Providence Journal | January 18, 2002
Officials in Massachusetts and Rhode Island hope the river can be cleaned up, but the job won't be easy
BY DANIEL BARBARISI, Journal Staff Writer
REHOBOTH - Bob Noons gestures out over his property toward the Palmer River, pointing out the recently installed retaining wall, the asphalt feed lots, the gutters on the roofs, and the raised curbs - in all, over $50,000 in improvements to his farm, made at the behest of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
The state is pouring money into the Palmer River, trying to get Noons and farmers like him to stop the flow of manure and other farm byproducts into the river.
Noons is happy to comply if it'll keep the state off his back - the problem is, however, that despite all the money and effort, he thinks this is a losing battle.
"It'll never be cleaned up. You have so many things running into the Palmer River. They might help it out some, but they'll never clean it up," Noons said from his farm, 150 feet from the river.
The only way to solve the problem, Noons said, is to close dairy farms like his, getting rid of both the cows and the manure for good.
"All these thousands of dollars that they're spending _ they ought to cut the cord right at the beginning," he said.
The Palmer River begins in Rehoboth, winds through Swansea and touches on Seekonk, and then passes through Barrington and Warren before spilling out into the Narragansett Bay. Its watershed, the surrounding land and tributary areas draining into the river, takes up over 50 square miles in those five towns.
It's a dirty river, so polluted with fecal coliform bacteria that the state has been closing it to swimming and lucrative shellfishing, section by section, since the mid-1980s.
The river has been completely closed to shellfishing and recreation since 1996, when Rhode Island's Department of Environmental Management started looking at plans to restore the river's water quality, completing its report last month. Massachusetts began a similar project in 2000, but won't be finished until June.
Now, the two states are publicly presenting their initial findings, and are begging for help in stemming the tide of pollutants draining into the river. Their reports identify agricultural and road runoff, storm-water runoff, and fecal matter from pets and waterfowl as the main sources of bacteria in the river.
Representatives from both states opened a 30-day comment period last week by holding feedback sessions, one in Barrington last Wednesday, followed the next night by a meeting in Rehoboth. At the Rehoboth meeting, officials from Rhode Island's DEM and from Environmental Science Services, the company contracted by Massachusetts to investigate its section of the river, described a river with many problems, from many sources.
"Cows are clearly an issue," said Russell Isaac of DEM, but so are new residential subdivisions, failing septic systems, pet waste and waterfowl, he added.
"Agriculture is one of them, for sure, but there's other things going on, too," he said.
ESS is still sampling the Palmer, and it won't yet say for certain what is causing the problem in each specific area, at least until its study is finished in June.
But officials from Massachusetts' Department of Food and Agriculture have been working for years to stamp out what they think is one of the major pollutants: manure runoff from the farms flanking the river in Rehoboth.
Food and Agriculture has been doling out grants to farmers like Noons for some time now, politely telling them they'd like the problem solved as soon as possible and, in general, getting agreeable responses from the local farmers.
At least one farmer refused to comply, but fortunately for the state, he recently went out of business. "Whether he simply couldn't [comply] or didn't want to, I can't necessarily say," said Food and Agriculture Director James Hines.
They point to Noons, on the other hand, as one of their success stories. He made all the changes they recommended, even spending $10,000 of his own money when the $40,000 grant ran out. Even so, Noons said he wasn't particularly impressed with the state's presentation last Thursday, and said he doesn't think the state is close to determining what ails the Palmer, to say nothing of fixing it.
"They don't know what's contaminating the water either. There's a lot of stuff in there," he said.
Still, Noons isn't all doom and gloom. He's convinced that what he's doing is helping, and that things will probably be better than they were before.
"I know I eliminated some of the problem. I'm trying to eliminate some more. I think I keep a clean operation," he said, pausing. "But this is a farm. You can't keep them perfectly clean."
Indeed, Noons said that no matter how many walls he puts up, or how many fences he erects to keep his cows away from the Palmer, it's all for naught as soon as a storm comes; the storm-water runoff carries all the manure right back into the river, and there's nothing he or the state can do about it.
For now, all Noons can do is wait, and keep complying with the state's requests. He already believes that he'll be the last of four generations of the Noons family on this farm. Now, he says, it's just a question of when the state will figure out that the only way to fix the Palmer is to close his farm.
"If they decide that we're the polluters, then they should buy us out. Eliminate the problem from the beginning. I don't know why they don't do that."Providence Journal:
