For beach-goers looking for a spot north of Boston to swim, there’s a number of options. From Good Harbor Beach in Gloucester to Plum Island Beach in Newburyport, Massachusetts beaches have remained popular tourist spots despite the unusually frequent rain storms this summer.
However, King’s Beach, on the border between Lynn and Swampscott, is one spot that locals have come to expect to be closed for swimming almost constantly, due to poor water quality from connected sewer systems.
Having been closed for swimming since June 25 in Lynn, and July 5 in Swampscott, King’s Beach has been closed for more than 90% of the days since Memorial Day weekend. For these communities, and especially for Lynn, where King’s Beach is virtually the only local option, the improvement of water quality is top priority within Stacey’s Brook that flows into the Nahant Bay.
Bringing together residents from Swampscott, Lynn, and other nearby communities, the Save King’s Beach group was founded to pool knowledge, raise awareness, and gain political momentum on this issue that has existed for decades.
“I think a lot of us were frustrated that there may have been a time in the past where, instead of working together, (Swampscott and Lynn residents) pointed fingers, saying ‘This is a Lynn problem,’ or This is a Swampscott problem’, and I didn’t think that was very constructive,” said Robin Grace, one of the group’s founding members who last year was appointed to the Lynn Water and Sewer Commission.
“So we started thinking about how the two towns could work together to solve a problem that affects us both. Anybody that wanted to join us could join, but it was really important that we saw it as a beach problem, not just a town problem.”
Save King’s Beach, along with other local nonprofits seeking to improve water quality such as Save the Harbor/Save the Bay and Friends of Lynn & Nahant Beach, have been working with local politicians to research and evaluate the best possible means of fixing the problem.
“Lynn and Swampscott are just like every other city or municipality, in that they have to keep improving and fixing their pipes,” said Chris Mancini, executive director of Save the Harbor. “This is a 100-year-old system, and things break. It’s just a tedious, ongoing process.
“So one thing I think Save King’s Beach can do is really hold people’s feet to the fire to make sure that work is going at a regular pace. and then what we all started doing was looking at additional support for clean water so that we could open the beach sooner rather than later.”
Save the Harbor also produces yearly “Water Quality Report Cards” for a broader look at the safety of beaches throughout the Commonwealth. In 2022, only one beach scored below a 80%; King’s Beach, which has consistently has been given the lowest safety grade since 2017.
Sewer infrastructure improvements, while a priority item for Save King’s Beach, are expensive as well as time-consuming projects, prompting the group to look for additional means of improving water quality in the meantime. A variety of solutions have been forwarded by the group, including the construction of a UV treatment facility to disinfect the water, extending the outfall further out into the harbor, disinfection through chemicals like chlorine, or even relocating the outfall along the shore so that it never enters the ocean to begin with.
Some solutions such as the UV treatment are estimated to take three years to implement and cost $25 million. Others, such as extending the sewer overflow, would be effective, but would require a more significant commitment of money and time.
“It’s a really beautiful stretch of beach, and the only beach in Lynn, so we want to address this with a sense of urgency, and find the most practical solution there is, to get people in the water as fast as we can,” said state Sen. Brendan Crighton, Senate Chair of the Metropolitan Beaches Commission.
“So we’re going to keep working with this administration to examine possible solutions, but it’s a challenging issue that will not be solved overnight.
“(Extending) the outfall may seem like the simpler, more straightforward solution, but my concerns are the time it will take and the funding, which would both be significant, Crighton said. “And it comes at a time when water and sewer infrastructure across the Commonwealth is in great need of repair. So competing for public dollars against many other worthy projects, to the tune of $65 million, seems like a very big challenge.”
As a result of the frequent rainstorms that have hit the bay this summer, the combined sewer overflows – or CSOs – around the beach were triggered three separate times.
“We’ve had three CSOs, which is very unusual,” Mancini said. “But I urge people not to get distracted by the CSOs because, yes, it’s millions of gallons of combined bacterial sewage, but they happen predictably. You look around the globe and this is one of the rainiest summers since 1872, so the system is behaving predictably. All of the municipalities are dealing with CSOs — not to say we love all this sewage being dumped into the water — we’re just trying to kind of be realistic as this is a major metropolitan area.
“In the shorter term, the real pressing issue is that the beach has been closed for swimming 90% of the summer,” he said. “It’s the only beach in Lynn, an environmental justice city, and so you have a real equity issue. We really focus on this daily contamination, and I think we have the momentum right now, between citizens and elected leadership, to hopefully get to a solution. We’re getting to the point where we’re digging down into like the nitty gritty details.”
Grace said tenacity plays an important in solving the problem.
“There’s a lot of people in both communities that really want to see a solution to the problem, or maybe they’ve even given up on it because we keep hearing over and over again that nothing’s really happening,” she said. “And I would say, don’t give up, we need as many people advocating as possible. Because I think the more voices we get, the more that we’ll have everybody’s attention.”
Source: Salem News
