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Welcome to The Watershed

Leading up to the June 2019 grand opening of Encore Boston Harbor, neighboring residents had mixed feelings about the resort’s façade. Passersby quoted by Beth Teitell, staff writer for the Boston Globe, shared their impressions for an April 2019 story in the paper. “It’s the same color as the lamp in my grandma’s apartment,” one said. Others likened it to “old union hall brown,” “70s car brown,” and “taupe.”¹

The patented ‘Wynn Bronze’ glass abuts the Boston skyline, welcoming inbound commuters on Route 93, one of the main arteries into downtown Boston.

Skyline view of Encore and its surroundings, taken by the author in January 2020

Michael Weaver, the Chief Communications Officer for Wynn Resorts, countered with a multi-part “Well, actually…” defense of the casino’s appearance. He told Teitell that the design was, in fact, iconic enough to be a part of the LEGO Las Vegas architecture set,  that “it creates a very warm, inviting glow inside the rooms” and “offers a beautiful reflection of its surroundings at night.”

The brand’s vision for the resort was, from the onset, cloaked with altruistic motivations; new, well-paying jobs for service workers from the casino’s neighboring communities, among the most diverse and least affluent in the state. Further injections into the local economy via tourism and tax dollars. And of course, the revitalization of a former toxic waste site reviled by its neighbors for the noxious odors it gave off.

Pre-Project Proposed View of the Casino from the Mystic River, as presented in a 2013 Wynn Resort Expanded Environmental Notification Form²

Indeed, this casino resort is built on a plot of land previously occupied by a series of chemical manufacturers, many of whom had a propensity for allowing manufacturing waste biproducts to bleed into the ground and spread into the surrounding communities. Moreover, the site does not exist in isolation — the 34 acres of surface land on which the Wynn casino is built sits adjacent to the confluence of the Mystic River watershed, the Charles River, and the Boston Harbor.

Situated just outside the ostensibly progressive beacon that is Boston, MA, the earth beneath 1 Broadway in Everett, Massachusetts serves as a comprehensive archive of industrialization’s leftovers. What follows is the origin story of some of these subsurface toxins, their ecological consequences felt throughout one of the most populated watersheds in the country, and the primary victims of the resulting environmental injustices — non-white, low income Bostonians. In this regard, this publication is too in part a defense for Weaver’s contentions — Encore Boston Harbor typifies its surroundings.

Encore Boston Harbor in Everett, MA within the Mystic River Watershed. Adapted from Mystic River Watershed Association map of Mystic River Watershed, 2019.

The Mystic River Watershed is a distinct land area in Greater Boston. Steven Kolmes, Director of the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Portland, provides a helpful description of the significance of watershed management within developed regions—

Within any geographic region there are areas whose topography determines that they share the same stream and river drainage for precipitation running downhill towards the ocean. Such drainage basins are often referred to as watersheds. Within a watershed a number of distinctive biological communities may exist, as in the common pattern where grassy uplands give way to forested riparian zones along rivers, but these are bound together by a common flow of life's most fundamental molecule... Urban growth challenges watersheds around the world, as mega-cities place huge demands on watersheds that are no longer sufficient to meet increasing needs of growing populations... Watershed level thinking is crucial, as the consequences of alterations to one part of a watershed will inevitably reverberate throughout the rest of the watershed.³

I have organized The Watershed by both geography (north to south) and by social justice construct, as these topics are inextricably linked. The twenty-two communities that are partly or wholly a part of the watershed have remarkable variability between one another with regard to their residents’ income, race, language, and religion. These disparities align disturbingly with the ecological distinctions of the communities, as well as the expected long-term health of their residents. With the outflow of the Mystic River Watershed positioned at its southern end, the accumulation of biochemical waste is most noticeable in the cities closest to the harbor—for citizens with the fewest alternative living options available to them.

Towns and Cities of Greater Boston⁴

There are avenues to work towards building a more equitable home for all residents of the Watershed. These residents include all humans, but also all other life along the Mystic River. To create a sustainable, humane future for everyone, it is critical to examine the consequences of our collective histories.

Green Marker for Encore Casino in Everett, MA.⁵

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Part 1: Marshland to Metropolis

Contents

Encore Boston Harbor overlooks the Mystic River, just upstream from where the river meets the Charles River on its way to the Boston Harbor. The Mystic River is the primary outflow of all water in the Mystic River Watershed — an area of approximately 76 square miles, or roughly 1% of the land area in Massachusetts.⁶

The watershed partially or wholly encompasses twenty-two communities north and west of Boston. Its headwaters originate primarily in the Aberjona River, which flows through the suburbs of Woburn and Winchester before reaching the Mystic Lake. The upper Mystic Lake flows into the Mystic River, which flows through Arlington, Somerville, Medford, Everett, Chelsea, Charlestown, and East Boston before discharging to Boston Harbor.⁷

Map of Mystic River⁷

Land degradation — a decline in land quality caused by human activities — is widespread in the Mystic River Watershed. It is not possible to find a parcel of land fully undisturbed by the region’s centuries of settlement and land redevelopment. The land invariably has been tilled, landscaped, excavated, blasted, built upon, or otherwise restructured at some point in the past.

