Newsday Columnist: Broadwater is a Good Idea, and Don't Confuse Me With the Facts

One of the advantages of writing an opinion column or editorial for a newspaper is that you can mouth off without paying any attention to the facts. Phineas Fiske, a retired editorial writer at Newsday, did exactly that in a column today.

It used to be a tenet of journalism that reporters and editorial writers cast a skeptical eye on the government. Fiske has turned that on its head. He wants us to accept government’s assurances blindly while saving our skepticism for the public. Yet why in this era of government ineptitude and outright lying should anyone accept its assurances?

Here’s what Fiske asserts:

Is there any reason the state should not approve Broadwater's plan? It's hard to think of any….

The only questions should be whether there are serious noneconomic risks or costs from the project…

As for … environmental concerns, the … Federal Energy Regulatory Commission [has] largely laid them to rest, finding … no significant impact on the environment….

Opponents of the project say the Coast Guard and FERC studies ignored public concerns. They have it backward: The federal agencies addressed legitimate worries; it's the opponents who are doing the ignoring, by rejecting the agencies' assurances.

The only way it would be hard to think of any reasons why the state should not approve Broadwater’s plan would be if you neglected to take the trouble to spend five or 10 minutes reading the comments about FERC’s environmental impact statement, particularly the letters submitted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service, the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection, the Connecticut LNG Task Force, and others; and also neglected to read the transcript of the testimony of four Connecticut scientists, one of whom (Lance Stewart, of UConn), said the impact statement was about the worst he’s ever seen.

Phineas Fiske, those letters can all be found here; just enter “Broadwater” in the text search box near the bottom.

Another thing Fiske fails to recognize, or was too lazy to bother to think about, is FERC’s assertion that there would be no significant environmental impacts. That assertion came in a draft environmental impact statement that has since been ripped to shreds by other federal government agencies and independent scientists. I look forward to reading what Phineas Fiske has to say when FERC decides that the impact statement was inadequate and needs supplemental work.

I doubt that Phineass Fiske is a Broadwater dupe on purpose. I think he simply made up his mind based on his prejudices and his trust that our benevolent government officials would never do anything that is good mainly for corporate interests and bad for the environment. His column today is lazy and credulous, and really not worthy of Newsday.

Money that GE Paid Out After Dumping PCBs into the Housatonic Will Be Used for Habitat Restoration Near Long Island Sound

Here are some habitat restoration proposals near Long Island Sound that are under consideration for funding in Connecticut:

— $963,000 sought by the state Department of Environmental Protection to control non-native invasive plant species, such as phragmites, in Stratford and Milford;

— $785,000 requested by the Town of Stratford for wetlands restoration, cleanup and construction of a greenway at the Hunter-Havens property;

— and, $20,000 requested by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service for restoration of piping plover and tern habitats at the Stuart B. McKinney National Wildlife Refuge at Milford Point.

The money would come from a fund established eight years ago as a result of General Electric's decision to ruin the Housatonic River by dumping PCBs into it in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. GE, the company that brings good things to life, also ruined the Hudson, and by ruined I mean it killed a centuries-old commercial fishing industry.

Greenwich's First Selectman Proposes to Loosen Rules for Public Access to the Town's Beaches

In Greenwich, where they don’t like out-of-towners going to their beaches (and where they frequently get sued because of trying to keep them out), the First Selectman has thrown a bone to the court in an attempt to get it to stop ruling in favor of the plaintiffs.

First Selectman Jim Lash is proposing to eliminate the entrance fee to town beaches, including Greenwich Point, to non-Greenwich residents who are 65 and over. That’s not a bad concession although, considering that the town is being sued by a 77-year-old Stamford resident named Paul Kempner who wants to ride his bike to the beach for free, the transparency of the proposal is good for a laugh. But whatever. Free is free, and if I'm alive in 12 years I'll probably take advantage of it.

Less impressive is Lash’s proposal to lower the daily fee for younger out-of-towners to $6 a day per person, from $10. A $20 per car parking fee would still be in effect. In other words, if two parents with two kids went to Greenwich Point last summer, it would have cost $60. If Lash’s proposal makes it through, the cost this year would be $44. That still seems like a lot to me, particularly compared to an equally nice beach like Compo, in Westport, where the fee for out-of-towners on a weekday is $15 per car. And you can pay it at the entrance to the beach; in Greenwich you have to go to Town Hall or the Civic Center to buy you pass first, which is a pain.

Here are some details, from the Greenwich Time.

A Federal Appeals Court Ruling Might Force Broadwater, Millstone and Other Energy Facilities to Use a Technology that Destroys Fewer Fish

The issue of the incredible number of small fish and fish eggs that will be destroyed in Long Island Sound if the Broadwater liquefied natural gas factory is approved got some attention last week after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service highlighted it in its comments on Broadwater’s inept environmental impact statement. The number is mind-boggling – an estimated 275 million small fish and fish eggs a year will be destroyed in the cooling water that the LNG plant and its tankers draw in from the Sound.

Coincidentally, the Soundkeeper and all the affiliated groups in the Waterkeeper Alliance won a lawsuit in federal court that might force Broadwater to use a less destructive technology.

The alliance sued to overturn a decision by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that allowed power plants, like Millstone in Waterford and Indian Point on the Hudson, to use a once-through cooling system instead of a closed cycle system. The once-through system works just the way it sounds – water is sucked in from the river or the Sound, pumped through the power plant to cool off the hot equipment, and released back into the river or Sound. In the process, everything in the water gets sucked in as well, and most of it dies. In the old days – 40 years ago – this was a major killer of adult fish, but lawsuits and public pressure, mainly by the Hudson River Fishermen’s Association (the predecessor of Riverkeeper and the Waterkeeper Alliance) forced changes in technology. Now the big fish survive but the small fry don’t. But lots more of them would if a closed cycle system – a system that keeps the water in the plant longer and doesn’t constantly suck up new water – were used.

Soundkeeper Terry Backer sent me a press release and backgrounder on the court case. Here’s an excerpt from the press release:

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled Thursday that EPA cannot allow power plants to kill a trillion fish per year through their cooling water intakes. Cooling water intakes gulp in billions of gallons of river, lake and coastal water to cool power plant machinery. Along with the water, these intakes devour countless fish and fish larvae, devastating fish populations across the country.

… the court found that regulations issued by EPA in 2004 improperly rejected “closed cycle cooling,” a technology that cools plant machinery while nearly eliminating the need for large infusions of fresh water. This technology also greatly reduces the massive fish kills associated with power plant operations. The court also found that EPA violated the law by placing the profits of power companies above the protection of America’s fisheries, defying the direct mandate of Congress in 1972 to EPA to stop these unnecessary impacts.

And here’s some information from the backgrounder:

Every year, electric generating and industrial plants withdraw more than 100 trillion gallons from U.S. waters for cooling, and kill the overwhelming majority of organisms in this massive volume by entraining them into the facility or impinging them on intake screens. This staggering mortality – trillions of fish, shellfish, plankton and other species at all life stages – has stressed and depleted aquatic, coastal and marine ecosystems for decades, and has contributed to the collapse of some fisheries.

A single large power plant can utilize hundreds of millions or even billions of gallons of cooling water per day before discharging the heated effluent directly into a lake, river or ocean. In contrast, a closed-cycle cooling system, which recirculates most of the water after dissipating the heat in a cooling tower and is standard technology for new plants, cuts withdrawals and fish kills by more than ninety-five percent.

Section 316(b) of the Clean Water Act requires such facilities to employ the “best technology available [BTA] to minimize adverse environmental impact.” Despite this direct mandate and the decades-old availability of cooling towers, industrial pressure and EPA neglect has prevented effective regulation.

In 1993, after years of frustration at agency failure to require protective technology, Soundkeeper and a coalition of environmental groups led by Riverkeeper sued to force EPA to finally promulgate cooling water intake standards, Riverkeeper, Inc. v. Whitman, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 93-Civ.0314 (AGS).) and won a consent decree requiring EPA to promulgate such standards. The Phase I and Phase II rules were issued pursuant to that consent decree.

