Less than an hour later, state environmental police recovered a man’s body floating nearby in a no-wake zone. Stephen Fabian, 59, of Moodus, had fallen off the watercraft and drowned. State environmental officials said his life jacket was ill-fitting and had slid up around his head, and the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) reported that his blood-alcohol level was well over the legal intoxication limit.
“The way he died was tragic,” his best friend, Dana Pitts of Westbrook, said. “He brought it on himself.” Fabian, a former licensed practical nurse, had once rescued a boater after a crash on the Connecticut River and performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation until medical personnel arrived, his family reported.
As a boating accident, Fabian’s was as typical as it was sad. The great majority of boating accidents in the United States occur because people fail to pay attention, wear life jackets, or are using substances, said Walt Taylor, recreational boating safety specialist for the U.S. Coast Guard in Boston.
In 2021, the Coast Guard reported 43 boating accidents and seven deaths in Connecticut. In 2020, there were more boating accidents in Connecticut— 54 —but fewer deaths, three, according to the Coast Guard’s annual Recreational Boating Statistics report.
Small though these numbers are, what’s striking about the fatalities is that all of them could have been prevented. Taylor said he avoids calling boating mishaps accidents, preferring the word “incidents,” since they are often the result of choices.
Five of the seven men who died boating in Connecticut waters in 2021 were not wearing life jackets, and a sixth, Fabian, wore an ill-fitting one. Had they been wearing proper life jackets—technically known as personal floatation devices or PFDs—they likely would have survived, Taylor said. The seventh died of blunt force trauma.
As in Connecticut, nationally, boating accidents declined in 2021 to 4,439 from 5,265 in 2020. But unlike in Connecticut, boating fatalities nationwide also declined from 2020 to 2021, from 767 to 658.
An estimated 80% of U.S. boating deaths last year were from drowning after falling overboard, according to the Coast Guard’s report. And of those who drowned, 83% of them were not wearing life jackets. Alcohol use is the leading contributing factor in boating accidents and the primary reason for 16% of accidents nationwide, the report said.
Coast Guard Photo.
Not paying attention is the deadly cause of most boating accidents, said Walt Taylor of the Coast Guard.
Boaters are legally intoxicated with blood alcohol levels of .08%, or .02% for those under age 21. And Connecticut law requires that people carry life jackets on board and that children under 12 wear one while on a vessel’s deck. Everyone on board a “manually propelled” boat, such as a canoe or kayak, must wear a life jacket between October 1 and May 31.
The problem, Taylor acknowledged, is that once a boat starts capsizing, it’s too late to grab the PFDs and put them on.
“Nobody plans on going out on the boat and, quote, accidentally falling overboard,” Taylor said. “It’s the same rationale as not putting your seatbelt on until the moment you need it. In the event you do find yourself in the water, it’s too late.”
Fabian’s death and most of the other boating fatalities in Connecticut last year are grim proof of that statement. On April 10, a kayak capsized in Long Meadow Pond in Middlebury. The 26-year-old paddler struggled and submerged, drowning despite witnesses’ efforts to find and rescue him. His body was found the next day. Officials said he wore no life jacket and had marijuana in his bloodstream and a blood alcohol content of .012.
On May 8, Michael Lowell, 58, of Putnam, was fishing from a kayak in the Quinebaug River in Pomfret. Two companions in other boats paddled upstream, and when they returned, they could not find Lowell and reported him missing. Later, his overturned boat was found many miles downstream and his body floating 198 yards away from it, DEEP reported. Officials determined he had drowned; he wore no life jacket.
On June 8, Philip Blouin, 50, who had gone fishing in a motorized canoe the previous night, was found dead after his family reported him missing. He wore no life jacket, his blood alcohol was .180 and THC was detected in his bloodstream. In addition, officials said he had no required safe boating certificate, and the trolling motor on the unregistered boat had fishing line wrapped around it.
Two men launched a canoe in Stamford and capsized near the Woodway Beach Club on July 10. Four lifeguards from the club rescued and tried to revive Lorenzo Macua, 63, of Norwalk, but he was pronounced dead at Stamford Hospital. The second canoeist, 50, wasn’t identified, but officials said he swam to shore and was unhurt. Neither of them wore a life jacket.
Akida Edwards, 45, of New York City, ventured out in a kayak at night in Wyassup Lake in North Stonington on September 25. He was reported missing. Divers found his body late the next morning. DEEP said he drowned after falling out of the boat and that alcohol and drugs were found in his system.
The only non-drowning boating accident last year happened on July 27, when 18-year-old Matthew A. Horvath of Shelton and a friend were riding their personal watercrafts off Cedar Beach in Milford when they collided. Horvath, a varsity soccer player who graduated from Shelton High School that spring, died of blunt force trauma. Officials did not identify the other rider, who was not hurt. DEEP officials said neither wore a life jacket and that speed may have contributed to the crash. Alcohol was detected in Horvath’s system, DEEP spokesman Matt Healey said.
“Anyone operating a personal watercraft should understand that it is a motor vehicle, similar to a car but on water,” Healey said. “Before getting on the water, operators should take safe boating courses and obtain their certificate of personal watercraft operation. Lifejackets should be worn at all times, and safe speeds should be maintained. Alcohol should never be consumed when getting in or on the water or when operating any type of vessel.”
Not paying attention is the deadly cause of most boating accidents in the United States, Taylor said. Even when they are sober, distraction is a big factor. He said people pay too much attention to their radar, fish finding, and navigation devices. “A lot of times, people get so fixed on those things that they’re not looking right in front of them.”
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Activists say one major category is missing when policymakers look at climate change preparation: the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ+) community. An environmental activist movement for LGBTQ+ people has been building in the New Haven area for a few years. Those involved in the movement say evidence is beginning to accumulate that makes a clear connection between environmental threats, sexual orientation and gender identity.
Their environmental vulnerability comes mainly from this group’s higher poverty rates. LGBTQ+ young people are homeless more often than the general population. Five years ago, the University of Chicago found that 40% of the homeless population was LGBTQ+ young people; 5 to 10% of the general youth population is from that group.
Adrian Huq
Adrian Huq became an environmental activist in New Haven while a high school student. Huq, who is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, first became interested in recycling, waste and energy. They soon co-founded the New Haven Climate Movement Youth Action Team. Huq is now a sophomore at Tufts University, majoring in applied environmental studies. They said the vulnerability of LGBTQ+ people can start with the rejection of their families, which often leads to other problems.
“For any folks trying to wrap their heads around this issue, it starts with poverty,” said Huq, who is 19 and living in the New Haven area while studying remotely at Tufts during the pandemic. “Anti-LGBTQ+ bias, mental health, substance abuse … homophobic bias or transphobic bias can get you kicked out, leading to homelessness.”
Huq said anyone struggling to understand the queer community should realize that they probably already know an LGBTQ+ person and don’t realize it. “Twenty-one percent of Gen Z identify as LGBTQ+. I am very proud to be part of Generation Z,” Huq said.
Leo Goldsmith, a recent graduate of the Yale School of the Environment, has authored two papers on LGBTQ+ people and climate change.
“Due to my intersectional identities as a queer and transgender individual who is also Latinx and my understanding of the immense amount of discrimination and disparities that occur within LGBTQ+ communities, especially those with intersecting marginalized identities,” Goldsmith said, “I wanted to explore the question: Are LGBTQ+ communities impacted by climate change similarly to how other marginalized groups are?”
These vulnerabilities have been there for decades but remain understudied, Goldsmith said. He is 28 and lives in Washington, D.C., where he works as a climate and health specialist at ICF, a firm that studies climate change and related effects for the U.S. Global Change Research Program.
Goldsmith’s peer-reviewed study, “Queering Environmental Justice,” co-authored with Yale Professor Michelle Bell, said that researchers have yet to properly study the effect of environmental and health inequities on LGBTQ+ populations “despite higher rates of chronic physical and mental illnesses.” Goldsmith and Bell referred to a 2019 study that found 1 in 6 LGBTQ+ adults avoid going to the doctor because they expect discrimination.
