by James Ehlers
Did you know canaries can live in cesspools? They can’t. Everyone knows canaries can’t live in oxygen-depleted coal mines; they die. It’s a trick question.
Yet, for some reason, Colchester town officials are attempting to defy science, and the odds, by ignoring the warning signs of a dying Malletts Bay. Or maybe they are just insanely optimistic that those of us who love Malletts Bay only care about the glittering surface–and don’t care about the health of the Bay and its dead “canaries.” It’s hard to tell.
Seven years ago Colchester Selectboard said it cares. But they have yet to do anything. They have not addressed any of the 14 untreated direct discharges of polluted gutter water draining into the bay.
As the State Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) and data show, Malletts Bay is the most rapidly degrading–eutrophying–section of the Lake, and the main source of that degradation is irresponsible development.
What is eutrophic?
It is a designation used by biologists and ecologists to describe a waterbody in decline due to excessive nutrient pollution.
Why should we care?
Eutrophic waterbodies do support some life, but not the kind we are used to and find socially valuable. Life forms such as cyanobacteria, and their associated liver and neuro toxins, thrive in and around eutrophic waterbodies–including in the air we breathe. As do choking mats of aquatic vegetation and disease-carrying insects. Bullpout–a type of catfish–do okay, but that is about it. Bullpout are not typically showcased on chamber tourism websites for a reason, though. Have you ever seen one? Perhaps even the tourism marketers are savvy to the fact that bullpout live in backwater mud–not the sexiest of sales messages. And, of course, neurotoxins definitely don’t sell.
Property values don’t do so well in communities with polluted waterbodies, either. This has already been the case in Georgia, VT where water pollution, like what is rapidly occurring in Malletts Bay, prompted a downward adjustment to assessed values by town officials. Lakefront properties on a soupy, toxic mess do not sell well.
Why is this happening? And can it be stopped?
Since 2017, Colchester Selectboard members have allowed hundreds of millions of gallons of toxic untreated stormwater to flow directly into the bay where families swim, paddle, and fish. They allow this despite their own 2017 Selectboard Action item to treat the 14 direct discharges of toxic stormwater that flow into the bay.
Why has The Town of Colchester not followed up on its own decision to protect Malletts Bay?
It is not for lack of resources. The federal and state government offered money. But without asking the citizens the town manager decided to spend the federal money on actions that instead increase pavement and pollution.
Would citizens have agreed with the Selectboard’s failure to stop hundreds of millions of gallons of toxic stormwater from flowing directly into the bay? We will never know. We were not asked.
I am confident concerned people would not have ignored the crisis year after year, adding tens of millions of gallons of toxic stormwater annually as Malletts Bay turns into a toxic mess.
The Town knows how important it is to prevent erosion on the shoreline. In fact, dozens of homeowners lost their houses due to a failure to stabilize shoreline erosion.
Yet, tons of sediment and phosphorus from the unstable, almost vertical, and nearly 40 ft.-high sand bank on the town-owned property of the Bayside-Hazelett forest on the shore of Malletts Bay will have a huge negative impact on the water quality of the Bay when it collapses,as well as posing a danger to the public water line and the stability of East Lakeshore Drive. Of course, this danger has been accelerated by the town’s recent clearcut of that forest.
It is time for the State to become more actively involved in protecting the water quality of Malletts Bay. The Town is under federal regulation to clean up the pollution. The State issues the stormwater permits and has authority here. Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation Commissioner Jason Batchelder and his Chief Environmental Enforcement Officer, Sean McVeigh, should ask for comprehensive stormwater remediation at this site on the basis of both the TMDL and MS4 and whatever other authority they have to make the department mission at least seem credible.
When will they act? Maybe they are waiting for dead birds to wash up on Bayside Beach. Or dead fish to show up on the shores of Niquette Bay State Park.
Oh, wait. That’s already happening. Surely, they are not waiting for one of us to get sick, or worse, an AirBnb tourist to fall ill or a dog to die.
The choking sounds of the dying canaries are a result of the doubling of dissolved phosphorus, the reductions in dissolved oxygen, the cyanobacterial outbreaks bubbling underwater. Those are hard to see on the glittering surface of Malletts Bay. But they are there. Regardless, it won’t be canaries; they don’t live in developers’ cesspools. Like us, they depend on clean water–for life itself.
For more info and or to get involved with citizen efforts to hold public officials accountable for their obligation to stop the poisoning of our beloved bay, visit: welovemallettsbay.org. Please join us in loving Malletts Bay through the website or facebook group.
James Ehlers, past president of the Colchester Economic Development Council, is a senior policy adviser at Lake Champlain International and the Children’s Environmental Health Director at Vermonters for a Clean Environment.