This can only be good news. How many power plants draw cooling water from Long Island Sound? I wish I knew. Millstone certainly. There are also power plants in Norwalk and Northport. Presumably EPA will have to at least consider making those plants change their cooling technology. If Broadwater and the tankers that will supply it with natural gas have to consider and study and then pay for the new technology, maybe it will delay them long enough to make their obscene LNG terminal dead in the water. And if not, at least it will not be as destructive.

Broadwater's Hot Water

Broadwater’s liquefied natural gas terminal would take in millions of gallons of water from Long Island Sound, use it as a coolant, and then discharge the water back into the Sound at a higher temperature – an average of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer. This is called thermal pollution, and the scientists and government experts who have reviewed the Broadwater environmental impact statement think it is potentially a problem. They also think that the impact statement did a poor job analyzing it. Sam Wells, who comments frequently here and who used to live on the Sound in Connecticut, sent me some further thoughts:

Duck Island, circa1972

Duck Island is a very small island off Westbrook, Connecticut, which was probably in view of famous folks like Katharine Hepburn’s house on the shore. We didn’t know that back then, as they were secretive over there, not like us commoners in Clinton. So once every year, a bunch of us Clintonites would sail or motor over there to “take over” Duck Island, right in front of their famous yacht club. Seriously, we planted a flag, had a barbeque, honked our horns, and it was a blast. It wasn’t more than a shelly sand spit of maybe 5 acres.

But that summer there was an unusual outbreak of red jellyfish, the Lion’s Mane, known for its intense sting similar to that of a Portuguese Man-O-War. My little brother got stung by one across the chest and nearly drowned, right next to about 50 other boaters and swimmers on good old Duck Island. He screamed, went under, and we had to fish him out.

Being a kid, I listened to the men-folk ponder the massive infestation of the red jellyfish, talking in low, serious voices: “maybe Millstone … nuclear power plant … cooling water.” True enough, Millstone Unit One down by New London had just opened up a few years earlier in 1970, and the watermen noticed a different mix of fish, especially trash fish, and now an invasion of the Lion’s Mane. The power plant used ocean cooling water and could have been warming up the Sound on the incoming tide.

In subsequent years I found that the connection between the Lion’s Mane and Millstone’s cooling water might not have been exactly true, since the Lion’s Mane thrives in colder waters but will end up in the shallow bays and inlets in the summertime. Within a few years the infestation simply disappeared. However, because of warmer water temperatures the ecology of that part of the Sound shifted tremendously and fundamentally, at least in our minds on that hot, becalmed day on Duck Island.

It turns out that thermal pollution is a big issue for Long Island Sound, even if the tipping point didn’t occur in 1972. Warmer peak summertime water temperatures allow for more rapid blooms of certain kinds of algae, given the increasing nutrient loads. Bacteria decompose the dead algae and consume the available oxygen. Thermal pollution continues to be a relevant issue even today, with large industrial projects being proposed such as Broadwater.

E-mail Exchange: Send Your Ladybugs to Norway, Please

January 27, 2007 3:03:56 PM EST
To: tandersen54@optonline.net

Hey Tom!
I dropped into your blog after doing a search on the Halloween lady beetle on Google. I found your observation you're writing aboutvery interesting since I've found the first specimen of this beetle in Norway last summer. I just finished my mastersthesis about alien species coming to Norway as stowaways in imported horticultural plants. I was wondering if you had done an observations lately of these beetles, and if you knew any places where they could be found at this time of year. If you do I would be very interested if you could send me a few individuals for closer study. Are you able to do that?
Hope to hear from you soon.

Sincerely yours

Arnstein Staverloekk
MSc. Ecology
Norweigan Institute for Agricultural and Environmental Research

January 27, 2007 4:23:47 PM EST
To: Arnstein Staverloekk

There might be one or two in our bathroom now. Do you want me to mail them to you?

Tom Andersen

January 27, 2007 5:29:31 PM EST
To: tandersen54@optonline.net

Hi Tom!
That would be excellent!! Then I'll send you something from Norway in return! Put the insects in a small box with some cotton inside so that they arrive in good shape. Thank you very much!

Please mail them to:

Bioforsk Plantehelse
Arnstein Staverløkk
Høyskoleveien 7
1430 Aas
Norway

Sincerely yours

Arnstein Staverløkk

January 27, 2007 5:32:13 PM EST
To: Arnstein Staverloekk

They were not as abundant this season as last, but we've had a few. I'll go do a search.

Tom


January 27, 2007 5:48:31 PM EST
tandersen54@optonline.net

Kepp me updated! Thanks.

-Arnstein

January 27, 2007 5:50:08 PM EST
To: Arnstein Staverloekk

I found two, both dead. I think there are more but if there aren't, I'll put the dead ones in the mail on Monday or Tuesday.

Tom

Whales Near New London

Whales have been spending some time near the eastern end of Long Island Sound in recent days, although what kind of whales seems to be unknown still, and exactly where they are is a bit vague. Today's Newsday says:

A pod of whales - usually found in the deeper waters of the Atlantic - has been swimming in Block Island Sound off of New London, Conn., for the past week.

Then the story says:

Robert DiGiovanni, director of the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation, said "We don't get a lot of reports of those animals in that area but this year there has been unusual weather patterns with such a mild winter. ... We've have reports of whales in Long Island Sound over the years but they are hard to verify."

So where are they? Block Island Sound is the strip of water between Block Island and mainland Rhode Island. If whales are in Block Island Sound, they're not off New London in any but the most general sense -- they'd have to be in Long Island Sound (or Fishers Island Sound) to be off New London.

Regardless, it's an interesting occurence. The whales seem to be healthy and feeding, and with any luck they won't meet the same fate as the dolphins that swam into a cove of Long Island's north fork a couple of weeks ago.

FERC Says No More Broadwater Hearings, Which Is Fine. The Real Story is in the Written Comments.

FERC has rejected a request by Congressman Tim Bishop to hold more Broadwater hearings. Bishop will act outraged, no doubt, but to me this is no big deal. Though required by law, the hearings are a show. True, they are an opportunity to mouth off in public but they're also an opportunity to demonstrate that a lot of people don't want an LNG terminal in Long Island Sound. So on that count, the goal was accomplished.

More importantly, anyone who wants to be heard by FERC can send written comments. And as I've tried to show in previous posts, a lot of the written comments have been devastating.

So I'm not worried that there won't be more hearings. But if, based on the written comments (click here and then enter "Broadwater" in the 'text search' box, near the bottom), FERC doesn't require a lot more work on Broadwater's environmental impact statement, that will be a travesty.

The Problem With FERC's Environmental Review of Broadwater? "Quarrying marble in Long Island Sound"

Ralph Lewis, who used to be the Connecticut State Geologist and is now a geology professor at UConn, got a fair amount of attention early last month when he compared the geology section of FERC’s Broadwater environmental impact statement to a bad term paper.

Save the Sound got a copy of the transcripts of Lewis’s remarks (he and three other scientists were testifying before Connecticut’s LNG task force, in Hartford) and submitted them to FERC, as part of their comments on the EIS (click here and then enter "Broadwater" in the 'text search' box, near the bottom, then look for the Connecticut Fund for the Environment's filings). I read through Lewis’s section this morning and was amazed at his critique and its implications for the environmental analysis that FERC will base its Broadwater decision on.

Lewis makes two main points. One is that the analysis in the environmental impact statement of the Sound’s geology is barely competent, but in general it doesn’t make any blunders that would lead him to believe the moorings for the LNG terminal, or the pipeline that would transport LNG, would be unsafe. Her gave on example, for instance, of an assertion about the Sound's geology that sort of makes you scratch your head:

… they're talking about quarrying marble in Long Island Sound, which doesn't even exist in Long Island Sound. It only exists in the northwestern part of the state.

That’s a mistake but on its own it’s irrelevant to whether the floating gas terminal would be safe.

