Tucked behind businesses, homes and industrial sites sits Mashapaug Pond, the largest freshwater body in Providence.
Suzannah Rutherford bought a home overlooking the water six years ago.
“It’s just so open when you stand here and look out. It’s beautiful. It’s just like you see more sky, you feel like you have a larger expanse of yard,” Rutherford said.
Rutherford fell in love with the scenic views from her gazebo, but she also had her share of questions. Signs around the pond warned that Mashapaug Pond was sick.
“I was very concerned so I did a lot of research before we moved here,” she said.
For nearly 100 years, the Gorham Manufacturing Company, one of the largest producers of sterling silver, operated a factory by the pond and dumped toxic byproducts into the water.
“Gorham Silver was in the cove at the other end of the pond and dumped a lot of solvents in the water,” Rutherford said. “And so I read about the remediation efforts. I spoke to a few environmental scientists at Brown University.”
Those remediation efforts included dredging the pond’s cove in 2015. These days, pollution left behind from Gorham is not the primary source of contamination in Mashapaug Pond. It is stormwater runoff, which can produce a blue-green algae known as cyanobacteria.
“It’s an environmental problem of our time that I feel like people are going to be very motivated to figure out how to deal with it eventually,” Rutherford said.
Topher Hamblett is one of those who is motivated to solve it. He is the executive director of Save The Bay, a conservation organization.
“No matter who you are or where you live, you have a right to clean water, period,” Hamblett said. “And I think it’s a travesty that people who live around this pond can’t enjoy it as people can enjoy other waters around Rhode Island.”
Stormwater runoff, Hamblett said, is causing excess nutrients, like phosphorous, to enter Mashapaug Pond. And it is susceptible to polluted runoff because it’s surrounded by impervious surfaces like asphalt and concrete.
“This whole watershed’s a mix of some park areas like we’re sitting in now, but also some very wide open, heavily paved areas,” Hamblett said. “When water hits pavement, it can’t go into the ground. It has to go somewhere. And that’s one of the reasons why we see ponds like this so polluted.”
Since at least 1998, Mashapaug Pond has been listed on Rhode Island’s list of impaired waters because of the contamination.
Terry Gray said warmer waters and more frequent, intense storms are adding to the problem.
“No one likes to see a pond that’s covered in green scum or other types of invasive flora that just cover the whole surface of the pond,” said Terry Gray, the director of the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, also known as RIDEM.
Gray said warmer waters and more frequent, intense storms are adding to the problem.
“A lot of it is, I believe, getting driven by climate change as well,” Gray said. “When we see these unbelievable short bursts of rainfall, that creates a huge slug of stormwater that’s being introduced into our water bodies and those slugs can really trigger bacterial growth and algae growth.”
Increased awareness about algae growth
Awareness about algae growth has increased in the community. It’s an important message for Lorén Spears, a Narragansett Tribal Citizen.
“Water as the slogan goes is life,” Spears said. “We need it. It’s a giving force.”
The banks of the pond were once home to a thriving Narragansett settlement.
“Our ancestors have lived here, but also our contemporary ancestors, if you will, just a generation ago, were living on and around this pond,” Spears said.
She credits a decade of annual processions held around the pond with helping to raise awareness about the contamination.
“The average person knew a lot about what was happening here, and it kind of rises to the political entities that can do something about it and puts more pressure on them to do something about it,” Spears said.
Environmental groups and state agencies have taken note. In 2018, the Conservation Law Foundation petitioned RIDEM to require businesses to control stormwater runoff but that petition went unanswered. Then, earlier this year, the Rhode Island Attorney General’s Office got involved.
“We got involved because we’ve seen the algae blooms in some of our most critical urban ponds,” Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said. “You can see in the summertime it’s this really bright lime green stuff, algae, on top of these ponds.”
RIDEM recently announced about 70 businesses near the Mashapaug Pond Watershed in Providence and Cranston will be required to control runoff. Gray said in the short term commercial and industrial properties will have to take basic housekeeping steps, like picking up leaf litter and clearing storm drains.
“A lot of times what happens is the rain flushes nitrogen and phosphorus out of that material by flowing through it, and then the water, which could look perfectly clear, carries those materials downstream,” Gray said. “And boom, what that is that’s food for the organisms that are living in the pond naturally. And if you overfeed ‘em, boom, you get this bloom that people see toward the end of the summer every year.”
When Gray was asked if RIDEM needs to require property owners to do more, he responded, “That’s where we have to start.”
Gray added that RIDEM may ask some property owners to put measures in place to keep that stormwater on their site, which he said could include, “pervious pavement, rain gardens, tree wells. These are all sort of technologies that are more current that get the water back in the ground, and then it’s not flowing over the surface of the land as stormwater.”
Rutherford will be among the first to know if the water quality is improving on Mashapaug Pond. She’s also a volunteer with the University of Rhode Island’s Watershed Watch Program, which measures water quality.
“We monitor visibility, which is an indicator of how many bacteria or algae are blooming. We test for chlorophyll content. We test for dissolved oxygen,” Rutherford said. “So one of the problems when you have overgrowth from runoff, from fertilizer, the oxygen lower down goes down to the point where fish can’t survive.”
Some animals still make their home in Mashapaug Pond, including swans and turtles.
An environmental justice issue
Hamblett said cleaning the pond is an environmental justice issue. “I think justice looks like a clean, vibrant, healthy pond that people in this community are enjoying,” he said.
Hamblett said there’s an acceptance of that kind of pollution in urban areas that wouldn’t exist in more affluent communities.
“If this pond was in East Greenwich or Barrington, you might see a different response to the pollution that’s in it,” he said.
Gray said the work being done in the Mashapaug Pond Watershed, which flows into Narragansett Bay, is a case study with lasting ripple effects.
“As we learn and we see the benefits and we see how to do this effectively, my hope is that we’ll apply those lessons to other parts of the state,” Gray said.
The long-term goal, Gray said, is to restore the water so it can be fishable and swimmable.
When asked when people can expect to swim and fish in the pond, Gray said it was too early to say.
“Remember, it’s taken over a hundred years to really get to this point, and that’s a hundred years of history that we have to overcome in order to restore the water quality in this pond. So it’s going to take a while.”
Rutherford said being out on the water feels like a ghost town. She’s seen rotting docks submerged — a sign it once was a vibrant place.
“I’d love to be able to dive off a dock and swim across the pond someday,” Rutherford said. “We enjoy just looking at it. We enjoy the birds, we enjoy watching the eagles catching fish, but it would be a beautiful thing to have people be able to swim here again.”
“A hundred years from now, I’d like the people to be telling the story about how this generation did this work and repaired this waterway so that others could enjoy it,” Spears said. “There was a time where most people couldn’t enjoy (Narragansett) Bay, and we did a lot of work, and now most of the Bay is enjoyable. And so if we can do that, then we can do this.”
The Rhode Island PBS Foundation and The Public’s Radio will be one of the properties required to control stormwater runoff under the state’s new plan.
According to a Providence city spokesperson, the city is also doing its part to help revitalize Mashapaug Pond. It recently received $920,000 in federal funding which will, in part, improve water quality, revitalize trails that connect the pond to nearby parks and restore a boat launch.
