Arlington walkers, joggers not told popular trail flooding was actually sewage

By MIKE SULLIVAN

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    ARLINGTON, Massachusetts (WBZ) — Imagine taking a stroll down a rainy bike path and having no idea you are stepping in sewage. Neighbors in Arlington say it happens all too often, and they are sick of it.

Last Tuesday, the Alewife Greenway bike path flooded with water from the nearby Alewife Brook. Neighbors say the waterway is a sewage dump for a few different sewer systems. These dumps are called combined sewer overflows, or CSOs. When heavy rains hit, sewer water gets pumped into the brook to release stress on the system.

Last week, a CSO dump coincided with the heavy flooding of the bike path. People were seen walking, biking and pushing children in strollers through the sewage water. Neighbors say those people had no idea despite the smell.

“Anybody going through it would have been wading through sewage,” said David Stoff, a neighbor and member of an advocacy group called Save The Alewife Brook.

“You need to know whether what you are walking in is contaminated,” Stoff told WBZ-TV. “There’s a legal duty to notify the people using that street, and that duty has been avoided.”

Stoff says there is an email system in place to warn people. However, neighbors say, visitors may not know it exists.

“There are six CSOs in the Alewife, and you have to subscribe to three systems in order to get notified,” says Kristin Anderson, and fellow member of Save The Alewife Brook. “A lot of people think you subscribe to one, and you will know when sewage in the Alewife Brook. That’s not true.”

They want to see the EPA step in and increase notifications in real-time. They point to a lighting system seen on the Potomac River.

“You see a light go on, and that lets you know sewage discharge triggered the light,” explains Stoff.

The neighbors have formed a group called Save the Alewife Brook. The group has started a growing petition to ask the EPA to make a change. In addition to the lighting system, they want to see a CSO treatment system for the sewer runoff water.

“Twenty years ago, they weren’t telling anyone, and my neighbors and I were … received flood waters in our home – it came right in through the back door – and we got sick.”

“1910 or 1911, that was the end of maintenance for the Alewife Brook. Nothing has been done since then,” adds Stoff. “When you get six to eight inches of rain, that water goes into the adjacent houses here.”

WBZ contacted the EPA for comment, but have yet to receive a response.

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