Leo Goldsmith
In 2020, when the Federal Emergency Management Agency introduced its National Risk Index, which, in addition to rating communities’ vulnerabilities to natural hazards and weather events, also rates their social vulnerabilities to such events, there was no mention of the LGBTQ+ community. According to the formula, socially vulnerable people include females, Blacks, Latinx, Native Americans, those who live in mobile homes, those without cars, the unemployed, renters, and those in assisted living. Of the more than two dozen categories, none mention LGBTQ+.
The social vulnerability index can, for example, map where people might suffer health problems, lack easy access to a car in the chaos of an evacuation, or might suffer excessively from pollution, mold or heat.
“I’m glad you are looking into maps,” said Goldsmith. “I don’t know of a single one that includes SOGI (sexual orientation and gender identity).”
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This year, the first report of Eastern equine encephalitis (EEE) occurred Sept. 23 in mosquitoes trapped in Voluntown, in southeastern Connecticut, as part of the state’s surveillance program. EEE is rare but kills one-third of those who catch it, according to the state Department of Public Health.
Two years ago, three out of four people who caught EEE in Stonington died. A mostly bird-biting mosquito, Culiseta melanura, which favors freshwater swamps, feeds on infected birds, which then pass EEE on to mosquitoes that bite birds and people.
Mosquitoes also spread two other serious diseases—West Nile virus and Jamestown Canyon virus—that cause neurological and flu-like symptoms. There are no vaccines, no surefire cures, and proper diagnoses are difficult.
Scientists at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station (CAES) trap mosquitoes weekly during the warm season. The traps capture a small percentage of all mosquitoes but give scientists an accurate picture of the highest levels of these illnesses.
“These are very serious illnesses,” said Philip Armstrong, a research scientist at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station and the head of the state’s mosquito testing program. “Those that survive infections suffer from lifelong disabilities, or they have really long-term residual effects.”
Armstrong said that by the time a human gets sick and is diagnosed through blood tests with one of these illnesses, the risks are even higher. “The human cases are a lagging indicator of risk. By the time we learn about it, it’s usually weeks after.”
A few key species of mosquitoes spread the virus and increase its concentration by biting birds. Then other species of mosquitoes also bite the birds and then bite people. People can only get sick from bites from infected mosquitoes. Humans don’t spread the disease in any way; they are simply victims.
Armstrong said the trapping and testing they do is the only way to “know what we’re dealing with” each year in the mosquito population and protect people from these illnesses. “The risk of these viruses changes each year with variable weather conditions and other factors that we don’t fully understand,” he said, “so the only way to know what the risk is, is to go out and do the hard work which is trapping.”
Melanie Stengel Photo.
John Shepard (front), assistant scientist, and Catherine Goncalves, laboratory research assistant, sort the various types of mosquitoes collected from traps in the New Haven area. The mosquitoes will then be sent for testing.
The Numbers. What The Traps Are Showing
As of Oct. 4, the West Nile virus had been found in trapped mosquitoes in 45 towns, including Greenwich, Hartford, New Haven, Norwalk, Waterford, Wethersfield, and Stamford. The virus tends to accumulate in mosquitoes that breed in puddles and storm drains in urban areas.
Jamestown Canyon virus has been found in mosquitoes trapped in 16 towns.
Year to year, the trap data shows fluctuations in disease-carrying mosquitoes, depending on how much it has rained. In 2020, the West Nile virus was detected in mosquitoes in 29 trap locations in 21 towns. Jamestown Canyon virus showed up 13 times in seven towns. The rare Eastern equine encephalitis was found twice that year: in Stonington and Hampton.
In 2019, 122 instances of EEE were found in mosquitoes trapped in 20 towns, a substantial number for EEE, scientists said. West Nile virus was detected 82 times in 24 towns. Jamestown Canyon virus was found 20 times in 11 towns.
It may be difficult to translate virus presence in the traps to percentages of disease carriers in the general public. But a different kind of test published in 2001 offered a clue. A team from CAES looked for antibodies to the Jamestown Canyon virus in samples from blood donors. It concluded the virus was present in about 4% of the general population. Most people who get exposed, therefore, don’t get sick. But it can be fatal: the public health department reported in August 2021 that a patient in Dublin, New Hampshire, died of Jamestown Canyon. There is no commercial blood test for the Jamestown Canyon virus. The only way to test people is by sending samples to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Human cases are very rare and sporadic,” Armstrong said, “but it’s also likely, because there is no testing on a regular basis, that some of these infections are not diagnosed.”
Climate Change Could Be Making It Worse
Climate change could be creating conditions that make the situation worse. Connecticut is getting wetter and warmer, and mosquitoes breed in temporary pools of water until the first frost.
Mosquito populations have been exploding in recent years. A team of five scientists from CAES found in a 2020 study that mosquitoes—unlike many other insects—have increased dramatically since 2001. The study found the number of mosquitoes trapped has risen by about 60% since 2001, and “species richness” has increased by 10%.
Armstrong is a coauthor of the study, along with the former mosquito program head, Theodore Andreadis. “There are a lot of papers that have come out recently on what they call insect Armageddon—all these beneficial insects that are declining in abundance and diversity,” Armstrong said. “But one exception is tee mosquito. At least here in Connecticut, mosquitoes are getting more abundant. They’re getting more diverse. With the heavy rain and the wetter summers and warmer winters, I think it’s all creating nice conditions for them,” Armstrong said.
The trend continued this year. The numbers of mosquitoes have been the highest in 20 years, based on what scientists are finding in the traps.
Melanie Stengel Photo.
CAES research assistant Michael Olson, demonstrates setting a mosquito trap in the kind of shady area that mosquitoes like.
The Trapping Program
The CAES collects mosquitoes from spring through fall at 108 locations in 88 cities and towns. It increased the trap number by 16 after an outbreak of EEE in 2019, Armstrong said. CAES staff identify every individual mosquito, divide them into groups by species, and test them all for the three viruses. The public can view the reports here.
State health officials advise residents across the state to wear long sleeves and long pants and apply insect repellent when they go outside, especially at dawn and dusk when many mosquitoes bite.
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Between March 19 and June 30, a group of scientists tested waste that had previously been used to detect COVID-19, looking for drugs and chemicals. The researchers found significant increases in three opioids, four antidepressants, and other chemicals in sludge from New Haven.
The analysis, by scientists from the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station (CAES) and Yale University, offered the first glimpses of how the pandemic’s stay-at-home orders affected people’s behavior. It also underscored how important human waste can be as a resource for understanding public health and society’s habits. Diseases, drugs and chemicals all show up in feces, providing a major tool for public health studies.
Sara L. Nason, a CAES scientist, is leading the waste analysis, which found increases in fentanyl, hydromorphone and methadone in sludge taken from primary settling tanks in New Haven.
Nason said the goal is to understand how the pandemic changed people’s habits and health.
“We hypothesize that the changes in chemical concentrations will reveal interesting trends that correlate with public health outcomes.”
— Sara L. Nason
Fentanyl’s increase in the New Haven population reflected “both increased use in hospitals for patients on ventilators, and the nationwide trend of increases in accidental overdose deaths from illegal use,” Nason said.
Five years ago, the testing of human feces for substances “was something that I would talk to other people about, funding agencies, and they would kind of roll their eyes and say, ‘Yeah…’ It was not too much on the radar back then,” said Jordan Peccia, a professor of chemical and environmental engineering at Yale University. Peccia is working with Nason on the analysis using frozen samples from another project on which Peccia is working, a COVID-19 testing effort that analyzes sludge from six Connecticut treatment plants. Peccia’s Yale laboratory collects data and publishes the information on a public website. The lab tests the concentrated substance found at the bottom of the tanks where waste entering sewage plants in New Haven, Bridgeport, Hartford, New London, Norwich and Stamford goes to settle.
Peccia and at least eight other scientists hope to expand the sludge testing “to other diseases, to other viruses, to other locations around the world where they don’t have testing,” he said. They have applied for National Institutes of Health funding.
Rising Drug Levels
Besides the opioids, the scientists found six antidepressants in the sludge, and six disinfectants. Sertraline (Zoloft) increased in March, before there were reported shortages of that drug. Three other drugs showed a clear rising trend over the spring: doxepin (Silenor), citalopram (Celeva), and amitriptyline (Elavil). Tracking these drugs during the pandemic was important, Nason said, because studies have linked psychiatric illnesses and COVID-19.