Here’s another mistake, more serious but still, I think, one that can be solved by Broadwater spending more money on engineering than it originally thought it would have to. The issue is the clay that forms the basin of Long Island Sound, how deep those clay deposits are before they hit bedrock, and what would happen if there were an earthquake, which, as Lewis notes, happens about once a year in New England. The environmental impact statement asserts that you have to go through about 165 feet of clay before you hit bedrock; Lewis, who published a lot of original research on these kinds of questions, says it’s more like 400 to 500 feet:

If there's an earthquake, they're worried about shaking. … what would be a good example that I could give you? If you had a bowl filled with concrete and a bowl filled with Jell-O, and you wrapped those two bowls in exactly the same amount of energy, which one would shake more? The Jell-O.

Well, the lake clay is like Jell-O. The bedrock is like the concrete. So there's a thing called intensity. An earthquake can only have one magnitude, X number of sticks of dynamite goes off, and it releases one amount of energy. But what that energy is passing through determines how much damage there is, so there's a thing called modified mercali intensity, which, what that basically says is that you could have one earthquake go off, but you can have a variety of amounts of damage. Buildings sitting on bedrock and buildings sitting on made land or lake clay or something like that, there'd be much more damage over the lake clay, and you can predict that.

So they're worried a little bit about the fact that the lake clay would be susceptible to shaking, and what they propose to do is put pilings in, and they mentioned 165 feet, I believe, in the report. That may not be, if they want to found those pilings in bedrock, they may have to go much deeper than that in some places because there are places in Long Island Sound where the lake clay is 400 or 500 feet thick. So I just bring that up as a concern that they didn't really understand the distribution of the lake clay when they mentioned that.

These kinds of mistakes (and Lewis describes a number of others) lead to his second point – that the basic research about Long Island Sound’s geology is easy for a competent geologist to find and to understand, so if FERC did a poor job finding it and understanding it, we probably should assume FERC did a poor job finding and understanding the other research and issues the environmental study covers. Here's what he says:

… the approach I took was that what I was expecting to see would be something probably at the level of a graduate student or a young professional who was either submitting the first draft of a thesis or dissertation or submitting to me a draft for my review of a paper to be published. So that was the level of expectation that I had for, you know, the background that I would be supplied to see if they had supported their argument or not.

I'm not taking any sides as to whether this is a good idea or a bad idea. I just tried to review the material that was there, and give you some idea of what I thought. My finding is that probably this is at the level of maybe an undergraduate, reasonably bright undergraduate, who's taken some geology courses … who had some insights but probably went to the library the afternoon before the paper was due, grabbed what was there, and pulled an all-nighter and wrote the paper, first draft.

And I base that on my first read. I haven't really spent a lot of time with it, but that was my first impression. So they certainly didn't meet the level of expectation that I would have, and I would call that sloppy in my terminology. If I were talking to a student, I'd say that was a pretty sloppy first effort, so that's the terminology I'll use. So what I have to say is, overall, it's a fairly sloppy general overview of the geology of Long Island Sound by people who either didn't have the knowledge or didn't take enough time to seek out the best reference material in support of their arguments. And what I feel is, they've used old references that have been superseded by better information.

A good example of that is the Williams 1981 reference that they use in the first paragraph of their opening argument. It's over 35 years old, and I think a careful researcher would realize that that's probably been superseded.

So in summary of what I think, in the case of the geologic setting hazardous section, the sloppiness did not result in any great misunderstandings of the general state of affairs. My concern though is, that if they were this sort of sloppy with the geology sections, if they were equally sloppy elsewhere, there may be some place where that really did make a huge difference.

Face Facts: Broadwater's Environmental Impact Statement Needs to Be Done Over

Anyone who thinks the federal Energy Regulatory Commission is going to finish the environmental impact review of Broadwater’s liquefied natural gas proposal in three months or so, which is the official schedule, is fooling himself, and that includes the folks at Broadwater, Shell and TransCanada. Or to say it a different way, if FERC does finish the review in three months, I think a strong case can be made that it will have been severely derelict in its duty.

What other conclusion can one come to after reading the written submissions by responsible government agencies and scientists (click here and then enter "Broadwater" in the 'text search' box, near the bottom)? The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service, the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection, and the Connecticut LNG Task Force all make compelling arguments that there’s simply not enough information, and the analysis is not rigorous enough, in the draft environmental impact statement, to decide whether the environmental impacts of the project outweigh the benefits. A supplemental impact statement is needed, without question. Here, for example, is what the National Marine Fisheries Service says:

NMFS notes the proposed safety zones that would be established around the FSRU [shorthand for the LNG terminal] and any tankers coming to deliver LNG would at least temporarily exclude traditional commercial and recreational uses of LIS. Commercial and recreational vessels would be prohibited from entering the permanent safety zone surrounding the FSRU and in the moving envelope surrounding approaching tankers. NMFS believes the safety zones are likely to displace commercial and recreational fishermen, particularly those operating in the eastern basin of LIS that rely on trawling or use of fixed gear. This displacement has the potential to create an economic and social hardship for a number of fishermen. While the eastern basin and its offshore approaches would not be subjected to the permanent closure contemplated around the FSRU, lobstermen and other fishermen effectively would have to cease operations and move away to avoid a safety zone whenever a LNG tanker approached. As indicated in the DEIS, LNG deliveries would occur on a very regular basis. This could disrupt some fishing operations to the point that they could no longer effectively tend their gear. The DEIS does not adequately assess the loss of access and economic impacts on commercial and recreational fisheries, particularly in the eastern basin and its approach. Similarly, the collateral losses that would accrue in both Connecticut and New York should recreational boating access become disrupted for the life of this project should be evaluated.

Keep in mind that the National Marine Fisheries Service is not composed of a bunch of crazy environmentalists. It’s a branch of the U.S. Department of Commerce, and when it says that legitimate commerce might be disrupted, it’s worth listening to, particularly because Broadwater seems to have abandoned its argument that the LNG terminal will have no environmental impact in favor of an argument that it’s worth proceeding with the project because it will save consumers money, namely $400 a year. See this New London Day story, for example.
But what kind of a tradeoff is that? The project will damage the Sound and it will damage a part of the Sound’s economy, but it will save us $400 a year.

Who is convinced by that?

Suffering Mortality at the Hands of Broadwater

It seems as if the experts at FERC were a bit premature when they concluded, in their exhaustive and comprehensive environmental impact statement, that Broadwater’s gargantuan liquefied natural gas terminal would have no affect on the environment. Or perhaps they don’t consider the destruction of hundreds of millions of an estuary’s fish larvae and eggs a year to be worth worrying about.

The estimate of the amount of fish larvae and eggs that will be destroyed annually by Broadwater comes from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in a January 18 letter to FERC. The letter points out that the LNG terminal, and the tankers that will carry LNG to it, will draw as much as 30.9 million gallons of water a day from Long Island Sound. That water will contain fish eggs and larvae. Of particular concern are the eggs and larvae drawn in by the tankers. As the Fish and Wildlife Service delicately puts it:

All of these organisms would likely suffer mortality.

The specific fish that are likely to suffer mortality are weakfish, scup, fourbeard rockling (seriously), tautog, sea robin, Atlantic menhaden, windowpane flounder, bay anchovy, smallmouth flounder, sand lance, and butterfish.

The estimated number of eggs and larvae of these fish that will suffer mortality is as high as 275 million a year. Somehow the experts who wrote and reviewed this exhaustive and comprehensive environmental impact statement, which concluded that Broadwater would have no affect on the environment, forgot to study that issue.

The Fish and Wildlife Service is also looking into whether two federally listed birds – the piping plover and roseate tern – might also suffer mortality. The draft environmental impact statement forgot to study that issue as well.

I suppose if you were charitably inclined you might say that it was an oversight on FERC’s part that it studied the environmental impacts of a giant industrial facility in an important estuary and forgot about what the impact might be on fish. If you’re less charitably inclined, like me, you’d think it’s just lame. I don’t think that FERC, under the influence of Broadwater and Shell and TransCanada, and presumably knowing full well that the issue of fish eggs and larvae suffering mortality is a big problem at power plants on the Hudson River and elsewhere, would leave that information out of the DEIS on purpose. Would they?

