretty much has been used up by the city and most of the other municipalities so we got to start to look at uh where else are we going

are we to get things where else are we going to get funding uh private funding is always one a great opportunity so whether we're able able to partner with a large Federal um you know Federal Foundation or other uh Partnerships that we could make with uh other utility companies or things like that we're always looking at those options trying to move forward a lot of these larger companies like to do uh environmental

Improvement projects um it is part of their missions uh so we we reaching out to those to try to get uh some funding uh state or federal directed funding uh so I know there was uh one of the early studies was funded by an AAR uh that was uh that was given to Westport uh in relation to the South wupa pond so that was a state directed funded uh AAR currently um the city uh we've been

working with uh Senator maki's office uh we do have a a federal aach um directed funding some people call them directed funding some people call them air Mars but we do have a aark within the federal budget for $2 million for inactivation treatment on the southw tuppa pond the federal uh budget is not approved yet uh it's uh being held for a little while but we're working with uh with the

Senators office to make sure that uh that that stays within the final approved budget uh they are pushing for that we're pushing for that uh and that would go uh for direct uh direct improvements and uh most likely inactivation project within the South wopa Pond but again as you've heard tonight the in inactivation is only 50% of the fix of this whole entire thing so but there is there is a match that we

are going to have to uh that we are going to have to bring forward with that so again and with the uh with how uh the inactivation treatment has been laid out there could be multiple stages of it too so we're looking at the different options you know 2 million is more than we had before the AAR so that's that's how I look at it uh so you know any of

those programs and you know who knows what's going to come out climate change is always one thing that everybody's talking about uh there's new funding programs coming out through the state and the FEDS uh every year in relation to climate change in this the South wupa Pond is definitely impacted by climate change with the warmer temperatures the uh increased uh drinking water capacity that's going to

be needed in the future so that's always something else that we're looking at so that kind of wraps us up um you know I know I really thank you guys for sitting here I hope you guys got a lot of information out of tonight uh is again you've been hearing me say this you know it's not we're not going to fix the pond tomorrow this is going to be generational that it's going to take to

fix this Pond we may be able to get uh as you heard some better quality for a period of time but to really fix it it's going to take everybody out here so you know we're coming into the fall and I thought this was a great time to have this project uh leave litter can be a great contributor to the pond as it gets ground up in the roadways ground up in

your driveway leaves blown into the pond uh so try to pick them up bring them either to your disposal station or brown barrels within the city um you know some of the other things that can be done um you know throughout the whole entire entire uh Watershed um you know we think about little things of um picking up dog waste or uh making sure that your septic system is pumped and clean possibly even

those may be very small impacts but every drop within this bucket counts so you know everything that you can do tell your neighbors to do to be a able to make make it better makes a better situation for everybody involved so there's any questions for myself or anybody else feel

free so again as most people have known since 2018 there has been a uh posting that's required for us to put up from the uh Department of Health uh it lists the hazards there is not a ban on swimming within the pond but it lists you know there is a uh there is a caution and people need to decide uh on their own what their risk is uh and whether they're comfortable with that

risk I can give you a little more detail on that when you have visible accumulations of cyanobacteria in the lake you only have about a 20% chance of that actually having top outomes that are hazardous but one in five shot you know it's a little dangerous there's no requirement that anyone test for those toxins and in fact it's very expensive you didn't have to do it very often so

that's why it's simply you must post it so people realize that there's a possible Hazard that's the way the state handles it is it only when it's very visible or always there and the hazard is always there even if it's not in a full BL no it it it depends on the type of algae and the state there it's funny we have one called phazon that in the northeastern us I

have never seen it produce toxin ever and it's a very common Bloomer that's listed as a possible toxin former so yeah if it's there in a high abundance they're going to put the warning up but the reality is I've never seen it produce toxin in 40 years which just they don't seem to carry the gene for it but you go to Florida yeah they produce it you know there's Regional variability

the most common ones that are out there though are all possible toxin producers and unless you're going to test constantly it's not worth the risk but Dr wag I think the question is like when you can see it in the water when it's green that might visibly the water is green I see a surface floating scum you know I mean pea soup is often what people describe it doesn't have to be

quite that bad but if you look at the water it's pretty clear you weight out to 4 foot deep and you can see your feet there won't be enough algae that that's going to cause a problem and you could be swimming in one part of the lake and it's all blown to somewhere else in the lake uh although the way your lake is set up it tends to be a little more

evenly distributed but you can have good areas and bad areas the problem is without constant monitoring you don't know and that's the problem how do we get the word out to more people like how many people in this room actually live on the pond how many houses around that Lake how do we actually we did count I don't remember the number it's more than 100 less than 300 I think and how many people learn this

room this is this is bad how do we get the word out the the health department have posts don't they yeah you know and there's there's multiple things there there's different opportunities that that we're going to have to explore in the future because again it is going to take the Watershed you know one of the things that we looked at and we've talked about is being able to send out

Direct Mail and things like that but again there's there's costs associated with that so that would have to be lot of part of a program you know that's funded so um you know again any anybody you know that is on my email list you know if you're not if you didn't get an email about tonight make sure you sign in make sure the email and your name is legible so that we can make sure see

people blowing leaves into the pond every year yep nope it is and and you know it's going to take word of mouth it's going to take everybody in this room telling their neighbor and telling them to tell their neighbor you know I think that's one of the things that we're really going to have to do you know uh as we get uh as we get additional funding being being able to

go into this project whether we do direct mailers whether we do uh educational days educational flies those are all things that are going to have to come and that's all part of that watershed management strategy one of the things that's going to take that 50% off the board is going to be also not only installing bmps install bettering wetlands and things like that it's going to be all the people within the

