Harbor of Shame No More

in South Boston

The Deer Island facility can process up to 1.35 billion gallons of wastewater daily. Key features: Tanks that separate solid sludge from wastewater. Secondary treatment that uses microorganisms. Egg-shaped digesters that convert sludge to carbon dioxide, organic solids, water, and methane—which powers the plant.

Courtesy of MWRA

In the 1980s, Boston Harbor was one of the dirtiest in the country, due to centuries of dumping raw and poorly treated sewage and industrial waste into its waters. Pollution threatened irreversible harm to the harbor’s marine habitats, brought slime and foul odors, and closed beaches and shellfish beds.

Today, the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA) operates the state-of-the-art Deer Island Wastewater Treatment Plant, which removes pollutants from the wastewater of 43 communities.

After treatment, solid sludge is made into fertilizer pellets–used in gardening and landscaping–while liquid effluent is sent into a 9.5-mile tunnel and discharged into the deep waters of Massachusetts Bay. Ongoing monitoring shows vastly improved conditions in the harbor and no degradation of the bay.

The facility took 15 years, 3.8 billion dollars, and the efforts of thousands of people to plan and build. It transformed Boston Harbor into one of the cleanest in the nation. An environmental treasure that welcomed people to its waters and shores for thousands of years can do so again.

Signs like this one often disappointed beachgoers, especially after heavy rainstorms overwhelmed the former treatment plant’s capacity.

Courtesy of MWRA

A storage tunnel under South Boston beaches virtually eliminates the sewer system discharges into the harbor that occurred there after heavy rains. Now the overflow–a combination of sewage and stormwater–is held in the tunnel, to be pumped to the treatment plant when capacity allows

Courtesy of MWRA

Fishing enthusiasts flock to McCorkle Pier to catch striped bass, bluefish, winter flounder and cunner–depending on season and tide.

Photo by Robert Gillis / GillisPhotos.com

Boston beaches are swimmable again, and Pleasure Bay is one of the cleanest. In August 2021, Swim Across America Boston held their open water swim here to benefit cancer research.

Courtesy of John Deputy, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Sign Location

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Community activists. Colonial law. Political will. New state regulations. The combination created the 43-mile Boston Harborwalk–a public path, stretching from Logan Airport through seven neighborhoods to the Neponset River. In 1978, the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management (CZM) sought to improve public access to the waterfront. They succeeded by integrating early Colonial laws into new state regulations.

In the decades that followed, community activists, city and state government, and developers of shoreline projects have worked together to ensure the Harborwalk is always constructed along the waterfront. Some sites also provide public amenities–bathrooms, meeting places, kayak launches,
etc. The result is a fabulous path welcoming residents and visitors to our vibrant clean harbor.

Early Colonial laws established public right of access along tidelands to protect citizens’ rights to fish, hunt, and navigate at sea and along the shorefront. These laws go back even further: They stem from Roman law, which was incorporated into English law and brought over to Massachusetts by English
settlers. Then, in the 1640s, Massachusetts Bay Colony passed laws permitting private docks in the intertidal area (between low and high tide) as long as public access was retained. Almost all of Boston’s waterfront is filled land that was once the intertidal area. This, together with the centuries-old legal right of access, served as the underpinnings for the 1978 CZM regulations.

Resources

Acknowledgments

  • This sign is made possible with funding from a Boston Community Preservation Fund grant.
  • Many thanks to Ria Convery of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority for her invaluable help in the creation of this sign.
  • Our gratitude to the Perkins School for the Blind Recording Studio and Thomasine Berg for their partnership in creating the audio files.