Waterways Eyed for Snow Piles
Morgantown Dominion Post
5 February 2011
By The Associated Press
BOSTON — Imagine the East Coast’s largest cities mixing a brew of salt,
motor oil, trash and grocery carts and dumping it into rivers and
harbors.
It’s allowed in emergency situations, and some officials staring at
massive snow mountains in densely populated areas of the
winter-walloped Northeast say that time is now, even as others warn
dumping snow in water comes with big problems.
‘‘There’s a lot of stuff in this snow that if I isolated it and threw
it in the river, you’d have me arrested,’’ said John Lipscomb of the
New York-based environmental group Riverkeeper.
Snow from the East Coast’s insistent winter is being plowed into banks
that are narrowing roads and highway ramps like hardening arteries,
blocking drivers’ sight lines, and forcing schoolchildren to break
paths like cattle as they walk down buried sidewalks. In a normal
winter, the snow melts on a good day or is carted off to designated
dumps where it eventually filters its pollutants through the earth or
is treated before ending up in sewers.
This is not a normal winter. Many East Coast cities, including Boston,
Hartford, Conn., and New York are on their way to setting seasonal
snowfall records, and the extra snow means extra road salt and human
refuse that gets swept up by plows.
The federal Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t directly regulate
dumping snow, but recommends against dumping it in water. It also urges
state and local governments to include snow disposal restrictions in
storm water management plans. Some states and municipalities restrict
dumping snow into waterways out of fear of harming water life and
polluting drinking water.
Massachusetts is one of them.
Even so, state Sen. Jack Hart has called for a ‘‘Boston snow party,’’
with snow being poured into Boston Harbor like tea was long ago.
Despite the state’s long battle to clean up the oncenotoriously
polluted nook of Massachusetts Bay, he’s getting support from unlikely
allies.
Bruce Berman of the group Save the Harbor, Save the Bay said that he
normally wouldn’t support such dumping, but that high snow banks are
making it dangerous to just move around Boston, and that the deep and
active harbor can handle it.
‘‘When there’s a compelling reason — and believe me, these storms have
given us a compelling reason — to snow dump, I support it,’’ Berman
said.
But Boston has yet to seek to dump its snow in water. It has found room
for nearly 71 inches of snow this year, about 50 inches more than it
usually gets by this time of year, according to the National Weather
Service. New York has seen about 58 inches; typically it has gotten 12
by now.