By Elizabeth Dinan
edinan@seacoastonline.com
March 21, 2010 2:00 AM
Great Bay “isn’t so great of late,” said Jeff Barnum, a Stratham resident, sport fisherman and president of the Coastal Conservation Association of New Hampshire.
“We’re extremely concerned about the water quality in Great Bay,” said Barnum, noting that in the early 1990s there were 1,100 acres of oyster beds, with each adult oyster capable of filtering pollutants from 20 gallons of water a day.
Read the Portsmouth Herald story here
Adams Point Road is dangerous(too narrow) and in serious disrepair so if you are dropping shells there be very careful.
Now read this,
Notice of Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO)
Total rain event of March 14 thru March 18, 2010 = over 7 inches. Spring Street Combined Sewer Overflow total= 13,835,000 gallons. Water Street = 6,361,000 gallons.
and this,
Notice of Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO)
Total rain event of March 23 thru March 25, 2010 = 2.5 inches. Spring Street Combined Sewer Overflow total = 2,706,000 gallons. Water Street = 509,000 gallons. DES Shellfish Program, EPA-Region 1 and NHDES were all notified.
The tank below is a 5 million gallon tank.
We all really should do our best to eat more oysters, cause the rain is not stopping anytime soon.
I could fit maybe 2 of these tanks behind the Hayes Mobile Home Park, that’s a floating lid. There is land at the back of the Park alongside the Squamscott River. I am only half kidding with my siting proposal. That point of land opposite the current sewer lagoons is good too, at the end of Allen St. The piece that was offered to St Mikes a while back. So , you hold the CSO’s then pump them for treatment after the storm event. I really only post tank pics to illustrate how much we dump in the River and Bay. This idea for holding the CSO only just popped in my head after seeing our huge overflows these past weeks. In RI they built a massive underground storage system to protect Narragansett Bay, and it works. We have to do something. I feel the amount of the CSO’s illustrates that our sewers are basically wide open, that they are all in disrepair and we have an interim issue to address, our polluting of the Great Bay.
“Another platter of oysters?”
Mike
The Exeter Town Crier 