Judy Benson of the New London Day is apparently the only reporter reading the FERC online files. She had the story in Saturday’s paper

We Need Clean Water Money for Nitrogen Removal AND for Fixing Old Sewers

Curt Johnson of Connecticut Fund for the Environment makes the point in the New London Day that while nitrogen removal is important for Long Island Sound, there’s another reason Connecticut needs to put lots of money into its Clean Water Fund:

Few people realize that every year well over 1 billion gallons of raw sewage overflows from our sewers into the Connecticut River. We only notice when it backs up into our basements, and beaches, and when oyster beds are closed because of health threats from pathogens, or we find out we can't swim or fish in many streams, rivers and lakes in the watershed.

New Haven, Bridgeport and Norwalk harbors continue to suffer from an additional billion-gallon onslaught of raw sewage each year. The whole of Long Island Sound, and everyone who would like to use it, suffer.

“The house has been demolished”

[Read 'Modern,' our new blog about mid-century modern houses, here.]

While I was following the futile fight to keep developer David Waldman from demolishing Paul Rudolph’s Micheels house in Westport, I was also spending some time with Bill Earls’ new book, “The Harvard Five in New Canaan: Mid-century Modern Houses by Marcel Breuer, Landis Gores, John Johansen, Philip Johnson, Eliot Noyes, and Others.”

For someone who is a writer, it’s an odd book to read, because there’s hardly anything written by the author – just a brief introduction and a handful of short captions. But it includes terrific photos of a sizeable number of New Canaan’s modern houses, and it reprints a really good essay, called “New Canaan Modern: The Beginning 1947-1952,” written by Jean Ely and published in 1967 in the New Canaan Historical Society Annual.

What really struck me though about the book was to see in black and white the partial documentation of a history in New Canaan that is as shameful as Westport’s – that is, the history of knocking down modern houses and replacing them, presumably, with obnoxious mcmansions.

Earls has photos of eight such houses:

Noyes house, designed by Eliot Noyes in 1947: “The house has been demolished.”

Kniffen house, by Noyes and Marcel Breuer, 1949: “The house has been demolished.”

Johansen house, designed by John Johansen, 1949: “The house has been demolished.”

Mills house, designed by Breuer, 1949: “The house has been demolished.”

Dunham house, designed by Johansen, 1950: “The house has been demolished.”

Stackpole house, designed by Noyes, 1951: “The house has been demolished.”

Riley house, designed by Chauncey Riley, 1952: “The house has been demolished.”

Goode house, designed by Johansen, 1953: “The house has been demolished.”

Broadwater Foes Should Pay Attention to the Sound's Other Problem As Well

Greg Stone, the deputy editorial page editor of the New London Day, has his priorities straight: Save some of the anti-Broadwater fervor for a more important problem -- hypoxia:

Gov. M. Jodi Rell, who had DEP Commissioner Gina McCarthy read her protests against the [Broadwater] project into the record during the hearing at Mitchell College, ought to make a similarly fiery and colorful speech before the legislature, urging passage of legislation that would bring to an end the drought in state funding for improvements to sewage-treatment plants along the state's shoreline. The combined malfunctions and inadequacies of those plants are contributing to an environmental crisis that vastly overshadows the worst-case scenario from the LNG operation....

The causes of this phenomenon, hypoxia or oxygen depletion, are related to the forces that have brought us Broadwater. They stem from development. The growth of population, business and industry over the years has driven up demand for energy to power cars, heat homes, support industrial processes and administer to the growing array of human activities that consume fossil fuel.

This same development, concentrated along the Connecticut and New York shorelines and at the confluence of waters that empty into Long Island Sound from the New York metropolitan areas, has produced the conditions for an environmental disaster in Long Island Sound....

The Broadwater controversy performed the valuable function of bringing together government and environmental advocates and capturing the public's attention to a threat to Long Island Sound. It would be doubly beneficial if the same concerned and aroused constituency made as much noise and rallied around an initiative taking shape this year to restore government funds for improvements to sewage treatment plants, reduce nitrogen loads going into the Sound from stormwater runoff and preserve what open space is left along the Connecticut shoreline.

The governor, her DEP commissioner, the legislators and towns so visibly infuriated over Broadwater's plans should be similarly exercised over the fact that state money needed to prevent sewage overflows from treatment plants and arrest nitrogen discharges has dried up in the state government.

Read it all, here.

A One-of-a-Kind Meeting for FERC

How pathetic is this? FERC met in public yesterday with three of the scientists who last month criticized the Broadwater draft environmental impact statement for its inadequate analysis, and when the meeting was over the guy from FERC admitted they’ve never really done that kind of thing – meet with, like, scientists – before:

“This was a rare opportunity. We don't typically have ... folks in like yourselves to take a hard look at what we've done.”

Kind of makes you wonder about the rigor with which other FERC environmental impact statements have been compiled.

This New London Day story has some details of what Ralph Lewis, Roman Zajac and Peter Auster said, which is pretty much what they said last month. Supposedly someone in Connecticut state government is preparing a transcript of their original testimony last month and promised to send it to me, but I haven’t seen it yet.

Meanwhile, I like the way this guy from Long Island put it:

“New York and Connecticut are not separated by Long Island Sound, we are joined together by Long Island Sound,” said Kevin McCarrick, a councilman from Brookhaven, N.Y.

And the Courant outlines the Broadwater (dis)approval process, here and here.

Rescuing Dolphins

As south Texas correspondent and ex-Nutmegger Sam Wells pointed out in an e-mail, this is a cold, cold job, but apparently it was a job well done too.

The rescue of the dolphins, from a bay on the north side of Long Island’s South Fork, makes me wonder about (not criticize) the extraordinary lengths we go to for marine mammals. Newsday said:

The rescue took about three hours and involved eight boats and some 80 people on land and in the water, officials said. "This would be the largest rescue effort of common dolphins in my experience, and I've been here 34 years," said Chuck Hamilton, regional supervisor of the state Department of Environmental Conservation's natural resources office.

And even with all that, a handful of dolphins didn’t get out, and six had already died.

Another Newsday Columnist Loves Broadwater

It used to be that newspaper publishers, as represented by their editorial writers, always promoted whichever development scheme big business was trying to bring to their area, and it was the newspaper’s reporters who had to find out and then write the reality that these development plans at best usually compromise environmental qualities and at worse damage them. From what I see of newspapers in our region, publishers and editorial boards are deeply skeptical of Broadwater’s plan for a liquefied natural gas terminal in the middle of Long Island Sound, but reporters – or at least columnists – are on the side of big business.

Joye Brown in Newsday was one example the other day, and today it’s Raymond J. Keating (see footnote at end of this post), who mocks the Long Island residents who think Broadwater’s proposal is a bad idea but seems to have swallowed about a gallon of the Broadwater and FERC kool-aid.

Raymond J. Keating seems to think that because a government agency makes an assertion in a draft environmental impact statement, the assertion is correct. “Earth to Raymond J. Keating! A draft environmental impact statement can be as much a promotional document as it is an analysis of environmental impacts! The developer pays for it and it pretty much gets to conclude what the developer wants it to conclude! And even at its honest best it’s a document to be debated and analyzed.”

I’d bet a dollar that Raymond J. Keating hasn’t read more than the executive summary of the DEIS, if that. And I’d be another dollar that he’s not qualified to say whether the DEIS’s analysis is on the mark. Yet here’s what Raymond J. Keating writes:

Of course, a little sober reflection could point to something substantially different than the frightening environmental and security sermon preached by the environmental crowd. Might the Broadwater terminal actually help meet rising energy demands in the region by providing 1 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day, powering roughly 4 million homes? Isn't it possible that FERC was correct when concluding in its November report that the terminal would have no "significant impacts on the environment"? And could the U.S. Coast Guard be right in its assessment that with additional measures, safety and security would be responsibly managed?