Nason explained it this way: studies have shown “people with psychiatric illnesses are at risk for being diagnosed with COVID-19, and that COVID-19 infection is associated with new diagnoses of psychiatric illnesses.”
Steven Geringer/Yale University Photo
Sludge samples are placed into test tubes at Yale University.
Three of the six cleaners they found in the sludge are common wipes and sprays with quaternary ammonium disinfectants, known as quats, which scientists in the last decade have linked to reproductive and developmental problems in animals.
Nason said the CAES/Yale team’s research focused on “substances whose use we expect to be affected by the pandemic, such as antidepressants, opioids, and antiviral drugs.” They compiled their key findings in a poster presented last fall to the Society for Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry. They plan to submit research papers for publication this winter.
The findings were mostly detected using a technique called suspect screening, in which a mass spectrometer collects molecular information and matches it through large databases. “Suspect screening is a very powerful technique because you don’t necessarily need to know what chemicals you are looking for ahead of time,” Nason said. “You find whatever signals in your data match the database entries. For example, we did not initially decide to look at disinfectants in the sludge, but we found several of them through our suspect screening analysis.” She added that they used other analytical standards to confirm their key findings, “so we are quite confident in our results.”
Peccia said the expansion of sludge testing could be used to study infectious diseases like norovirus; adenoviruses, which cause fevers, diarrhea, and more; all of the coronaviruses that cause colds; and bacterial diseases like tuberculosis and legionella, which causes legionnaire’s disease.
Sewage As A Resource
The long but spotty history of testing sewage for disease dates to the 1960s and a Yale study of the polio vaccine in Middletown. For at least 20 years scientists have been studying sewage, but much of their work focused on environmental issues. Human waste can reveal whether industry is following environmental regulations, and scientists can test for banned chemicals, such as fire retardants, linked to cancer.
These studies analyze the sludge left in the bottom of primary tanks after the water has settled. Scientists can also collect human waste by sampling the diluted soup of water and solid waste that flows under the streets.
Yale University Photo
Jordan Peccia
Peccia maintains that sampling the concentrated sludge is the most efficient method. Sewage treatment “takes in wastewater and it separates the bad stuff from the water. It puts out clean water, and then you have tons and tons and tons of material that was separated from that wastewater. Most of the bad stuff in the wastewater treatment plant gets left behind in the sludge,” he said.
However they are found — whether in the water known as “influent” or the settled sludge — Peccia said he estimates that more than half of infectious diseases show up in waste.
He said testing sewage could transform how doctors recognize and treat diseases where diagnosis is difficult and not always accurate, such as Lyme disease and other tick-borne illnesses, and Eastern equine encephalitis and other mosquito-carried diseases.
Tracking substances like nicotine, alcohol, heroin and opioids in sewage sludge shows how drug uses changes on weekends. “Those pieces of information are hard to come by otherwise,” Peccia said.
These studies will provide information that will correlate with other studies of human illness and behavior. “If hospital prescriptions and disposals of fentanyl increase over the same period of time as fentanyl concentrations in sludge increase, we can start to put together a story,” Nason said.
“But if that is not the case, the sludge data could be a sign for public health officials that illegal use needs to be further investigated,” Nason continued. “Overall, the sludge findings are most valuable when they can be supported with data from other sources that relate them to public health.”
]]>This complex food system feeds directly into greenhouse gas emissions and accelerated climate change. Last year the journal The Lancet identified a global “syndemic” linking climate change to obesity and poor nutrition, referencing dozens of studies. Earlier, in 2017, the journal Public Health reported “significant and new insight about the causal link between obesity and environmental emissions.”
In Connecticut, 27% of all adults, almost 12% of children and 14% of toddlers (ages 2-4) have obesity. In 1990, the rate for adults was 10%, reports Connecticut Data Haven in its 2019 Community Health Well-Being Survey.
Obesity affects people of color at higher rates: more than 30% of Hispanic adults and more than 35% of Black adults are obese, compared with 25-29% of white residents, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports.
Many factors have contributed to the obesity crisis: lack of access to healthy food, socioeconomic factors, a car-oriented culture, and food marketing, said Marlene Schwartz, director of the University of Connecticut Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity. She said the center studies “how we can use policy to change the food environment. You can’t expect personal responsibility and willpower to be enough to overcome all the factors in the environment.”
Former Rudd Center researcher Rebecca Boehm led a study in 2018 that found 68% of greenhouse gas emissions from food production came from industrial farming and manufacturing, 30% of which was from animals.
“A majority of the emissions are coming from the production phase,” said Boehm, who now works for the Union of Concerned Scientists.
(Scroll through the photo gallery)
Boehm’s research showed that “consumption activities of all kinds create greenhouse gas emissions, and food is one of those integral parts of our lives that’s a consumption activity. It’s less obvious than the emissions coming out of your car. It’s a little hard to think about and conceptualize because the food system is so complex.”
Farm To City
In Connecticut, small farms have been working for many years to help those who live in cities and some rural areas far from markets get affordable fresh produce.
Teri Smith of Smith’s Acres in East Lyme said she started selling produce in downtown New London about 35 years ago and expanded to Stamford, Bridgeport and a dozen more farmers markets. She said part of the work was talking to customers about how to use what she was selling. “I was amazed at the mothers and the children who would come in and ask questions about vegetables: ‘Why is this cucumber curly? The cucumbers at the grocery store are straight. Why are the beans different sizes? What can I do with Brussels sprouts?’”
She added, “That was the best part of doing the markets in a place like New London or Stamford, talking to the people. You can buy $10 worth of apples and go home and make applesauce and freeze it for your baby. How about this butternut squash, how about cooking and mashing them up and saving them and you have baby food for a year for your baby?”
Staying healthy has become even more challenging during the pandemic. Just getting out, running errands, and getting exercise has gotten more complicated or even impossible for many people, especially those who live in food deserts. In cities, food deserts are where markets are more than a mile away and in rural areas where they are 10 or more miles away. Connecticut’s food deserts are mostly in its cities.
Thirteen years ago, to help those who live in food deserts, Connecticut farmers markets in cities began doubling coupons from federal assistance programs like Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). These programs are designed to help people living at 130% of the poverty level and below afford produce and other healthy food. Of Connecticut children between 2 and 4 years old whose families participate in WIC, 14.4% fall in the obese range.
The SNAP and WIC discounts at farmers markets were the project of the Connecticut nonprofit Wholesome Wave, which formed in Bridgeport in 2007. It pushes for better federal benefits for low-income people. Its co-founder, Michel Nischan of Fairfield, is a nationally recognized leader in bringing locally grown food to the underserved.
Wholesome Wave’s first initiative was boosting SNAP benefits at farmers markets. Today, the initiatives started with private donors in 2007 are part of the federal Farm Bill. Two years ago, Congress designated the Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program, which gives states grants to make fresh produce easier to buy. It’s named for Wholesome Wave co-founder August Schumacher, a local food advocate who served as the Massachusetts agriculture chief from 1984 to 1990 and USDA undersecretary of agriculture for farm and foreign agricultural services from 1997 to 2001.
A dozen farmers markets across Connecticut—including in Bridgeport, Hartford, New Haven, Stamford and Willimantic—now double SNAP benefits with support from UConn Cooperative Extension. They issue tokens or coupons for fruits and vegetables that can be spent that day or later.
Melanie Stengel Photo.
Wooster Farmers Market manager Alyssa Gant, left, settles up with Kyle Tamo of Rose’s Berry Farm, Glastonbury. Gant has baskets of tokens that she collects from the vendors. In the background is Elpidio Trejo-Ramirez.
CitySeed’s farmers markets and stores in the New Haven area have one of the highest redemption rates of food assistance in the state, said Cortney Renton, its executive director. Last year, CitySeed redeemed $63,000 in SNAP, WIC and Senior Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program coupons at its markets and stores.
Renton said many activists have begun referring to food deserts as “food apartheid.” They believe the lack of access to healthy food grows out of broader policies that need to change.
