Cleaning Goose Pond, for the sake of the harbor
Fronzuto seeking $145,000 for phase two of Consue Springs cleanup
BY PETER B. BRACE
Consue Springs is inching closer to cleanliness as the town hopes to have the money to complete phase two of its six-part watershed clean-up project.

Cute as they are, the affable ducks of Consue Springs have been a pollution contributor for years.

Marine Superintendent Dave Fronzuto recently wrote a coastal pollution remediation grant for $145,000 from the state to install an infiltrator drainage system on the Boys and Girls Club property. The system would cleanse the water in the Consue Springs (also called Goose Pond) watershed. The watershed eventually empties into the pond and slowly leaches into the harbor.

The project is a collaboration between the town and the Nantucket Land Council. Both are seeking grants to fund the work - the town is hiring the contractors and the Land Council is providing the scientific research and personnel.

"We've been looking at this whole watershed for a long time. While we had some money to do the design work and Horsley & Whitten did the design for the pond remediation, the actual pond remediation will probably be the year after," said Fronzuto.

Several infiltrator systems - essentially buried gravel pits in key locations within a watershed that allow large amounts of runoff to gradually leach into the soil, trapping pollutants before the water flows down to the harbor - are needed to complement remediation of the pond itself.

"It's not single-source pollution, there's a lot of area that adds to it. So, we basically just started at the high side and started working down," said Fronzuto.

In the summer of 2005, the town installed a similar drainage system beneath the Silver Street parking lot. Phase three of this project is the installation of infiltrators on property owned by the Nantucket Islands Land Bank across from Cumberland Farms on Orange Street.

Water containing nitrogen, phosphorous, arsenic, cadmium, lead, selenium, barium and fecal coliform bacteria flows into storm drains in this watershed area southwest and uphill from the pond bounded by part of the Boys & Girls Club field, Sparks Avenue, parts of Prospect Street, Orange Street, and a zigzag line connecting the latter two streets and drains into Goose Pond.

Adding more pollution to the pond is the large waterfowl population that contributes a significant amount of fecal coliform bacteria and nitrogen to its waters.

During heavy rain events and astronomically high tides, the bottom of the pond gets churned up and, at the same time, large quantities of the polluted pond's water flows into the Creeks and Nantucket Harbor.

At one time, Consue Springs functioned as a filter, cleaning out pollutants from the environment by breaking them down into usable nutrients for growth. But, this dynamic only works when there is a good flow of water coming in and out of the wetland.

Currently, the two concrete culvert pipes between the pond and the Creeks are not large enough to properly flush the pond, because so much polluted sediment has built up over the years, actually raising the level of the pond higher than the tide reaches.

Fronzuto said the town and the Land Council want to get into Goose Pond as quickly as possible to dredge out its polluted, sludgy sediment bottom, lower it to the level of the harbor, install two 18-inch culverts and clean the ditch to the harbor to re-establish tidal flow in and out of the pond to keep it clean.

But before they do that, Coastal Zone Management's Massachusetts Coastal Wetlands Restoration Program requires that they clean the water going into the pond from its watershed, said Land Council Executive Director Cormac Collier. "The recommendation stated that until

any onsite work occurs, storm water management infrastructure has to be upgraded to prevent pollutants from entering Consue Springs," said Collier. "The logic behind it is if you have improved the culvert and improved the tidal flow [first], you're actually exacerbating it because you're accelerating the flow of these pollutants." Collier said that with the phase-two

and phase-three infiltrators installed within the next 12 to 18 months, the town can then apply for grants to dredge the pond and replace its culverts, a process that could take an additional year or so to complete.

"Unfortunately to get these storm water improvements costs a lot of money, and takes a lot of time," he said.

I