In fact, given the extensive expertise used for these reviews and the obvious economic incentives for Broadwater to serve consumers and the public, as well as to protect its investments, the most likely answer to each of these questions is yes. This project would be good for consumers and the economy, while doing no substantive harm to the environment. For good measure, it is worth noting that natural gas ranks as the most environmentally friendly fossil fuel because it burns so cleanly.

Hey, Ray. Broadwater might help meet rising energy demands, although it also might be true that a LNG plant about to be built in Canada will meet rising energy demands, as the company says despite the Broadwater/FERC assertion to the contrary in the DEIS.

[Here’s what the president of the Canadian company wrote to FERC about the assertion in the Broadwater DEIS:

… The important fact to be considered in the Broadwater analysis is that Repsol will be able to deliver at least 0.73 bcfd of gas sourced from Canaport LNG, into the northeastern United States pipeline grid with access to all of the markets served by that grid. It is also important to note that the Canaport LNG terminal can be expanded to provide additional incremental supply that can access northeastern US markets, including New England and New York.

… Second, the DEIS states in Section 4.3.2 (page 4-20) that the Canaport LNG terminal would not be able to supply the needed volume of gas to the regional markets and that substantial upgrades to the downstream interstate pipeline systems would be required to meet regional market needs. However, since the DEIS does not identify specific markets that have committed to utilize gas supply from the Broadwater LNG Project, it is difficult to judge the accuracy of such a grad statement. …]

And it’s possible that the project will do no substantive harm to the environment but it’s also possible, as four Connecticut scientists said (here and here), that the environmental analysis isn’t worthy of a lazy college student.

Here’s what Raymond J. Keating is really saying: I don’t like Long Islanders’ attitudes or the way they behave; they should prostrate themselves in front of the wonderful folks at Shell and TransCanada and Broadwater (with newspaper downsizing you never know, I might want a corporate PR job someday). Basically, don’t confuse me with the facts, or with a serious analysis.
[Footnote: I'm afraid I owe respectable reporters and columnists an apology for lumping them in with Raymond J. Keating. Keating works for a group called the Small Business Survival Committee, which lobbies on behalf of the tobacco industry and opposes and disagrees with essentially everything environmentalists believe in, according to SourceWatch. To compare him to a respectable journalist like Joye Brown is an insult to Joye Brown, in my opinion. But why doesn't Newsday identify him in their online edition?)

Don't Blame Me If Your DEIS Is Unclear

I like Connecticut DEP Commissioner Gina McCarthy's attitude. A couple of days ago someone from Broadwater said at a meeting that statements made by McCarthy and others in Connecticut indicate a lack of understanding of Broadwater's proposal, and he offered to meet with her to discuss it. McCarthy said forget it -- if I don't understand what's going on, blame yourself, not me.

“I have no interest in meeting with Broadwater,” she said. “If there is confusion of lack of information, it is the fault of the DEIS (FERC's draft environmental impact statement). The DEP is commenting on a formal document of the federal government.”

At Play in the Fields of the CIA

In the middle of this somewhat interesting article about a now-forgotten literary figure who founded the Paris Review with Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton, the Times drops in the amazing revelation that Matthiessen (novelist, author of a bunch of really terrific books that chronicle the destruction of wildlife, resident of eastern Long Island) was a CIA "recruit" in Europe in the 1950s. Matthiessen is far greater and more important than the guy the story is about, and even of Plimpton, in my opinion, and yet the Times tells us nothing more.

The Times Reports that Waldman Tore Down Rudolph's Micheels House Even Though He Had An Offer to Sell

[Read 'Modern,' our new modern house blog, here.]

The Times reports this morning that a fellow named Steven Campus, who owns a house that Paul Rudolph designed in Manhattan, had made an offer to buy the Micheels House in Westport. There are few other details, so it's hard to say how far the negotiations with David Waldman went. It's hard not to come away with the impression though that Waldman had little intention of selling.

WestportNow has some terrific (and sad) photos by Dave Matlow (here) and a good comment thread going, here.

What seems obvious is that Westport has an inadequate historic preservation law. I hope the publisher of WestportNow, Gordon Joseloff, who also happens to be Westport's chief elected official, pushes for changes that would provide some protection for Modern houses.

For more on the issue, see The Destruction of Paul Rudolph's Micheels House in the right hand column.

Paul Rudolph's Micheels House in Westport is Gone

[Read 'Modern,' our new modern house blog, here.]

With Westport police preventing the press from watching, developer David Waldman had the Micheels House, designed by modernist Paul Rudolph, torn down today so Waldman could build his own house on the site, overlooking Long Island Sound. Enjoy the view, asshole.

WestportNow has the details. They've been doing a terrific job of following the issue (and of the tear-down phenomenon in general) and I hope they don't mind that I borrowed this photo from them. It was taken by photographer Dave Matlow.

For more on the issue, see The Destruction of Paul Rudolph's Micheels House in the right hand column.

[Read 'Modern,' our new blog about mid-century modern houses, here.]

More on Sea Grant, Coastlines and Their Hypoxia Conclusion

Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent on nitrogen reduction programs in New York City, New York State and Connecticut, in an effort to reduce the severity of hypoxia – that is, low levels of dissolved oxygen that can be damaging if not lethal to marine life – in Long Island Sound.

Is that money being well-spent? I think it is but I readily acknowledge that it’s hard to tell for sure right now. One thing I’m confident of however is that New York Sea Grant was wrong when it asserted in its Coastlines magazine that there’s already significant evidence that spending money on nitrogen reduction won’t solve the hypoxia problem.

The details of the Coastlines assertion are in a post from Monday, and in another post in which Jack Mattice, Sea Grant’s executive director, responded to my critique. The gist of it is that research (funded by Sea Grant) by two scientists from SUNY Stony Brook (Larry Swanson and Bob Wilson) indicates that because nitrogen entering the Sound has already been reduced by 31 percent, and because hypoxia hasn’t eased by a similar amount, the nitrogen reduction program is not going to work.

It’s a flawed conclusion, but it’s an important one because Sea Grant has been a participant in the Long Island Sound Study and cleanup for years, and because Mattice and Swanson are both members of the LISS management committee, which oversees the day to day work of the Long Island Sound program. There’s a presumption therefore that they know what they’re talking about and that people will listen to them

(Before I continue, I should add that I’m not sure how the Sea Grant researchers came up with 31 percent figure for nitrogen reduction. An EPA report called Sound Health, released last spring, said that nitrogen has been reduced by 24 percent. In an email to me, Mattice cited a letter to the editor of the Times that Swanson and Wilson published a year ago, but as far as I know their work hasn’t been published yet in a peer-reviewed journal, although I was told that it has been submitted.)

I asked two people involved in the Long Island Sound program what they thought of the Sea Grant/Swanson-Watson conclusion. Clearly these two people (Mark Tedesco, the director of EPA’s Long Island Sound office, and another person who asked me to keep his name out of it) are vested in the program, and it would be astounding if they said it wasn’t likely to succeed.

But they went further than that. They said that the people overseeing the cleanup have long expected that water quality improvements would lag behind nitrogen reductions, and that it is unreasonable to expect otherwise. Tedesco drew an analogy to global warming and carbon dioxide. Global warming is upon us now, and even if we stopped all carbon dioxide emissions tomorrow, global warming would continue for a long time because of the buildup of carbon in the atmosphere. The Long Island Sound nitrogen problem is similar: if we reduce nitrogen now, there still will be a lag time before we see the results.

The Long Island Sound program and cleanup is based on a target nitrogen reduction of 58.5 percent by 2014. So whether the nitrogen reduction is 31 percent or 24 percent, the program is barely halfway toward its goal. And that’s not enough to result in a corresponding increase in water quality.

Here’s what one of the Sound program managers told me: “I wouldn't really expect the Sound to respond as Jack and Larry suggest, i.e., a short-term load reduction observed in a rebound of oxygen loads. There's a lot of natural variability and natural effects on hypoxia severity that can't easily be sorted out in a three-year period. Plus there is a ‘memory’ in the Sound's sediments that affects recovery.”

Tedesco said the same thing: “No one expected that you’d turn off the flow and the next summer you’d see an immediate improvement in dissolved oxygen levels.”