Wholesome Wave co-founder Nischan said his desire for policy change dogged him from his early career as a chef. A native of Chicago, he spent childhood summers helping out on his grandfather’s small Missouri farm. “The farm was in a state of decline for a long time because food policy made it really hard for small family farms,” Nischan said. He struggled in the 1980s and 1990s to incorporate fresh produce into restaurants where he cooked in Milwaukee and New York. Then, 25 years ago, Nischan’s son was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, so good nutrition became even more important to his family.
For the past decade, Wholesome Wave has been working with hospitals to subsidize fresh produce purchases after prescribing their patients nutrition counseling. “What we are trying to prove is if we invested Medicaid dollars in prevention [like good food], it might cost less than treatment,” Nischan said.
Healthy food “should be an essential right for every American, regardless of income,” he said.
For information on Connecticut farmers markets go here.
]]>If the pandemic shutdown were now, those with obesity and others who suffer from the adverse effects of ground-level ozone might have caught a break. Officials know that other forms of pollution dropped significantly during the early spring.
Particulate pollution was greatly reduced briefly, according to a state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) report, because so many cars and trucks remained off the roads for weeks. DEEP reported that nitrogen dioxide levels (NOx) decreased 30% from normal along Interstate 95 from Washington, D.C., to Boston.
As summer’s heat sets in, tailpipe emissions are also rising as the state’s economy opens, creating conditions that are ideal for dangerously high levels of ground-level ozone.
Those trends likely will match those of previous years.
“The heat certainly makes the work of breathing harder just because your body temperature goes up and your metabolism goes up.”
— Dr. John Morton
The American Lung Association’s “State of the Air” report issued on April 21 rated all Connecticut counties “F” for ground-level ozone for 2016-2018. That F rating refers to the number of “orange” days, when at-risk groups—including people with obesity and those with chronic respiratory illnesses—are warned to limit outdoor activity, and “red” days, which indicate unhealthy ozone for all. The three counties with the worst ratings were Fairfield, New Haven and Middlesex.
Obesity rates, especially among Blacks and Latinos, have increased as the climate has warmed, and scientists find the two are connected in two different ways: First, hotter summer extreme temperatures worsen chronic health problems for people carrying extra weight.
On the other hand, researchers have found, the American way of life—frequent car travel, sedentary routines, and industrial farming–all contribute to climate change. Large-scale, energy-intensive food production feeds high greenhouse gas emissions while contributing to social conditions that promote processed food with poor nutritional value over access to fresh food.
Obesity And The Risks
Obesity is defined as a body mass index (BMI) over 30. Severe obesity is defined as a BMI over 40. Examples of obesity are a 5-foot 6-inch tall person who weighs 186 pounds or more, or a 6-foot tall person weighing more than 221. Examples of severe obesity are a 5-foot 6-inch person weighing more than 247 and a 6-foot-tall person over 294.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in its most recent national report that obesity affects 42% of adults, 40% of young adults (age 20-39), 45% of middle-aged adults (age 40-59) and 43% of people age 60 and older.
When combining data from 2016-2018, non-Hispanic Blacks had the highest prevalence of obesity at 39.1%, followed by Hispanics, 33% and non-Hispanic whites, 29.3%, according to the CDC.
In Connecticut, 27% of all adults, almost 12% of children and 14% of toddlers (2-4) have obesity. In 1990, the rate was 10% of all adults, reports Connecticut Data Haven in its 2019 Community Health Well-Being Survey.
Scroll through this gallery to view combined obesity prevalence from 2016-2018 among non-Hispanic Blacks, Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites.
Across all groups, roughly a third of Connecticut’s population, about 1.2 million people, suffer on high-ozone days. In 2019, there were officially 21 high-ozone days. In 2020, two days have exceeded the threshold as of July 7.
Obesity is a disease of inflammation—meaning the body perceives an invader, and hormones that drive metabolism react. Ozone increases inflammation in the human body, said Dr. John Morton. He is a surgeon, obesity researcher, and division chief for bariatric and minimally invasive surgery for the Yale New Haven Health System and vice chair of surgical quality for Yale School of Medicine.
“Higher ozone is going to create a double hit,” he said. “You have the inflammatory response of obesity along with ozone, which will make it worse.
“We saw that in COVID obesity was a big risk factor in China and Europe and the United States because of the enhanced inflammatory response,” he said. “Certainly, ozone and obesity don’t mix.” Obesity also has been proven to be a response to environmental factors like chemicals and BPA plastics, and climate change itself is linked to rising obesity rates because of greenhouse-gas-intensive practices like raising red meat, Morton said.
Obesity decreases lung function and makes chronic problems like sleep apnea worse, he said. “The heat certainly makes the work of breathing harder just because your body temperature goes up and your metabolism goes up.” Over his 20 years of practice, he said, he has noticed “more issues with heat and sun.”
“The biggest thing if you are carrying extra weight is to do something about your weight. We have many different therapies. We believe obesity is a disease,” Morton said. Those therapies include six federally approved medications; a modified bariatric surgery known as a sleeve gastrectomy, which makes the stomach smaller; cognitive therapy; and other procedures that help with hormone production.
Morton said he used to advise that patients visit air-conditioned stores to walk around on very hot days, although during the pandemic “it’s become harder” to do that and stay away from crowds. But staying active is still important, he said. “It helps their heart. It helps their mood. Social isolation becomes a big risk factor for mortality. People who carry extra weight become socially isolated.”
He acknowledged that it can be hard to move around in heat, high ozone, and during a worldwide pandemic. He advises taking a walk during cooler times of the day. “If it is time to slow down, slow down. Hydration is really important.”
Scientists say not enough studies have been done on obesity and climate change in light of the 2.3 billion adults who the World Health Organization estimates have obesity. In the United States, funding for climate-related health effects occupies just .004% of the National Institutes of Health budget, said Dr. Kristie L. Ebi, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington who studies the health risks of climate variability.
“Ozone affects anybody who has any kind of lung issue,” she said in response to a question during the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting workshop in June. “We don’t differentiate vulnerable groups very well. We tell everyone to do the same thing” when ozone levels are high. That is to stay inside.”
A University of Michigan review of 170 studies linked ozone to breathing problems in people with body mass indexes over 30. The study noted that those with obesity experience lower lung function in general. It also noted that “few epidemiologic studies have examined the interaction between excess weight and ozone exposure among adults.” The authors suggested that as obesity rates rise, more particular studies of people with obesity are needed to figure out risks they live with. They added that “recognition of this susceptibility could help regulators to designate obese populations as at-risk populations under the Clean Air Act for consideration in standard setting and public health warnings for air pollution.”
A 2019 study by California and Colorado scientists found a connection between ozone exposure and higher triglycerides (fat found in the blood) and lower “good” or HDL cholesterol. And a 2007 Harvard School of Public Health study of older veterans concluded that those with obesity and lung sensitivities suffer more when exposed to ozone.
Dr. Kai Chen
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation’s Global Burden of Disease study estimated ozone exposure causes 254,000 additional premature deaths globally each year. For Connecticut, that study estimated that 231 deaths in 2017 from chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases (COPD) were due to long-term ozone exposure. “This is a very conservative estimate,” said Kai Chen, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Yale School of Medicine who studies the intersection of climate, pollution and human health, “because cardiovascular mortality is also related to ozone exposure.”
Ozone is connected to other health conditions, too. For example, a 2017 study by a group of scientists across the United States connected long-term exposure to ozone in Black women, and a study of New York asthma sufferers linked ozone to increased hospitalizations.
Warning Standard May Be Too Lax
Current science suggests that the state’s danger threshold for ground-level ozone should be stricter, scientists say. It is based on the Environmental Protection Agency’s unhealthy ozone standard of 70 parts per billion over eight hours using data from the previous three years. The federal standard was last lowered from 75 ppb in 2015.
“This standard is likely not enough to protect the public health,” said Chen, who has studied ozone and health in the United States and China.
Setting a stricter danger threshold would immediately result in many more “orange” and “red” days, issuing warnings to people with chronic health conditions like obesity, heart disease and asthma to limit their movement outside. As the climate warms, ozone levels will get worse not only in the summer but also in the winter, scientists predict.
