Editor’s note: This commentary is by Karl Meyer, of Greenfield, Massachusetts, who has been a stakeholder in the FERC relicensing process for the Northfield Mountain and Turners Falls projects in Massachusetts since 2012. He is a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists. His feature essay on this license process can be found here.
On Sept. 1, FirstLight Power petitioned the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for a third delay in submitting final license applications to run Northfield Mountain Pumped Storage Station and its Turners Falls hydro sites in Massachusetts. In a process now in its ninth year, the Canadian-owned company wants four more months to restudy NMPS’s water release impacts on endangered Puritan tiger beetles 30 miles downriver. It was bad news capping a dismal year for a Connecticut River that’s not seen any semblance of natural flows in the Bay State for half a century.
Despite recent on-air, print and social media stories of cleanup heroism, secret swimming holes, baby lamprey rescue and adult lamprey barbecues, our river seems headed back toward its time as “the nation’s best landscaped sewer.”
At Vernon this spring structural problems at that fishway likely led to the big downturn in American shad passing upstream there to central New England. The partial blockage might have been caught — and repaired — had two students downriver at Greenfield Community College fulfilled their weekly fish counting obligations. Important tallying, via downloaded video, just didn’t happen — leaving the problem at Vernon Dam undetected for a full migration season.
Further downriver this August, hundreds of thousands of gallons of raw sewage overflow entered the main stem, fouling it from Springfield, Massachusetts, to Middletown, Connecticut. Meanwhile in Connecticut this June, for the second time in a year, toxic PFAS entered waterways at Bradley Airport, triggering fish consumption warnings and menacing water supplies on the Farmington River all the way to its meeting with the Connecticut.
And, at Turners Falls, Massachusetts, riverbanks were collapsing — some oozing grim pus that’s leaching to the most endangered habitat in the ecosystem. The Rock Dam is an in-river ledge that’s provided refuge to federally endangered shortnose sturgeon for centuries. It’s their sole documented natural spawning site. Pink-orange slurry has been flushing from the banks there for a year — running into the river’s cobble bed where early life stage sturgeon shelter and develop.
Visitors to the river at Rock Dam off “Migratory Way” in Cabot Woods will see a 30-foot hemlock and saplings being eaten by a sinkhole now big enough for a Mini-Cooper. Banks there slump to a series of nasty, yards-wide, gashes — one with a dumped tire in its center. Slime squeezing from them sloughs in weeping riverlets that flow the final few yards to the river’s sturgeon nursery as a rusty precipitate of oxidizing iron, manganese and other unknown agents. In a drought year, the adjacent muck-choked canal is clearly the destabilizing water source.
Upriver, failing FirstLight banks are threatening Millers Falls Road and houses on a buff there. Pipe failure is said to be a culprit. The town made expensive repairs, dumping rubble on that hillside at a sharp river curve called The Narrows. Failures at such nearby sites might merit closer examination. The Narrows is where current pushes against the outer riverbanks — a classic place for surging water to create erosional impact. Northfield Mountain creates big suck-and-surge cycles just 4 miles upstream — sending down powerful pulses that cause daily 3 foot “tides” at Turners Falls Dam. Some can reach 9 feet.
NMPS was completed in 1972 by Northeast Utilities. Rebranded as Eversource and now expanding into natural gas, they are still New England’s grid monopoly and perennial major sponsor of the Source to Sea Cleanup. NMPS is now a 48-year-old FirstLight holding, but still sending its surges down The Narrows to that dam. There, they get shunted into the power canal, ultimately exerting pressure against its massively muck-choked outer bank — adjacent and just 400 feet from those dissolving banks at Rock Dam. Ironically, any flow the canal can’t swallow gets flushed over the dam in channel-ramping surges to the starved, oft-empty riverbed below. That parch-and-flood cycle further impacts Rock Dam’s shores; then heads to endangered Puritan tiger beetle habitat 30 miles away.
The U.S. Geological Survey’s Conte Anadromous Fish Research Center sits 250 yards from Rock Dam. Shortnose sturgeon and their critical Rock Dam pool were extensively studied by their researchers there for decades. Now debased and failing, it is ignored. What about the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act? That lab sits on a bank opposite Greenfield, home to the 68-year-old, recently rebranded Connecticut River Conservancy. Why isn’t CRC testing that Rock Dam slurry at their water lab? Have they sent any slime samples out for analysis? Where’s their Streambank Erosion Committee? Why would a federal lab abandon the long-term endangered species research site at its door?
As self-described champions of “Science for a Changing World” and “Healthy habitats,” neither has steered a reporter or video crew to that elephant in the room. Perhaps it’s their admission of powerlessness. CRC, dependent on various federal and state fish and environmental agencies for grant monies, won’t likely be calling out their failures anytime soon. They have no enforcement mandate and employ no staff lawyers. Thus they never challenge the big dogs, and power companies know it.If a river could talk, I think it would say cleanups look nice, but they won’t save rivers. That requires an unencumbered 21st century organization — one with lawyers and an enforcement mandate corporations can’t ignore.