He recalled a workshop in 1990 at which computer modelers and scientists estimated that once the nitrogen reduction goal was reached, it would still take five or six years at least to see the concomitant response in dissolved oxygen concentrations.

In his email to me, Jack Mattice went even further than saying that the 58.5 percent goal is inadequate. He said Swanson and Wilson conclude “that even stopping all sewage inputs to the sound will not eliminate the hypoxia problem.”

This brings me back to one of my original questions: If Swanson and Mattice believe that eliminating all sewage inputs to the Sound (which is never going to happen) will not end hypoxia, and therefore that ending some sewage inputs to the Sound (which is going to happen) will not end hypoxia either, have they communicated that to the people who are making the decisions about the Long Island Sound cleanup?

If reducing sewage will not eliminate hypoxia, do they believe that reducing sewage will ease the affects of hypoxia enough to make it worthwhile? Should we be doing more? Or should we give up? If we give up, how bad will conditions be on the Sound compared to what they will be if we continue? Mattice and Swanson, after all, are on the management committee. Swanson conducted the research and Mattice paid for it and published a summary of it in his magazine. You would think the management committee would be interested in knowing their conclusions.

Skimming Through the Broadwater Accounts

I’ve been skimming the news stories about the public hearings that FERC is holding on the Broadwater LNG proposal for Long Island Sound, but not bothering to pass them on, mainly because they’re unilluminating he said-she said accounts that are as predictable as the tides.

This editorial, though, from the New London Day is worth a read. It mentions that FERC will meet with the Connecticut officials who feel disenfranchised and the scientists who think the environmental impact statement is as bad as a poorly-done term paper. My inclination is always to be skeptical of public relations ploys, and so I think the purpose of the meeting is to give the Connecticut folks the illusion that they’re being listened to. But I could be wrong.

On the other hand, here’s a silly column from Newsday, in which the author says that because she is afflicted with asthma (a chronic illness) and accepts her condition, we should accept having Broadwater (an environmentally risky industrial facility on publicly-owned property) on Long Island Sound. Makes sense, yes?

She also argues that we should accept Broadwater because the company says Long Island’s energy bills will be lower. This reminds me of the developers who argue that we should accept the new mall down the road because it will ease our property tax burden. It sounds good but I’ve yet to hear of a case of property taxes going down.

And finally she says we should compromise. Unfortunately she offers no clue as to that that compromise should consist of.

Does Sea Grant Think the Long Island Cleanup Will Work? Further Thoughts From Sea Grant

New York Sea Grant Director Jack Mattice, who no doubt had other plans for his workday yesterday, sent me a lengthy reply to the post in which I suggested that Sea Grant, a longtime participant in the Long Island Sound Study and cleanup, is skeptical about the cleanup plans. I have some further thoughts, which I'll save for later.

For now, the article that drew my attention is called Sound Reflections, and it's in this edition of Sea Grant's Coastlines magazine (click on Fall 2006).

Here's what I had to say about it yesterday.

And here's the reply (in its entirety except forsome cordialities and the beginning and end), which was signed by Mattice, Barbara Branca (Sea Grant's communications manager), and R. Lawrence Swanson, a professor at SUNY Stony Brook's Marine Sciences Research Center and the director of the Waste Reduction and Management Institute at Stony Brook:

We’d like to take this opportunity to further clarify the content with which you take issue and to establish that New York Sea Grant does not take a position regarding the relative contribution of factors that cause hypoxia. Rather we reported on the conclusions made by investigators Larry Swanson and Bob Wilson resulting from their NYSG-funded project.

Since the early 1990s these two researchers have been pointing out that nitrogen inputs are not the sole contributor to hypoxia. This assertion is neither a new point of view nor unique to them.

In the last decade there have been great strides in the reduction of nitrogen inputs by municipalities in New York and Connecticut. We all applaud those efforts. But according to Swanson and Wilson, over a three-year period in the late 1990s, the western Sound experienced a 31 percent reduction of nitrogen effluent, but no corresponding increase in dissolved oxygen (DO) in the bottom waters. In other words, there does not appear to have been the anticipated concomitant improvement in overall hypoxia levels. According to the researchers, earlier and more intense stratification is due to an increase in the difference between the summertime surface and bottom water temperatures of the Sound. In fact, the correlation between this temperature difference and bottom DO over the last 50 years is extremely high. The finding that physical conditions such as increased temperature differences and earlier stratification are related to LIS hypoxia has led Swanson and Wilson to the conclusion that even stopping all sewage inputs to the sound will not eliminate the hypoxia problem.

Drs. Swanson and Wilson have made this conclusion public in a letter to the editor entitled “Long Island Sound and Climate Change” (published in the January 29, 2006 New York Times) in response to an earlier op-ed piece entitled “Restoring the Sound.”

Broadwater Hearings Start Tonight

The public hearings on the Broadwater environmental impact statement start tonight, in New London, and the Connecticut Post, the New Haven Register and Newsday have stories this morning.

Fish Quotas

They're arguing over flounder in Stonington.

Does New York Sea Grant Think the Long Island Sound Cleanup Plan Won't Work?

Those involved in the Long Island Sound cleanup, and those who follow it, were no doubt astonished to read the new issue of Coastlines, the magazine published by New York Sea Grant.

Sea Grant has been a participant in the Long Island Sound Study for probably 20 years, and has participated in the process that resulted in the nitrogen reduction plan for sewage treatment plants -- the plan that is the basis of the Sound cleanup. In fact Jack Mattice, the director of New York Sea Grant, is on the management committee of the Long Island Sound Study. The management committee oversees the day to day work of the cleanup. New York Sea Grant’s base of operations, at SUNY Stony Brook, is one of the Long Island Sound program’s two offices.

Which is why it was surprising to click on the current Coastlines and see that on page 4 Barbara Branca, New York Sea Grant’s communications manager, writes of the western end of Long Island Sound:

Upgrading sewage treatment at great cost will not necessarily relieve hypoxic conditions.

This is an important and troubling assertion for a key participant of the Long Island Sound Study to be making, because upgrading sewage treatment at great cost to relieve hypoxia is the foundation of the Long Island Sound cleanup. It’s why New York State hammered out an agreement with New York City about a year ago to put the city on a firm nitrogen reduction schedule. It’s why such a big deal was made about Connecticut’s decision in recent years to stop putting money into its Clean Water Fund, which is the source of financing for sewage plant upgrades.

But now we hear from Sea Grant, whose director is on the LISS management committee, that it might not work. Sea Grant seems to be saying that the money we are spending on nitrogen reduction upgrades at sewage treatment plants might be wasted.

Not only that but the article quotes Larry Swanson, a SUNY Stony Brook professor and also a member of the management committee, as saying something that, assuming he's been quoted accurately, is either misleading or ignorant of the Sound cleanup process.

Branca’s article is called Sound Reflections, and it’s a review of several decades of work on Long Island Sound, concentrating on research that New York Sea Grant funded. After outlining earlier decades, Branca moves to the 1990s. Here’s an excerpt:

Later that decade at Stony Brook University’s Marine Sciences Research Center, Larry Swanson, director of the Waste Reduction and Management Institute and Bob Wilson, a physical oceanographer, found that physical and climatic factors play an important role in controlling dissolved oxygen levels in LIS. With funding from NYSG, they examined historical NYC data from a monitoring station near Hart Island in western LIS where oceanographic data have been recorded since 1914. They found that DO data from the 1990s showed declining summertime DO concentration in bottom waters over the past five decades. The pair also examined the hydrography, salinity, temperature and seasonal stratification and concluded that DO levels are controlled, in part, by physical and climatic factors which are beyond human control. Hart Island, a hotspot for hypoxia, lies near the mouth of the East River close to the outflow of many NYC sewage treatment plants and is hemmed in by the Hempstead sill, a relatively shallow region that serves to isolate it from the deeper waters of the Sound. The research suggests that this particular hydrology is what may cause the onset, severity and duration of hypoxia. In other words, a predictor of hypoxia is “location, location, location.”