]]>As ticks attached to the cloth, the team counted them and put them in jars for further study at their lab at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station in New Haven. Japanese barberry bushes grew thickly beneath the trees at this private horse farm that for years has cooperated with Lyme disease researchers.
As the group dragged cloths, they noticed ticks on each other’s pant legs and coats, and began to pick them off. This seemed to prove what the team leaders, biologists Scott C. Williams and Megan Linske, have found in one of their previous studies: More ticks thrive beneath tangles of Japanese barberry, with its year-round leaves and thorns, than in landscapes without barberry.
About an hour earlier, surveying The Preserve—public land in Old Saybrook—the team had found just one tick. That forest has no visible barberry and few invasive plants.
Throughout 2019, the scientists sampled 40 forested places in all corners of Connecticut. This study aims to calculate which landscapes attract ticks and which don’t. The early results, which they made public for the first time last week, reveal astonishing densities of the ticks that carry Lyme and four other diseases. In Fairfield and Litchfield counties, scientists found more than 20,000 adult biting ticks per square mile. The densities were almost as high in New Haven and New London counties, with more than 18,000 and almost 17,000 ticks per square mile respectively.
Their tick samples also reveal the grim truth of how Lyme disease increases in ticks if they survive into adulthood. Only 15% of nymphs (young ticks) that the team collected carry Lyme, but within a year of feeding on mice that carry the disease, almost half adult ticks carry Lyme disease. Nymphs are a threat to humans because they are so small and their bites often go undetected.
The town of Lyme, of course, is like ground zero for Lyme disease, which was discovered there in the 1970s. The blacklegged ticks carry Lyme disease and four other deadly diseases: anaplasmosis, borrelia miyamotoi disease, babesiosis, and Powassan virus.
Williams said infection with Powassan in 2019 was low, just five cases in the state. But Powassan is a dangerous illness. Former U.S. Sen. Kay Hagen of North Carolina died of Powassan in October. Congress is considering a bill called the Kay Hagan Tick Act for tickborne disease research funding.
Lyme disease has become a national health crisis. It is caused by a microscopic spirochete that enters the bloodstream and hides in the tissues. In 2018, Connecticut ranked fourth in the nation for Lyme cases, with 1,859 reported new cases that year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said. But the actual cases are probably 10 times that number (or roughly 18,500), the CDC reported.
Nationwide, the CDC estimates 300,000 cases a year. In 2015, a study at Johns Hopkins University estimated that as many as 440,000 new cases of Lyme are diagnosed each year, costing the health system $712 million to $1.3 billion a year.
The State’s Altered Forests
Lyme disease has been around for millennia. It evolved into ticks that bite humans because the landscape now favors those ticks.
Christine Woodside Photo.
Biologist Scott Williams holds one of the tiny blacklegged ticks before putting it in a jar.
Since about 1900 Connecticut has changed from mostly farmland into a land of small forest patches interrupted by grassy areas. The white-tailed deer and white-footed mouse, two important animals whose blood ticks need to survive, all thrive here.
Although 60% of Connecticut is forest, much of that forested land is cut up into narrow segments. Such fragmented woods create lots of places at the edge of woods where sunlight encourages the shrubs that deer eat—and where ticks survive.
At a forum on urban forests three months ago, Williams told a group of scientists and amateurs that deer have created landscapes that favor ticks. They eat native plants and leave behind invasive plants that tend to shelter the ticks through the winters.
Both scientists said that the time has come to understand why these forests harbor ticks. At the same forum, Linske called the life cycle of the blacklegged tick “quite the process.” It goes like this: In the ticks’ first year, as nymphs, they feed on mice. Not all ticks are infected, but those that are pass the diseases on to the mice. The mice then pass on those diseases to other uninfected ticks that bite them.
After feeding, the ticks drop off the mice. They then spend another season feeding on other animals, especially deer. Thousands of ticks can be found feeding on a single deer.
Unlike mice, deer can’t spread diseases ticks carry to other ticks from their bodies. The deer’s most important roles in spreading Lyme is they provide blood meals to ticks just before they lay their eggs.
The blacklegged tick has been called the “deer tick.” It would be truer to call Connecticut a deer landscape. Williams said deer don’t pass on Lyme disease the way mice do, but deer are pivotal to keeping ticks healthy so they can lay their eggs. Deer also disperse seeds of some plants that encourage ticks.
“This is an important study, and the hope is to have it continue every year,” Williams said last week, “but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention only gave us enough funding for this first year.” He said they need state or federal funding to continue sampling.
Their work could better define areas where people are more likely to contract dangerous tickborne diseases. And it will help Connecticut residents understand better how to avoid ticks.
TIPS
Japanese barberry.
• Homeowners should cut back Japanese barberry bushes on their property every five years.
• Change clothing after coming inside. Scientists often put their clothes right into a dryer.
• If spending extended time outdoors, people might prefer protective clothing treated with insecticide, available through outdoor outfitters.
• People can avoid tick bites by learning how to check themselves for ticks. Click here for information.
To view the locations where the team collected ticks click here.
]]>He posted a photo of the discharge on two Black Rock neighborhood Facebook pages, writing “This is disgusting.”
A week before Clough captured that photo, equipment malfunctioned at the Bridgeport West Side Water Pollution Control Facility. Fecal matter and other suspended solids spewed at two times the maximum limit allowed under a discharge permit issued through the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES). The state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) ordered the city to make all repairs and upgrades by 2039.
The West Side facility, the larger of two sewage treatment plants in the city, sends its treated waste through a 72-inch discharge pipe into Black Rock Harbor.
When the flow of waste and rainwater overwhelms the system, as it does several times a year, untreated sewage releases out of combined sewer overflow (CSO) pipes into the harbor. It sluggishly works its way to the open water of Long Island Sound. The plant also discharges partially treated waste during storms or equipment failures. Those discharges are called bypasses. Like the CSOs, the bypasses are legal and will remain so for decades.
Every 10 days, on average, a sewage discharge flows into the harbor, according to July 2014-July 2019 data from DEEP. There were 99 CSOs and the West Side plant bypassed partially treated waste 85 times. Overflows from the CSO pipes range between 100,000 gallons and 500,000 gallons. The legal plant bypasses ranged from 1 million to 16 million gallons.
Most of the overflows rush out during rainstorms, but residents interviewed said that they have seen regular overflow discharges for years on dry days and that they suspect West Side facility equipment malfunctions are the cause.
Melanie Stengel Photo.
Sunbathers along Seabright Beach. The beach was closed to swimmers most of the summer.
The city’s sewage plant manager maintains that 99 CSO spills over five years is not a high number. “During a heavy rainstorm, depending on the intensity and duration, [the CSO pipes] can overflow,” said Lauren McBennett Mappa, general manager of the Bridgeport Water Pollution Control Authority. “The overflow is very diluted raw sewage that can overflow for a short period of time. This happens very rarely.”
Residents are unhappy that DEEP, as enforcer of federal clean-water laws, gave the city so many years to fix its overflow problems. Although DEEP’s records show that most overflows are legal, residents say they have witnessed other spills that they believe aren’t documented, such as the scene in Clough’s photo.
“People look in the water, and they’re just shocked,” said resident Bruce Williams, who runs his family’s Captain’s Cove Seaport, a complex of shops, a marina, and restaurant that also leases space to sailing teams. On a recent Sunday, he said, “People from Long Island were staring at it. It looks like a horror movie. They were just stunned.”
The Culprit: The Plant
Part of the problem is the way the West Side facility operates. The Bostwick Avenue plant, built in the 1940s and last upgraded in 1996, is three times larger than the city’s east side plant and handles the majority of the city’s waste. Stormwater and waste together are pumped into the plant, and then travel through treatment by gravity. On a dry day, 18 million gallons enter the plant, which is designed to handle 30 million gallons a day. On a wet day, as much as 90 million gallons can enter the plant’s main raw sewage pumps. Usually one pump operates, but in heavier flows, up to four pumps move the water.
