Auto news on Youtube May 30 2018

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Narrator: The Boston Harbor cleanup

represents one of the largest public works

projects ever undertaken in New England.

Once considered the dirtiest harbor in America,

today it's recognized as one of America's

greatest environmental achievements.

Ken Moraff: When we started the harbor

cleanup, this water was so filthy that no one

wanted to be down here. People in Boston

didn't seem to care that much about it.

They just accepted it, that was what

the harbor was supposed to be like.

Bruce Berman: For generations we'd been cut

off from the harbor. In essence, the harbor was

surrounded by brownfields and abandoned

parking lots, was polluted to the point where it

was not just unsafe, but it was fairly unpleasant.

Narrator: By the mid-1980's, Boston Harbor had

become the dirtiest harbor in the United States.

For more than a century, the daily waste form

Boston and 43 surrounding communities went

virtually untreated before being dumped into the harbor.

Finally, in 1985, EPA joined the

Conservation Law Foundation, the city of Quincy,

and the town of Winthrop in a federal lawsuit

seeking compliance with the Clean Water Act.

EPA was then charged by the court to cooperate

in and ensure the expedition design,

funding, and construction of the

necessary facilities to clean up Boston Harbor.

The court ordered the Commonwealth of

Massachusetts to transfer responsibility for

sewage management to the Massachusetts

Water Resources Authority, the MWRA.

Fred Laskey: When the Authority was created

they inherited an antiquated, run-down,

ineffective sewer system from a state agency

that had been neglected for many years.

Ken Moraff: The project involved hundreds of

individual construction projects and every one

of those had its own complications and just

knowing that there were that many people out

there working on the project was just a great feeling.

It wasn't anymore that EPA was in this alone.

We actually had thousands of people

working to clean up the harbor.

Narrator: Many obstacles threatened to stall

the project. The massive plant cost billions of

dollars to build and ratepayers protested their

increasing sewer bills.

Citizens worried the discharge outfall was still

still too close to Boston while others argued

it was too close to the Cape and

might impact marine life.

Dave Toomey: As soon as the sludge stopped

being dumped you could almost see the

difference in terms of water clarity.

Narrator: The harbor restoration didn't end

with the building of the Deer Island treatment plant.

Since 2005, the EPA has stayed involved and the MRWA

has tackled projects to eliminate

combined sewer overflows that occur during rainstorms.

Phil Colarusso: We're seeing return of a lot of

sensitive marine species to areas of the harbor

that one time was considered some

of the most contaminated spots.

Now we see everything from small fish, sticklebacks,

to large predators like sand tiger sharks and

just about everything in between.

So it's just a wonderful story of recovery and hope.

Vivien Li: I joke some days that the most

popular bird here is really the crane because

every place you turn on the waterfront you're

seen so many cranes building new buildings.

People want to be on the waterfront

and it's because it's clean.

It has become the engine for economic development.

And we're all the sudden getting this critical mass

of mixes of residential, commercial uses,

cultural institutions all coming to the waterfront.

15, 20 years ago you never would've been able

to attract that caliber of firms or retail uses.

You know it has cost us many billions of dollars

dollars as ratepayers, but in return we have

had a renaissance of this waterfront

and the development that we have seen is unprecedented.

Ken Moraff: The incredible thing about it is that

we succeeded and the water is clean, and if we

can clean up Boston Harbor,

we can clean up anything.

Vivien Li: I think that our generation will be

looked at as the visionaries by our children's

and our grandchildren's generations who will

say, "you know, they paid a heavy price in terms

of cleaning up this harbor, but, my goodness,

what they have left our generation!"

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