Results from this project may limit the anticipated effectiveness of implementing mandated TMDLs at sewage treatment plants. Says Swanson, “This precise analysis of hypoxia’s cause is of great importance especially when municipalities and managers propose upgrades from secondary to tertiary sewage treatment.” Upgrading sewage treatment at great cost will not necessarily relieve hypoxic conditions. [emphasis added]

From 1994 to 2004 municipalities along the Sound have improved sewage treatment and successfully reduced nutrient loadings by 24 percent according to the Sound Health 2006 Report published by LISS. Yet summer hypoxia persists. ...

Look again at what Swanson is quoted as saying:

“This precise analysis of hypoxia’s cause is of great importance especially when municipalities and managers propose upgrades from secondary to tertiary sewage treatment.”

Now let's review the facts of the Long Island Sound cleanup.

MUNICIPALITIES AND MANAGERS ARE NOT PROPOSING UPGRADES FROM SECONDARY TO TERTIARY SEWAGE TREATMENT.

Those upgrades are already well underway and they were the result of years of study and political compromise (in the best sense), and they were agreed to by the regional directors of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the governors or New York and Connecticut. The agreement was formalized in the Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan. And the states and EPA reaffirmed their commitment to the plan just a few months ago, at a much-ballyhooed meeting in Rye.

In other words, far from being something that managers and municipalities are proposing, the sewage plant upgrades are the policy of the United States government and the states of New York and Connecticut.

So what could Jack Mattice and Barbara Branca and Larry Swanson possibly be thinking? Do Mattice and Swanson represent a dissenting wing of the Long Island Sound Study? Are they using Coastlines to distance themselves from the massive cleanup? If so, are they misleading us on purpose when Swanson says that managers and municipalities are proposing sewage treatment upgrades -- and when Branca and her boss, Mattice, allow him to say it without contradiction?

An Oyster Population is Revived By the Rain

The abundance of young, fingernail-sized oysters on New Hampshire is greater than at any time in a quarter century. Scientists think it’s because of heavy rains last May. It makes me wonder if some of the sub-estuaries of Long Island Sound were as lucky. Here’s an excerpt from the Boston Globe:

Baby oysters, millions of them, are fixed to the bay bottom in numbers not seen since scientists started tracking them almost 30 years ago. The discovery was made during underwater surveys in the fall. …

About 12 inches of rain fell over the May 14 weekend, followed by another 2.5 inches on June 7. All that fresh water washing into Great Bay may have given the baby oysters naturally spawned last year an important edge in a critical period of their development, Grout said.

Great Bay oysters produce millions of larval offspring each year, but almost all die in the first few months of life. Those that survive into the following winter are called a set, and this year's set is phenomenal, both men said.

All that rain water may have killed off predators, like green crabs, that eat baby oysters. It's also possible the fresh water kept the oysters from opening up and feeding for a few weeks last spring, thus making them less vulnerable at a critical time in their early lives, Grout said.

There Might Be a Buyer to Save the Micheels' House in Westport from Demolition

[Read 'Modern,' our new blog about mid-century modern houses, here.]

Apparently a serious buyer has come forward and wants the Micheels' house, in Westport, which was designed by Paul Rudolph. David Waldman, the developer who has a contract to buy the house from Micheels, has agreed to give the new buyer about a week to negotiate a deal. It sounds like a good way out of the mess for everyone -- Micheels, an old man who wants to live out his days in peace near his children, in the Boston area, gets his money; Waldman gets rid of what has become a headache and gets to save face; and the preservationists who think so highly of Rudolph and his modernism, get to see the building saved. As this story has proceeded over several weeks, Waldman has come to seem more and more reasonable, and I give him credit (as if anyone cares) for being willing to change his mind. WestportNow has the details.

I don't know who the buyer is -- the email I got earlier didn't say, nor does WestportNow. But I recall a small flurry of emails a week or so ago that included a real estate broker in Florida who specializes in modern houses and who said she might have a buyer.

[For more on the issue, see The Destruction of Paul Rudolph's Micheels House in the right hand column.]

The East River Tidal Power Project

Tidal power in the East River comes to the small screen, in this video (which is preceded by an annoying ad) from the Times website (via Gristmill).

Verdant Power is doing the work. The firm also wants to put a tidal energy project out at Plum Gut. You can find previous posts here and here.

The Chesapeake Bay Cleanup Isn't Going So Well

No one has ever said that restoring an estuary in a heavily urbanized region would be easy. But maybe it’s harder than we think. The folks responsible for cleaning up Chesapeake Bay are failing miserably, and yesterday they acknowledged it at a meeting the Washington Post covered:

The multibillion-dollar cleanup of the Chesapeake Bay, which government officials had pledged would succeed by 2010, will likely miss that deadline by a wide margin -- and, at the current pace, might drag on for decades more, an Environmental Protection Agency official acknowledged yesterday.

Rich Batiuk, an associate director of the EPA's Chesapeake Bay Program, made that projection at a meeting of the Chesapeake Bay Commission, an advisory group that includes state officials from Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

His talk was a blunt, and public, admission of something that the EPA had conceded in an agency report last year. A pledge to "save the bay," made six years ago in the so-called Chesapeake 2000 Agreement, is falling drastically short. "If we go at the current rate that we're doing, we're talking about restoring the Chesapeake decades from now, a generation or two," Batiuk said.

You may remember, from reading this, that in 1987 the Chesapeake Bay Program set a nitrogen reduction goal of 40 percent by 2001; but when 2001 rolled around, the actual nitrogen reduction was just 17 percent. That resulted in a new goal and a new promise, and they’re not meeting those either.

Batiuk's assessment was not news to many environmentalists, who have said for years that roads and suburbs in the watershed were growing too fast and that cleanup efforts at farms and sewage plants were moving too slowly for the deadline to be met.

Some of them said yesterday that they were heartened that the EPA was admitting the shortfall but wished the acknowledgment had come sooner.

"Duh," said Roy Hoagland, a vice president of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, after hearing Batiuk's talk in Annapolis. "We've been arguing for at least four years that in order to reach those goals, they need to accelerate implementation [of cleanup efforts]. . . . That is not new information."

Does New York Sea Grant Think the Long Island Sound Cleanup Plan Won't Work?

Those involved in the Long Island Sound cleanup, and those who follow it, were no doubt astonished to read the new issue of Coastlines, the magazine published by New York Sea Grant.

Sea Grant has been a participant in the Long Island Sound Study for probably 20 years, and has participated in the process that resulted in the nitrogen reduction plan for sewage treatment plants -- the plan that is the basis of the Sound cleanup. In fact Jack Mattice, the director of New York Sea Grant, is on the management committee of the Long Island Sound Study. The management committee oversees the day to day work of the cleanup. New York Sea Grant’s base of operations, at SUNY Stony Brook, is one of the Long Island Sound program’s two offices.

Which is why it was surprising to click on the current Coastlines and see that on page 4 Barbara Branca, New York Sea Grant’s communications manager, writes of the western end of Long Island Sound:

Upgrading sewage treatment at great cost will not necessarily relieve hypoxic conditions.

This is an important and troubling assertion for a key participant of the Long Island Sound Study to be making, because upgrading sewage treatment at great cost to relieve hypoxia is the foundation of the Long Island Sound cleanup. It’s why New York State hammered out an agreement with New York City about a year ago to put the city on a firm nitrogen reduction schedule. It’s why such a big deal was made about Connecticut’s decision in recent years to stop putting money into its Clean Water Fund, which is the source of financing for sewage plant upgrades.

But now we hear from Sea Grant, whose director is on the LISS management committee, that it might not work. Sea Grant seems to be saying that the money we are spending on nitrogen reduction upgrades at sewage treatment plants might be wasted.

Not only that but the article quotes Larry Swanson, a SUNY Stony Brook professor and also a member of the management committee, as saying something that, assuming he's been quoted accurately, is either misleading or ignorant of the Sound cleanup process.