Over a 12-hour period, the waste normally circulates through three screening tanks, where human feces, sanitary napkins, tampons, condoms and other items are screened out. Then the water enters tanks where the remaining solid material is allowed to settle to the bottom. These solids are later trucked to landfills. The water then continues to aeration tanks, where sprayers speed up the breakdown of bacteria. Next chlorine is added, and then bisulphate is added to dechlorinate the water.
But if a flow equal to more than 58 million gallons per day enters the plant, the facility enters “bypass mode,” which speeds up and eliminates some steps in the process. During this mode, the system screens out solids, chlorinates the water, dechlorinates it, and then discharges it. The level of rain that triggers a bypass depends entirely on the accumulated water level in the street. Some official documents list the amount of rain that triggers this as four-tenths of an inch in 24 hours.
Since last year, DEEP has issued two administrative correction orders to the city, including one in 2019 that addressed the April 2018 permit violations. A June 2018 order requires the city to stop all discharges out of its CSO pipes by 2039. Eleven projects separating stormwater pipes from sewage pipes must begin by 2021. Some of this work has begun. An order issued earlier this year sets deadlines for fixing sludge processing and nitrogen removal systems that malfunctioned earlier. Construction on those must begin by the end of 2022.
Floating Condoms
Captain’s Cove rents the city-owned waterfront across Bostwick Avenue from the West Side sewage plant. Williams’s office overlooks the sewage discharge pipe. “I’m here every day. This happens all the time. I will go down to check that no condoms or sanitary napkins are floating in the shipway.”
So much is unknown about health threats in this water. But human contact with fecal contamination can result in gastrointestinal sickness like norovirus, respiratory illness, ear and eye infections, and rashes, health experts report. Regular water-quality testing is geared to the swimming season at some public beaches.
Bridgeport tests some of its beaches for bacteria that can indicate fecal matter and therefore disease-causing microbes. Swimming beaches like the neighborhood’s Seabright Beach, about 200 yards from one of the CSO pipes and 800 yards from the main discharge pipe, were closed for swimming most of the summer. The nearby Seaside Park, one of the most popular destinations, was rated “D+” for high bacteria by Save the Sound, a program of the Connecticut Fund for the Environment.
‘Not Normal’
For 13 years, Kevin Blagys, who owns KB Dive Services, has been diving in Fairfield County waters. Wearing a wet suit and snorkel gear, and holding a scrub brush in one hand, he cleans the barnacles and particles off boat bottoms. As he swims underwater, he passes through striating sections of brown and clear water. Sometimes the visibility is so bad he can only see a few inches. As the summers progress, the quality of his work zones worsens with floating black mud and the combination of heat, sun and nitrogen that makes hypoxia—oxygen too low to support life. He then hauls out dead horseshoe crabs. In some years, he has steered his small boat through slicks of dead menhaden, fish that typically thrive on Connecticut’s coast.
Blagys, a native of Greenwich, has been frustrated for years by the water quality in Black Rock Harbor, where “we have a discharge pipe at the end of a dead-end harbor.”
Melanie Stengel Photo.
Kevin Blagys of Bridgeport, who owns KB Dive Services, lifts a dead horseshoe crab found in Captain’s Cove.
Living and working so near the discharge pipe gives people in the area a sense of the water’s condition, Blagys said. “The whole neighborhood knows when it’s gross and when it’s not normal.”
Bill Lucey, the Long Island Soundkeeper, a watchdog scientist for Save the Sound, has docked his research and education boat at Captain’s Cove since spring 2018. This year he tested for dissolved oxygen in the water near the sewage discharge. In mid-August he was recording oxygen saturations of 0, the result of nitrogen from the sewage discharge combined with heat and light. High levels of nitrogen result in harmful algae growth.
The harbor could handle some nitrogen, Lucey said, “but that is only OK if it’s being discharged into a pristine environment,” which Black Rock Harbor is not. “The whole system is overloaded.”
Lucey thinks nitrogen levels should be lower than they are, but Mappa said nitrogen tests at the plant’s outflow between July 29 and Aug. 2 were “all very good numbers.”
Everyone agrees Black Rock Harbor is polluted. Residents called Peter Spain, their 130th District City Council member. He organized a public information meeting on the plant’s permit, attended by Save the Sound, DEEP, business owners, and residents, including some students. Residents hoped to share their concerns, but DEEP engineer Ann Straut spoke for much of the reserved time in a local school auditorium. She explained in detail each step required to plan, approve, fix and check plant upgrades. Public questions were cut short. Lucey trimmed his presentation on the health of the water in Long Island Sound to a few minutes.
Residents, business owners and students had already decided to take part in a regional Unified Water Study of Long Island Sound, coordinated by the Connecticut Fund for the Environment. Spain helped fund the study out of his City Council stipend.
Although Blagys never got a chance to address the meeting, he said he would have told those in attendance, “I’ve maintained boats underwater throughout the [Black Rock Harbor] and western Long Island Sound, from Milford to Greenwich. Of all the harbors—like Milford and Norwalk and Southport—Black Rock Harbor stands alone. It is clearly the most stressed environment.”
Visit the Save the Sound, Sound Health Explorer to view bacteria levels and other information here.
Coming Thursday, Part 2: A catalog of West Side plant malfunctions and sewage discharges into Black Rock Harbor; how sewage problems persist in other cities.
Coming Friday, Part 3: Black Rock area residents, including high school students, spent the spring and summer cruising the harbor and Long Island Sound gathering water samples for testing. They’re part of the Long Island Sound Unified Water Study, and like many living and working in the area they’re tired of the smelly, brown-slick water and beaches closed to swimming.
This project was supported by a grant from the Society of Environmental Journalists – Fund for Environmental Journalism.
How C-HIT’s Christine Woodside reported this project: Christine Woodside had long wanted to understand why sewage overflows regularly in some of Connecticut’s cities. She settled on the Bridgeport neighborhood of Black Rock, on Black Rock Harbor and near the promenades of Seaside Park. There she found recreation, industry, and local people who were getting tired of pollution. She went to Black Rock at least a dozen times between late March and late July. She read sewage plan documents. She scouted. She tagged along with citizen scientists collecting water. She sought out the overflow pipes with diver/boat cleaner Kevin Blagys. She wandered around the docks, streets, beaches, and markets. This gave her a sense of the residents’ anxieties and the enormity of the project to stop overflows.
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At the most inland tip are Santa Energy’s oil tanks. On the east side stretch asphalt runways at Pratt & Whitney’s test airport and a city landfill. On the west side stand O & G Industries sand and stone yard, an empty industrial building, a city landfill, a trash-to-energy plant, the regional aquaculture high school, a seaport, shops, a restaurant and sailing teams’ docks.
Last on this list is the Bridgeport West Side Water Pollution Control Facility, the city’s largest sewage treatment plant, which began work this year on a 20-year plan to correct chronic overflows.
All those buildings lie at the end of Bostwick Avenue, near the constant hum of I-95, a short distance from Seaside Park and within view of a historic lighthouse and beautifully restored park called St. Mary’s by the Sea.
Sewage filters and breaks down at the West Side plant. The treated effluent pours through a 72-inch discharge pipe into Black Rock Harbor. Several times a year, stormwater mixed with sewage overwhelms the system of pipes leading to the plant. Then untreated sewage and rain diverts directly into the harbor through combined sewer overflow (CSO) pipes. Although the city has shut down some of its CSO pipes, 30 of them still are active, including the five in the Black Rock area.
Graphic by Wes Rand.
Storms also regularly threaten the plant itself. Instead of flooding, the plant will speed that waste through a partial treatment called a plant bypass. Waste also bypasses treatment when equipment fails. Like the CSOs, the bypasses are legal and will remain so for decades.
The Legal Overflows
Every 10 days, on average, a sewage discharge flows into the harbor, according to July 2014-July 2019 data from DEEP. During that time span, CSO pipes in the Black Rock area discharged 99 times, and the West Side plant bypassed waste 85 times. CSO overflows were estimated between 100,000 gallons and 500,000 gallons. Bypasses ranged from 1 million to 16 million gallons each.
Of the five pipes in Black Rock reported overflows include:
• One at Admiral and Harbor Streets, at Santa Energy, which has overflowed 26 times since 2014.