Land degradation results from mismanagement of land and thus deals with two interlocking, complex systems: the natural ecosystem and the human social system⁸. In The Watershed, I explore the interactions historically between these two systems within the Mystic River Watershed, while referencing various related environmental justice related events, research, politics, and regulation in the United States more broadly.

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The First Law of Ecology: Everything Is Connected to Everything Else. The Second Law of Ecology: Everything Must Go Somewhere. The Third Law of Ecology: Nature Knows Best. The Fourth Law of Ecology: There Is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

–         Barry Commoner⁹

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Land Making

Boston’s land area includes more than 5,000 acres of man-made land — more than any other American city (except perhaps San Francisco, where the landfill hasn’t been comprehensively totaled).⁴ Boston’s man-made land was not the product of a single concerted effort to expand the city limits, but rather a multitude of unrelated land creation efforts over the centuries, each with its own motivations.^A

More often than not, the original fill used to create this land included contents that today would be deemed inarguably toxic to surrounding natural ecosystems. Pollutants were especially present in bodies of water known as mill ponds — manmade bodies of still water formed from building dams to reroute flowing water through a mill wheel for power. Early city ordinances would encourage, if not outright mandate that abandoned mill ponds be treated as landfills. Boston city records from as early as 1656 document the zoning of one of the city’s mill ponds as a site designated to deposit particularly noxious refuse, such as ‘beast entrails’ disposed of by butchers —

 Retrieved from Documents of the City of Boston,1878¹⁰ 

This was a standard practice in the developing city. National Geographic tells the story of Greater Boston’s largest mill pond, near what is today Haymarket Square—

In the 1640s, a group of businessmen got permission from the city to build a dam across the mouth of a cove on the northern end of the peninsula, so that they could use the tides to power some flour mills. The dam formed what was known as Mill Pond, and the mills were up and running by the end of the decade. But they were never very productive, and the whole operation was sold off to another group by the end of the 18th century.

 The new mill owners closed the floodgates on the west end of the dam, which reduced flow along the banks of Mill Pond. Consequently, sewage, garbage, and the rotting corpses of discarded animals began to accumulate along the shore. It’s unclear whether letting the filth build up was part of their plan, but the new owners soon began lobbying the city to let them fill in the pond and sell off the land.⁵

Indeed, for many of these projects, little mind was paid to the quality of the fill itself. The land from this dam today helps support the traffic along Causeway Street, and the land on the site of the former pond itself would at the time be known as Bullfinch Triangle. A new building was promptly constructed on the filled land to house the delightfully titled organization, The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel among the Indians⁶

 

Highlighted triangle marking Bullfinch Triangle added to 1891 map of Boston¹¹

Independent of the environmental consequences, the man-made land quickly proved to be ill suited for urban infrastructure. The first ‘made’ land involved dumping sand and gravel on top of Boston’s mud flats, quickly leading to the realization that heavy structures could not be constructed on top of it.

By the turn of the 20th century, city planners had adopted a new strategy for building on the loosely packed land. Laborers would drive wood pilings — essentially vertical logs about the size of telephone poles — through the filled land and underlying organic silt layer (the original mud flats), 15 to 20 feet below existing ground surface¹².

The estimated 1630 Boston shoreline, overlying a 1999 satellite map of Boston and surrounding areas^12,13

The wood-piling method of building on top of wetlands introduced new problems for the city as it grew. While the method can be structurally reliable for centuries if left undisturbed, it requires that the groundwater level at no point dips below the tops of the wood pilings. Wood rots at a much slower rate when submerged in environments low in oxygen, and groundwater has markedly lower oxygen levels than water on the surface. As long as the groundwater level never dipped below the tops of the submerged wood pilings, the pilings could theoretically remain sturdy for generations¹⁴.

Unfortunately, like most cities, much of Boston’s infrastructure has been built out beneath the ground water level (subways, sewers, tunnels, etc.). When any of these structures are punctured, such as a tunnel springing a leak, the groundwater will drain into it — exposing the submerged pilings to air. The most well-publicized examples of this occurred as a result of the nation’s most expensive highway project ever, Boston’s Big Dig. While the Big Dig is a topic outside of the scope of The Watershed, infrastructure projects like it are one contributing factor to land degradation in the Mystic River Watershed.

This environmental deterioration likely has increased the impacts felt from chemical pollution in the region.