Watershed are going to have to also contribute to that as well whether it be not blowing your leaves in your in the pond taking your C to the car wash rather than washing it in your driveway or uh other other things that that can better the the water quality I can make a comment something you mentioned about the ation of the water this this is for all you other

people who live on a pond I have a pump that I bought at uh track Contractor Supply I water my grass in my garden from the pond and my grandchildren coming over going to water in the morning I turn that hose off and it runs on the rocks and I have and it clears out my beach it's Crystal Clear and we go swimming and it's it's a simple thing uh

and I think it helps it certainly helps in my Beach area one a localized basis that can work just becomes really expensive on a lakewi basis right I mean I'm I'm paying for electricity myself but it's something you know utilizing the water we have I have I don't have to use fertilizer I use in my my garden my flowers are are spectacular with the with the nutrients that are in the

water uh it's it's a low cost item Works without a doubt and that's and that's the benefit that you know that's the thing that everybody around the pond eventually you know being part of you every all the humans around the pond are part of the ecosystem of the pond um so what you can do to better your own better your own yard help question or comment uh I work in environmental

industry we we uh work for a contract Service operation uh uh the service Su Suz municipality I work worked uh uh for had a water quality project they needed funding Public Works direct uh Public Works Director City Manager went right to the regional manager for that company and you know you have the money available you're want want uh environmental projects we have a new company who's taking over the wastewater

treatment plan uh what the city is giving him millions that company millions of dollars to operate that treatment plan here's a good water quality project to help them some type of donation for our project we've already been in discussions that is what that is one of the private Partnerships that that we're looking at again you know utility companies uh everybody that contributes

and is part of this Watershed uh we're going to look to uh try to try to help out water but thank you for that yes oh whatever you want to post them on we have the larest following on the war Pera site okay and I run it so I'm the administrator so anything you want to put and if you want to get it around the pond pretty much everybody on the

belongs for that okay so feel free good yeah you got my email on when I sent out the blast email yep so yeah again anything that I send out to your emails or anything like that feel free to share with uh to share with any body it's all public information and the more people that know the better yeah that would reach the most people on the farm my wife had asked about this

meeting tonight you know we we heard from a friend we live in Westport wasn't in the Westport times there's nothing yeah you know again I I I sent it for Westport I know their uh their Town administrators uh I sent it to him he's he's out right now so that may have been a bit of a lapse there so I know uh you know Westport has been a partner in the past and I expect that

you guys will continue so we'll definitely try to make sure that the information does get out to the other um communities news media too because I send it to WS The Herald news and and those types of you know the full Riv of local media so uh even though I'm sitting next to um Dr Wagner the question I'd like to pose to him that I that I thought it would make sense to share with you

um am I correct in assuming that the cyanobacteria have a particular infrared Spectrum so could that be detectable from a drone yes how how expensive would a drone cost to have the IR capability to actually transmit it somewhere so that somebody could monitor it it's a more sophisticated IR spectrum than what you typically get but it does exist there are people that do this in fact John

Hudak South Central Connecticut Regional Authority now retired he's got his own little company build stuff dang somebody else thought of it huh yeah so I think I think there's a there's a chunk of potential technology for you um the lady in the back who wanted to know well when should I be concerned if somebody is actually streaming you know real time the infrared signature has different

gradations of color to basically give you the heads up where it is where to stay away from where to bring the grandchildren save a few bucks on pumping to go swimming that actually could work it's something your size that's actually a worthwhile exercise potentially so I think I think the whole point of my comment here is to plant that seed and I'm not surprised that Ken is saying

that yeah that could work I wouldn't say it's in common use in places but it is a doable thing in fact I I'm involved with some Venture capitalists who are trying to set up a company to provide um self-service things hey if you want to do this you want to do that here's what you order and here's how you get it and what you doing they're probably still a year away from being out there but

doesn't hurt you to chase some of these things you could also get um a meter measures chlorophyll and ride around the boat with it you know the spectral thing might be faster but once you had that instrument you'd be able to test it anywhere you wanted and there are limits on the amount of algae measured that way say yeah if it's above that that's probably not a good idea and it'll

actually measure overall algae and it'll give you a reading for just the blue grees so there there are techniques out there you have to do a lot for yourself but if you're willing to do that there are efforts that could be made to better monitor the lake thank you go get him all right like I said you know I learned I learned more tonight as well every time I listen to these uh to The

Experts uh you you Mass Dr Wagner uh Zach from Woodward and curan um you know these guys just know this stuff they live this stuff and the great partners that we've been able to uh to partner with so I thank them very much for coming out to tonight sharing this information with all all of you you know I hope you guys understand that um naturally we're not moving light speed

here but we're not sitting here on our hands doing nothing we're making the progress that we're able to make uh doing the steps that we need to do to be able to get the correct foundation in place to be able to move forward to correct this in the long term so one more question in the back there um just mentioning um former government television is televises and maybe on puza you could

put some type of notification that if anybody wants to see what happened at the meeting they can watch for government tele well I guess Westport won't get it but anybody in for it'll be on our YouTube page it'll be on the Fall River government tvtube yeah Fall River government TV FTV uh you go to on demand it goes to YouTube that and a weather station connection my sonin-law yeah we'll see whether we can get the

link for you and get it get it emailed over to you that would be great next meeting uh so again like I said we we planned this one this fall um I would like to definitely have one again next fall if there are any major uh changes within within our plan or strategy we're trying to move forward to uh get things lined up so that we're still moving forward next year with that Federal AAR pending

uh even if the budget does pass um it probably would we probably wouldn't have time to be able to get started with an IND activation program for next season it would most likely we'd be looking at the season after if that uh funding does come through but um you know at least you know minimum we'd be looking at next fall to update everybody where we are if there's major changes within the program

then we'll do something earlier all right thank you guys very much