• A CSO at St. Stephen’s Road and Anthony Street—the location of the Bridgeport Regional Vocational Aquaculture School—which has overflowed 22 times.
• The CSO nearest the neighborhood beach, Seabright Beach, sends untreated waste off Brewster Street and Seabright Street, overflowing four times in late October 2017.
The 85 bypasses of partially treated sewage over the last five years—varying from 1 million gallons to 16 million gallons—discharged from the plaint’s main pipe below the Captain’s Cove Seaport office and next to its restaurant deck.
Reports of bypasses from 2019 include:
• Between April 26 at 4:40 p.m. and April 27 at 3:45 a.m., nearly 12 million gallons
• July 12 between 1:25 and 4:15 a.m., 11 million gallons
• Between July 17 at 5:50 p.m. and July 18 at 2 a.m., 11 million gallons
• Between July 22 at 6:30 p.m. and July 23 at 1:30 a.m., nearly 10 million gallons
Christine Woodside Photo.
This CSO pipe is closest to Seabright Beach overflowing four times in five years, all in late October 2017.
Lauren McBennett Mappa has been the city’s water pollution control authority manager since January. She maintains that during heavy rainstorms, CSO pipes can overflow, but that the raw sewage being released is “very diluted,” and that it happens rarely.
The Orders
The state issued two orders to the city to correct its sewage overflow problems. Those orders cite violations of the federal discharge permit, issued through the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES).
Bridgeport’s required long-term control plan is designed to bring its sewage treatment into compliance with federal laws. By Nov. 30, 2020, the city must submit a report to the state detailing a schedule for completing upgrades to the plant. By May 31, 2022, “100% design plans shall be submitted” to the state. Construction on the upgrades must begin 4½ years from the date of the order, or September 2023, and must be finished by September 2026. The city and DEEP spent six years negotiating this plan, which requires new sludge storage tanks, odor control units and dryers. DEEP said chlorination and dichlorination of wastewater should have been automated a decade ago. The project is estimated to cost hundreds of millions of dollars to complete.
Melanie Stengel Photo.
Marcelo Borges, the West Side water treatment plant supervisor, explains the plant’s operations.
Those who work or relax near the plant’s discharge pipe, and near the five combined sewer overflow pipes that empty into this harbor, describe ugly-looking waste coming from the West Side plant at 205 Bostwick Ave. even on days when it is not raining.
Just ask Gail Robinson, who sells local real estate. Several years ago, she took a potential buyer to visit the open-air restaurant deck of Captain’s Cove Seaport. They stood admiring the view over the harbor. Then Robinson heard a gushing noise, and an ugly brown discharge rushed into the water just below her and her client. “I lost the sale,” said Robinson, who later founded the Ash Creek Conservation Association to advocate for clean water in that tributary of Black Rock Harbor.
Captain’s Cove Seaport manager Bruce Williams’ office overlooks the West Side’s discharge pipe. Often the discharge looks like chocolate mousse, he said. “There’s particle matter in that outflow. It settles and settles and settles, covering the bottom with a brown slurry a foot thick.”
Problems Persist In Other Cities
Melanie Stengel Photo.
Treated waste rushes through the chlorination channel at the West Side plant while Pollution Control Authority Manager Lauren McBennett Mappa, center, talks with two staffers.
Sewage problems aren’t unique to Bridgeport. The problem persists in three other Connecticut cities: New Haven, Hartford, and Norwich. “It went from 13 cities to four remaining,” said Jennifer Perry, assistant director of infrastructure management in the water bureau of DEEP. “We’ve been working with [all four] for a pretty extended period of time.”
In Hartford, a $300 million project to store untreated sewage underground during storms is under construction. New Haven’s 80-year-old sewage plant—also serving East Haven, Hamden, and Woodbridge—overflows regularly. A 2009 consent order dictated plant upgrades, separating storm and sewage pipes, and bioswales. The predicted completion date is 2036.
By permit—until they fix the problems over the next few decades—these cities may divert raw sewage mixed with rainwater directly into rivers, inlets and Long Island Sound.
Anyone spending time in Black Rock, smelling the plant and seeing the discharges and overflows, might ask: Why in an age of robots and space travel can’t society treat its own human waste without polluting its beloved waterways in a time frame faster than over 20 years?
Part of the reason is that the work involves undoing a century-old infrastructure in the state’s largest city, costing hundreds of millions of dollars. Perry said Bridgeport had resisted separating sewer from stormwater pipes because it costs so much. But the city has begun separating some of the pipes. For other areas, its plan is to build underground storage tanks that would hold waste during storms.
The city itself admits its sewage treatment plants fail. In a pamphlet Bridgeport distributes, it says its two plants don’t always properly operate, can’t handle flow from common storms and fail to meet the federal standard of “nine minimum controls” that include a ban on discharging waste on days when it isn’t raining.
Perry said she’s not sure people realize what happens in Bridgeport when it rains. “We as an agency talk about it, but I’m not sure many people pay that much attention,” she said. “It happens when it’s raining and no one’s outside.”
Since 2012, by law, the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection records sewage outflows on maps. You can view the maps here.
Coming tomorrow Part 3: Black Rock area residents, including high school students, spent the spring and summer cruising the harbor and Long Island Sound gathering water samples for testing. They’re part of the Long Island Sound Unified Water Study, and like many living and working in the area they’re tired of the smelly, brown-slick water and beaches closed to swimming.
This project was supported by a grant from the Society of Environmental Journalists – Fund for Environmental Journalism.
How C-HIT’s Christine Woodside reported this project: Christine Woodside had long wanted to understand why sewage overflows regularly in some of Connecticut’s cities. She settled on the Bridgeport neighborhood of Black Rock, on Black Rock Harbor and near the promenades of Seaside Park. There she found recreation, industry, and local people who were getting tired of pollution. She went to Black Rock at least a dozen times between late March and late July. She read sewage plan documents. She scouted. She tagged along with citizen scientists collecting water. She sought out the overflow pipes with diver/boat cleaner Kevin Blagys. She wandered around the docks, streets, beaches, and markets. This gave her a sense of the residents’ anxieties and the enormity of the project to stop overflows.
Charlotte Hickey grips a heavy cylindrical metal probe that is about a foot and a half long. The students call this “the beast.” It contains electronics that precisely measure water conditions. Sienna Matregrano holds a clipboard and pen, ready to record depth, temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, fluorescence and turbidity. Both girls are seniors at Bridgeport Regional Vocational Aquaculture School.
They’re up early because they must take water quality readings in Black Rock Harbor when it lies still. Like most residents of the Black Rock area, they’re tired of sewage overflows, smelly water and beaches closed to swimming—mostly caused by overflows at the Bridgeport West Side Water Pollution Control Facility sewer plant.
The students have devoted many early mornings of the spring and summer of 2019 volunteering as citizen scientists in a Long Island Sound-wide study of water quality. Called the Unified Water Study, the initiative is administered by Connecticut Fund for the Environment and its program Save the Sound. The Bridgeport group is one of 22 taking water samples at 36 embayments of Long Island Sound in Connecticut and New York.
The study’s goal is to understand the whole Sound’s water quality, and so the Black Rock citizen scientists follow strict guidelines. They take readings every two weeks in the same six locations from the mouth to the furthest inland stretch of Black Rock Harbor in the same way at the same time of day.
Under the director of teacher Holly Turner, Hickey has worked all of the collections. Matregrano rotates as data recorder with Lyle Given, a senior at the aquaculture high school.
Christine Woodside Photo.
Kevin Blagys, a study volunteer, and students Sienna Matregrano and Charlotte Hickey, both from Fairfield, check their equipment for testing.
Working with them is Kevin Blagys, who operates a one-man diving and salvage service in these waters. Blagys offered his boat, although often they use the school’s, and he helps check the figures. Blagys also has devoted hours to helping with the logistics of the study, and, using his own boat, collects seaweed and chlorophyll samples.
The last data collection is Oct. 18, so any results now are localized and don’t take into account the context of the greater Long Island Sound, which is how the unified study is designed. But the readings here in Black Rock indicate water with high nitrogen levels (because of the sewage effluent) and diminishing health as the warm season progresses.