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Biochemical Innovation

Boston pioneered and remains today a hub of innovation for the chemical and biotechnology industry. Throughout much of the history of the biotechnology sector’s evolution, regulation has lagged well behind innovation. This is perhaps most evident with respect to regulating manufacturing processes in order to minimize the creation of toxic byproducts. Glenn Nedwin, an accomplished biochemist and co-editor in chief of the journal Industrial Biotechnology, described the challenges presented by early innovations in the biochemical industry at a 1997 conference—

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s, industry has not consistently paid attention to the environmental impact of its operations. This inconsistency has grossly intensified since the early 1900s due to a number of complicating factors, including competition driven by capitalism, technological advancements and the need to sustain an increasingly rapid growth in population. Today we are faced with an inordinate number of toxic waste sites due to industrial carelessness and little attention has been paid to energy and resource efficiency.

Historically, most known synthetic reactions were developed primarily on the basis of product yield, with little or no regard for the toxic nature of the starting materials, catalysts, solvents, reagents, byproducts, or impurities. Further, in many instances there was an incomplete technical understanding of the process, no stated set of emissions or waste parameters for operating, lack of detection systems, and in some cases, instances where arrogance, neglect, and greed took over.¹⁵

The class structures of each of the Mystic River Watershed’s communities have evolved over the past 200 years, with residents of the cities closer to the harbor today typically experiencing greater levels of economic hardship. Throughout this period, the watershed has withstood a tremendous degree of ecological destruction, amassing an accumulation of hazardous industrial chemical waste deposits spanning generations.

 As will become evident in the subsequent chapters, the combination of land degradation and toxic runoff has come to define the racial disproportionality of these communities.

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Extensive information about the making of Boston can be found in Michael Rawson’s Eden on the Charles.

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Part 2: Activism and Epidemic

Contents

 

It took many fights and a multitude of twentieth-century environmental disasters for the United States’ present-day environmental protections to be enacted. A commonality across these environmental disasters is that residents of the communities impacted by the disasters had to collectively organize to hold polluters accountable and demand regulatory reform. Fighting through the health ailments caused by those same environmental disasters, residents of these communities helped create a public outcry strong enough that regulatory bodies were made to hold guilty corporate actors accountable.*

These crises would eventually lead to the enactment of major environmental regulatory reforms, most notably the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act in 1980 (CERCLA, also known as the Superfund Program). CERCLA allows the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to craft a master plan to restore a ‘Superfund site’ for pollution sites that exceed minimum thresholds defined in the agency’s Hazard Ranking System (HRS). The HRS is a model in which various characteristics of the site, its wastes, and its surrounding environment are combined through use of a numerical algorithm to compute an overall score.¹⁶

Sites that qualify as Superfund sites are placed on the National Priority List (NPL), a designation that initiates a judgement by the EPA of the Potentially Responsible Parties (PRPs) who must bear some or all of the costs of that cleanup.¹⁷ As of this writing in June, 2020, there are 1,335 sites actively with this designation across the United States, 31 in Massachusetts.

Among the most impactful — and disturbing — of the environmental disasters that caused these reforms was the Love Canal disaster in Niagara Rivers, New York. It created a moral panic that reverberated nationwide, one which served as a case study for the city of Woburn, which faced its own environmental crisis in the same time period.

The Love Canal Disaster

In 1892, William Love received a permit to excavate the Love Canal, blueprinted to stretch perpendicularly from the upper to lower Niagara Rivers. At the time, canals were thought to be a future mainstay for energy creation, and the Love Canal was blueprinted as a major source of hydroelectric energy for a planned housing development. William Love would only make it as far as digging a mile-long trench before abandoning the project in 1910 for lack of funding.

The canal bed was next used as a dumpsite for both municipal and industrial chemical wastes, until the land was purchased in 1947 by Hooker Chemical, a since-shuttered subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum. With the government’s authorization, Hooker alone began using the partially dug canal as a dump site for chemical wastes produced from their manufacturing processes.¹⁸ By 1953, the canal was completely filled back in with 20,000 tons of chemical waste. The following decades would bring horror to the residents of Niagara Falls, New York, both bureaucratically and epidemiologically.

1953 — City developers begin building new residences in the growing surrounding community. The Niagara Falls Board of Education, searching for land to build a new school on, sets their sights on the Love Canal land. Hooker volunteered the site for the bargain basement price of $1.00 (just over $9.50 in 2020 dollars) — provided that the new deedholders sign off on a liability waiver which removed Hooker’s responsibility for any potential injury or death stemming from buried chemical wastes. The Board signed off.