Branca’s article is called Sound Reflections, and it’s a review of several decades of work on Long Island Sound, concentrating on research that New York Sea Grant funded. After outlining earlier decades, Branca moves to the 1990s. Here’s an excerpt:

Later that decade at Stony Brook University’s Marine Sciences Research Center, Larry
Swanson, director of the Waste Reduction and Management Institute and Bob Wilson, a physical oceanographer, found that physical and climatic factors play an important role in controlling dissolved oxygen levels in LIS. With funding from NYSG, they examined historical NYC data from a monitoring station near Hart Island in western LIS where oceanographic data have been recorded since 1914. They found that DO data from the 1990s showed declining summertime DO concentration in bottom waters over the past five decades. The pair also examined the hydrography, salinity, temperature and seasonal stratification and concluded that DO levels are controlled, in part, by physical and climatic factors which are beyond human control. Hart Island, a hotspot for hypoxia, lies near the mouth of the East River close to the outflow of many NYC sewage treatment plants and is hemmed in by the Hempstead sill, a relatively shallow region that serves to isolate it from the deeper waters of the Sound. The research suggests that this particular hydrology is what may cause the onset, severity and duration of hypoxia. In other words, a predictor of hypoxia is “location, location, location.”

Results from this project may limit the anticipated effectiveness of implementing mandated TMDLs at sewage treatment plants. Says Swanson, “This precise analysis of hypoxia’s cause is of great importance especially when municipalities and managers propose upgrades from secondary to tertiary sewage treatment.” Upgrading sewage treatment at great cost will not necessarily relieve hypoxic conditions. [emphasis added]

From 1994 to 2004 municipalities along the Sound have improved sewage treatment and successfully reduced nutrient loadings by 24 percent according to the Sound Health 2006 Report published by LISS. Yet summer hypoxia persists. ...

Look again at what Swanson is quoted as saying:

“This precise analysis of hypoxia’s cause is of great importance especially when municipalities and managers propose upgrades from secondary to tertiary sewage treatment.”

Now let's review the facts of the Long Island Sound cleanup.

MUNICIPALITIES AND MANAGERS ARE NOT PROPOSING UPGRADES FROM SECONDARY TO TERTIARY SEWAGE TREATMENT.

Those upgrades are already well underway and they were the result of years of study and political compromise (in the best sense), and they were agreed to by the regional directors of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the governors or New York and Connecticut. The agreement was formalized in the Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan. And the states and EPA reaffirmed their commitment to the plan just a few months ago, at a much-ballyhooed meeting in Rye.

In other words, far from being something that managers and municipalities are proposing, the sewage plant upgrades are the policy of the United States government and the states of New York and Connecticut.

So what could Jack Mattice and Barbara Branca and Larry Swanson possibly be thinking? Do Mattice and Swanson represent a dissenting wing of the Long Island Sound Study? Are they using Coastlines to distance themselves from the massive cleanup? If so, are they misleading us on purpose when Swanson says that managers and municipalities are proposing sewage treatment upgrades -- and when Branca and her boss, Mattice, allow him to say it without contradiction?

Odds & Ends: Conch, New Blogs, Stranded Dolphins, PBS Documentary

Conch shells may be showing up on the beach in Milford but they’re not from around here. At least that’s what a marine biologist I conferred with told me: conch isn’t part of the natural fauna of Long Island Sound. If Bob Adams is finding them on the beach in Milford, they’re getting there in some unknown way. Here’s what he also said:

There's one very important piece of information missing from Bob's website. Is the conch that he's showing in the picture as he found it, or did he clean it off? If that's how he found it, then there's no doubt that someone put the shell there. In the wild, the outer surface of the conch's shell is quite fouled with algae and small critters (such as hydroids). They allow the conch (whether by intent or not) to blend in with its environment and be less visible to its predators; unfortunately for the conch, man usually isn't fooled, one of the reasons why they're heavily overfished.

If the conch was here, and was alive at some point, then I'd tend to think that one of the scenarios than you hypothesized in the blog probably came to pass.

Caroline DuBois, over on Long Island, pointed me to these two community blogs – one that focuses on Oyster Bay, the other on Bayville. They don’t appear to be updated all that frequently, but the top post (which Caroline wrote) concerns an ethanol spill that occurred last month.

Dolphins are getting stranded in the shallows near Cape Cod. This story uses the word “surge” to describe it but doesn’t say whether the number of stranded dolphins this winter is unusual.

Jon Christensen, a former blogger who is a research fellow at Stanford’s Center for Environmental Science and Policy, has done a documentary called "The Great Wilderness Compromise" that will be on PBS on Friday night:

PBS "NOW" heads out West on Friday, January 5, to examine a controversial effort to find common ground on wilderness protection in the reddest state in America: Idaho. Correspondent Jon Christensen follows Rep. Mike Simpson, the Republican sponsor of a compromise wilderness bill, from the halls of Congress to the peaks of the White Cloud Mountains. To break through the polarization that has stymied efforts to protect wilderness in Idaho for a generation, Simpson has worked hand-in-hand with environmentalist Rick Johnson of the Idaho Conservation League for six years carefully crafting a local compromise that gives something to everyone, but none of them everything that they want. "NOW" talked with residents, ranchers, off-road vehicle fans, and wilderness advocates, including singer-songwriter Carole King, an ardent opponent of the compromise, which would give public land to small towns in the region for future growth — the most controversial of the bills many trade-offs. Exchanging public land for wilderness is a tug-of-war that has entered into a number of wilderness bills that were seeking passage in the last session of Congress. And the Idaho compromise will be among the first bills put on the congressional agenda in the new year. "NOW" offers a window into the passions that drive the wedges — and the ongoing quest for common ground— in western wilderness politics.

More information on time and channel here, and if you can’t catch it tomorrow night, it will be online starting after the show airs, here.

Can This House Be Saved?

[Read 'Modern,' our new modern house blog, here.]

The judge in the court case about the fate of Paul Rudolph’s Micheels House, in Westport, suggested that the two sides discuss dismantling the house and moving it elsewhere. A developer named David Waldman wants to buy the house from its original owner, Louis Micheels, for $3.2 million, then tear it down and build something else for his family to live in with views of Long Island Sound. Waldman said yesterday that he stands to lose his $500,000 deposit if he can’t close on the house by the end of the month, although why he can’t ask Micheels for an extension isn’t clear.

WestportNew presents a fairly sympathetic account of Waldman’s situation, and also reported:

During testimony today, Waldman said he had inquired of several ways of demolishing the house, including having someone dismantle and remove the structure if it can be done in a cost-effective and timely manner.

“I am interesting in pursuing that,” he said.

Several people have approached him about dismantling the house, Waldman said, but they have said it may be difficult because the house is on a narrow, private road.

He also offered the drawings of the house to others so it could be replicated in another location, he said.

Adams asked if the matter of dismantling and removing the house had been discussed between the two parties after Waldman made the comments during testimony.

Stephen Conover, one of Waldman’s attorneys, said it has not been discussed and his client was willing to have the discussion.

And here’s what Micheels and a real estate agent said about trying to sell the house:

Micheels testified that he opposes the house’s inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places.

“I do not think it’s a historic building,” he said. “It was an experimental building and it’s not like Paul Rudolph’s other houses.”

The house, he said, was a collaborative effort between he, his wife and Rudolph.

Micheels said he and his wife first listed the property in June 2005 for almost $5 million and emphasized the Rudolph connection in the early marketing.

There was very little interest in the property, he said, and at 89 years old, he did not want to wait long to sell the house.

In spring 2006, he said, the marketing for the house was changed to emphasize the property and its views of Long Island Sound.

Ruta said the listing brokers felt it was appropriate to emphasize the Rudolph connection and contacted a number of people who would be interested in such properties.

Those contacted included those who have restored other Rudolph properties and the Paul Rudolph Foundation, he said.

None of the contacts, he said, presented any offers for the home.

When the land was emphasized, he said, there were three bids. One of the bids could not have all of the money in place until two years from now, and the other two bids, which included the Waldmans, was to demolish the house, he said.

[For more on the issue, see The Destruction of Paul Rudolph's Micheels House in the right hand column.]