Indeed, in their preliminary results the students are finding alarming proof of the poor health of the water. For a snapshot of declining health, one only has to compare readings from the first day the citizen scientists recorded conditions, May 10, with the readings three months later. Hypoxia, or too little oxygen to support most marine life, occurs when oxygen measures below 5 milligrams per liter. In Long Island Sound, high nitrogen levels from sewage treatment—even when plants are operating perfectly—is the cause of hypoxia.
At testing station 3, near Captain’s Cove Seaport, oxygen on the bottom declined from 100% on May 10 to 38% on Aug. 9. At the surface it went from 100% in May to 55% in August.
Farther inland, near Santa Energy and I-95, dissolved oxygen at the bottom went from 67% in May to 25% in August. At the surface it dropped from 99% in May to 30% in August.
Melanie Stengel Photo.
Megan Dear, a volunteer working on the Soundkeeper’s boat, takes a sample at Jennings Beach, Fairfield.
At the harbor’s mouth, dissolved oxygen measured 100% on the bottom and at the surface in May. By August that went down to 45% on the bottom and 62% at the surface.
They test also for turbidity, or suspended particles in the water, which remains high.
And they test for chlorophyll, an indicator of plant life. As the season warms up, oxygen in the harbor is depleted, making it more difficult to sustain marine life. “The other staggering reading is the chlorophyll levels,” Blagys said in mid-August. “They greatly increase as we go up the harbor” inland.
Chlorophyll readings Blagys collected told a story too. “I was surprised at our first testing on the 10th [of May]. It was already very green,” Blagys said, although the water temperature was still in the 50s at that time. “The water’s alive.”
Meanwhile, Bill Lucey, the Long Island Soundkeeper for the Connecticut Fund for the Environment/Save the Sound, started testing Black Rock Harbor near the discharge pipe of the West Side facility in June.
Melanie Stengel Photo.
Charlotte Hickey of Fairfield, a student at the Bridgeport Regional Vocational Aquaculture School, lowers “the beast” into the water.
His probe has measured dissolved oxygen at 0 from his first tests. Then sometime in July, what he calls “this big organic mat,” or blobs of black matter floating up from the bottom, began to clog his probe. “In a healthy embayment, the top few centimeters of the bottom sediment should have oxygen,” he said.
“There should be clams and worms making holes,” Lucey said. Deeper down you’d find anaerobic bacteria, which doesn’t need oxygen, he said.
Black Rock Harbor qualifies as an unhealthy embayment. The sediment near the top also lacks oxygen. The result is methane production on the bottom. The boaters docked near the discharge pipe see the bubbles bursting into patterns as they start their engines.
On the boat, the students, Turner and Blagys act as a well-oiled team. They’ve been doing this for months. The boat reaches the first test collection spot and hovers as Hickey lowers the beast into the water. Turner reads off the device that records the conditions, calling out figures to Matregrano, who writes them down on the study’s preprinted chart blanks.
As the boat moves to the next stop, Hickey and Turner pull the beast out of the water and go to the back of the boat to hose off blobs of thick, black mud.
Blagys said he “kind of literally jumped into this. After 13 years in business, diving in the harbor and seeing the state of it, and it really becomes in a crisis mode for two months for July and August with the hypoxia and the fish kills,” he said. He wanted to do something.
Melanie Stengel Photo.
Kevin Blagys, a nationally-ranked snowboader, volunteered his time and boat for the Unified Water Study of Long Island Sound. Here he shows seaweed that will be tested.
So did the other residents of Black Rock who attended a summer 2018 meeting organized by City Council member Peter Spain. “We found out about this study,” Blagys said. “It was pretty much Bill Lucey with Save the Sound and Holly Turner. They got together and said, ‘How can we run this thing?’ ”
“We’re sort of all citizen scientists,” Blagys said.
Blagys said he was eager to “give back” to the water where he makes his living, and is delighted that finally the water quality in the Black Rock area would get independent attention. “In the previous studies, the water hasn’t been monitored here in Bridgeport,” he said.
As soon as Turner told the students about the water study, Hickey signed up. She said that over the past three years the water in Black Rock Harbor looks more polluted than it ever has. She’s worked at Captain’s Cove with her family since she was in second grade. She sells her own cleverly painted shells—some look like Santa Claus—and she talks to a lot of tourists. Hickey’s family sells ice cream and runs a few other little stores on the boardwalk at Captains Cove Seaport. The brightly painted shops cluster over the well-kept boat docks. Music plays from the restaurant deck speakers at the northern end. You can smell fried seafood, french fries—and the sewage plant.
Since the West Side facility began operating in the late 1940s, residents have lived with regular flows of effluent (treated sewage).
Since the West Side facility began operating in the late 1940s, residents have lived with regular flows of effluent (treated sewage). The discharge pipe is designed to emit up to 30 million gallons a day, but it regularly sends out more out of its 72-inch mouth directly below Captain Cove’s restaurant deck.
When the study ends in October, residents may understand better the problems in this water. For now, they are noticing that the dissolved oxygen went way down as the summer went on and the water heated up. They see high nitrogen levels and high turbidity (cloudiness) in areas.
The Future
Bridgeport is under orders from the state to correct its sewage overflow problem by 2039. Once all the work is done, Lucey said, the harbor would need about 20 more years to recover. So if the city stops overflows by 2039, the harbor will be clean by 2059.
Waterways do recover when sewage outflows are moved. A case in point is Mumford Cove in Groton. The sewage outflow was moved to the Thames River in 1987. Fifteen years later, the cove’s natural eelgrass ecosystem had recovered.
Lucey said that Black Rock Harbor should be dredged so that it has a chance to recover, once the sewage overflows are halted.
The recovery in Black Rock rides, too, on other industry being careful. Over the summer, some spilled gravel caused the water to look as blue as a glacial lake for a day.
Climate change will also affect how the harbor recovers.
Connecticut is getting wetter and warmer, which means more rain will infiltrate sewage and stormwater pipes. Warmer summers increase the interactions of heat, sun and nitrogen that lower water oxygen levels.
The people in Black Rock have decided that whatever the odds against the harbor might seem to be, they want to do something. “We basically got the Unified Water Study started in Black Rock with no federal funding,” Lucey said. “They self-funded.”
Spain, Santa Energy, and Blagys donated time and boat time. The aquaculture high school donated its boat and captains. Ash Creek Conservation Association donated money and acted as the fiscal agent for buying equipment. Captain’s Cove provided free boat slips.
“A half dozen entities donated resources to make that happen,” Lucey said. “People put their money where their mouth is.”
Read the 3-part series on C-HIT.org.
Part 1: A typical rainstorm in Bridgeport overwhelms the West Side sewage treatment plant. Over the past five years, hundreds of millions of gallons of bypassed waste have poured into Black Rock Harbor. Combined sewage overflow pipes have diverted hundreds of thousands of gallons of untreated waste. A murky thick foam filled with objects people flushed down the toilet lingers for days. Residents say that they should not have to live with this.
Part 2: A catalog of West Side plant malfunctions and discharges into Black Rock Harbor; how sewage problems persist in other cities.
Part 3: Black Rock area residents, including high school students, spent the spring and summer cruising the harbor and Long Island Sound gathering water samples for testing. They’re part of the Long Island Sound Unified Water Study, and like many living and working in the area they’re tired of the smelly, brown-slick water and beaches closed to swimming.
This project was supported by a grant from the Society of Environmental Journalists – Fund for Environmental Journalism.
How C-HIT’s Christine Woodside reported this project: Christine Woodside had long wanted to understand why sewage overflows regularly in some of Connecticut’s cities. She settled on the Bridgeport neighborhood of Black Rock, on Black Rock Harbor and near the promenades of Seaside Park. There she found recreation, industry, and local people who were getting tired of pollution. She went to Black Rock at least a dozen times between late March and late July. She read sewage plan documents. She scouted. She tagged along with citizen scientists collecting water. She sought out the overflow pipes with diver/boat cleaner Kevin Blagys. She wandered around the docks, streets, beaches, and markets. This gave her a sense of the residents’ anxieties and the enormity of the project to stop overflows.
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