Buzzards Bay National Estuary Program

Home    BBNEP Info    Town Information    Pollution    Living Resources    Watershed Info    Enjoy Buzzards Bay    Technical Info    Special Topics

Home  >   Management Solutions  >   New Management Plan   >   Chapter 3: Pollution Charactization

Draft Chapter 3:
Characterization of Pollution Sources

About the new Buzzards Bay CCMP Action Plans
The Buzzards Bay NEP is now updating our 1992 landmark Buzzards Bay Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan (CCMP) to reflect the great progress achieved since that plan was finalized. It will include new goals, objectives, and recommendations to meet the environmental needs for Buzzards Bay and its surrounding watershed throughout the next decade. This new document will also meet the requirements for a Massachusetts Watershed Action Plan, which will enable new funding opportunities through the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

On this page is a draft action plan from the updated Buzzards Bay Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan. The text on this page is a public draft provided to invite comment and discussion of the subject by residents and stakeholders. It may contain goals and recommendations that have not yet been endorsed or approved by the Buzzards Bay Steering Committee. The views or information contained here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts or the US Environmental Protection Agency.

We want your feedback on each action plan. First, please read the entire action plan on each page then at the bottom of the action plan pages, click the "rate each recommendation now" button to provide comments on each goal, objective and recommendation contained in this Action Plan. Based on your feedback, we will update and revise all the action plans in the new CCMP.


This page has only a few highlights of this chapter.

Read the actual text of Chapter 3 as a pdf file (1.3 MB), with graphics.

Characterization of Pollution Sources

[This web page just has a few opening paragraphs. Open the pdf file above for the entire chapter.]

Overview

Buzzards Bay remains an estuary in transition. The stresses faced by Buzzards Bay are typical of the stresses placed on many estuaries of the Northeastern United States from past dumping of wastes, new development, and conflicting uses. Along the eastern and northern shores of Buzzards Bay, dramatic coastal development occurred in the 1980s and 1990s. Owners converted small summer vacation homes into year-round residences. Property owners built an even larger number of new homes in some of these summer cottage areas. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, communities on the western shores like Westport, Dartmouth, and Mattapoisett had their own similar growth booms. In contrast, areas like the City of New Bedford, an old industrial and fishing center has had both a severe and continued population and economic decline, in part contributing to the suburban growth patterns in the surrounding communities.

Like many old industrial centers, the greater New Bedford area suffered from decades of pollution. While areas of New Bedford inner and outer harbor and Clarks Cove have seen some dramatic improvements in water quality, this area of Buzzards Bay still faces decades of prescribed cleanup and restoration. In contrast to the success stories around New Bedford, most development growth areas around the bay have largely experienced only continued water quality declines during the past two decades. Most of this degradation has been the result of non-point source pollution, and regulators have not imposed solutions, nor have towns adopted solutions voluntarily, especially for coastal eutrophication problems.

In the late 2000s, this landscape began to change in that the DEP began issuing nitrogen TMDLs for some Buzzards Bay embayments, and issued bacterial indicator TMDL in 2009. Both these actions could have a profound environmental, economic, and political impacts to the region depending the approach and time frame for compliance with these TMDLs. These issues are discussed in other chapters of the Buzzards Bay CCMP.

Management solutions for restoring and protecting Buzzards Bay require an increasingly sophisticated knowledge and understanding of pollution sources, estuarine processes, and an understanding of the effect of land use on water quality. This chapter is meant to provide a cursory overview of the main pollutant issues facing Buzzards Bay and is not meant to be exhaustive. In each section, we provide footnotes to articles with more thorough discussions or contain more specific data.

Classification of Pollution Types

To simplify characterizing pollution sources, since the introduction of the Clean Water Act, managers tend to classify pollution sources into point and nonpoint sources. Point sources occur at discrete and identifiable points, usually through pipeline discharges or direct dumping. Obvious point-source discharges into estuarine and coastal waters include sewage treatment plants, industrial discharges, and combined sewer overflows (CSOs). Nonpoint sources are considered diffuse, often intermittent, and sometimes ill-defined inputs to an estuary. These sources include surface runoff, rainfall, atmospheric deposition, underground transport, and leaching of materials to the estuary.

Pollution sources were classified this way in part reflect the regulatory process as to whether the class of discharge required a discharge permit from a state or federal agency. But in the late 1990s and early 2000s, state and federal discharge permit programs changed to accommodate some so-called non-point sources, like municipal stormwater system discharges, in effect alter-ing how many of these non-point sources are characterized and managed. That is to say, stormwater pipe net-works were multiple discharges pipes are now regulated as collective systems. Despite this shift in regulatory classification, throughout this CCMP we continue to refer to stormwater discharges and nitrogen discharges from septic systems as non-point source pollution.

Priority Pollutants

In the 1991 CCMP, the Buzzards Bay NEP focused its efforts on three priority pollution problems pathogen contamination, toxic contamination, and in-creasing nitrogen inputs and how they affect water quality and living resources in Buzzards Bay. The Buzzards Bay management conference selected these pollution problems because they had the greatest impact on the economic, ecological, and aesthetic values of Buzzards Bay.

These three sources remain the focus of pollution-related recommendations in the 2009 CCMP, but new emerging contaminants, like pharmaceuticals also need to be addressed, and are addressed in this updated management plan. Below is a thumbnail overview of the pollution sources and impacts to Buzzards Bay and the surrounding watershed.



[etc. Open the pdf version to see maps, tables, and the rest of the text.]

---