Section of Bill of Sale and Transfer of Property Deed between the Hooker Electrochemical Company and the Board of Education of Niagara Falls, New York, April 28, 1953

Over the next two decades, residents would increasingly report strange odors near the school playground, accumulations of black sludge bleeding through basement walls of the residences along the former Love Canal, and children playing on the school’s playground having sneezing fits and watering eyes. Among these reports—

·         1974 — A couple reports that when they were excavating their backyard for a new pool, the hole they dug immediately filled with rancid blue and yellow liquids. These same chemicals had mixed with the groundwater and flooded the entire yard, reacting so destructively to the redwood posts that one day the fence simply collapsed. When the chemicals receded in the dry weather, the gardens and shrubs looked as though they had been withered and scorched by a brush fire.¹⁹

·         March 1978 — The New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH) opens an investigation, first collecting air and soil tests in basements and then conducting a health study of the 239 families living in residences directly encircling the canal. They find an increase in reproductive problems among women and high levels of chemical contaminants in soil and air²⁰.

·         August 1978 — Children living in these homes start to fall ill at an alarmingly frequent rate. Parents organize, demanding that the NYSDOH take action to protect them. The Department ultimately agrees to conduct a more comprehensive investigation, which shows that the contents of the filled-in canal at that point contained over 21,000 tons of toxic chemicals, including at least twelve known carcinogens.²¹  Among the slurry of carcinogenic chemicals found at the site were benzene, lindane, and trichlorophenol (TCP). But the several hundred pounds of TCP buried in the ground was itself contaminated with Tetrachlorodibenzodioxin or Dioxin for short, known more commonly as Agent Orange — one of the deadliest substances known to man.²²

·         December 11, 1978 — Seeing that six construction workers are working on a new development near the Love Canal site, residents organize and form an informational picket to warn the workers of the dangers of exposure to Dioxin. Six picketers are arrested for disorderly conduct.

·         December 12, 1978 — Several of the aforementioned construction workers are hospitalized for mysterious body rashes.

·         August 1979 — Residents begin to leave the neighborhood, citing severe chemical fumes in the area. NYSDOH is mandated to pay food and lodging for 48 hours for families if any family member’s illness was believed causally linked to remedial construction.

·         May, 1980 — State University of Buffalo neurologist says some Love Canal residents may have irreversible nerve damage. Frustrated Love Canal residents, upset by the reports, take two EPA officials hostage in the Love Canal Homeowners Association office and hold them for five hours while demanding evacuation of the entire Love Canal neighborhood.²³

·         July, 1982 — State announces high dioxin levels at the canal. EPA soon confirms that the chemical is present in concentrations 100,000 times that found toxic to laboratory animals.²³

An abandoned home bordering the Love Canal site in 1987.⁷

This environmental disaster had devastating consequences, affecting all aspects of victims’ lives. In 1983 Occidental Chemical, which had bought Hooker, settled $15 billion in claims that had been filed by 1,336 Love Canal residents. It distributed a paltry $20 million lump sum with a $1 million lifetime medical trust to be split by the residents—meaning an average victim received a settlement of $14,250.²³

Even if the settlement had been considered acceptable to some victims, they had no way of knowing at the time what the long-term health effects of chronic exposure to carcinogenic chemicals would be.

A 1993 report co-authored by scientists at the Yale University School of Medicine and the New York State Department of Health documented the long-term effects upon residents living near Love Canal and other toxic waste sites.²⁴ Among the 27,000 births by mothers living within 1 mile of New York’s 590 toxic waste sites studied, there was a 12-percent greater chance of giving birth to a child with a major birth defect relative to women living farther from such a site.

90 of the 590 sites were considered to be high-risk locations because there was documented evidence that chemicals had migrated off-site.²⁵ When just these sites were examined, the risk factor soared; women living within one mile of one of these sites were found to have a 63-percent greater chance of bearing a child with a major birth defect relative to women living farther from such a site.

These findings motivated 900 residents to file a follow up suit against Occidental, which resulted in a settlement ranging between $63 to $133,000 in personal injury damages for the victims.²³

The disaster served as a case study, though, for communities across the country where residents suspected environmental contamination. Knowledge of the Love Canal case was paramount to the investigations that took place in Woburn, MA just a few years later.

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• While this topic is explored throughout The Watershed, exemplary examples of scholarship in environmental justice advocacy include No Safe Place (Brown and Mikkelson), Toxic Communities (Taylor), Water, Place and Equity (Whitely, Ingram, and Perry), Toxic Nation: The Fight to Save Our Communities from Chemical Contamination (Setterberg and Shavelson)

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Part 3: Activism and Epidemic

Contents

There is a broad counterreformation against health, safety, and environmental regulation. In this insurgent view, most of these matters can efficiently be left to market forces after all, if government will just get out of the way. The fact some concerns about resource shortages were overstated has been used to impeach the need for environmental regulation generally.

~Robert Kuttner, Everything for Sale

The Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) p