Pollution is a human activity that may put an ecosystem out of balance. Almost every activity—from how we get around to how we grow our crops—creates some type of pollution. As the city of New Haven has grown, its residents put more and more demands on its environment: both the land and services within the city and surrounding lands and waters. Our wastes create land, air and water pollution.
You can see many ways in which a city affects its surroundings as highways are built, forests are cut down, and ponds, lakes and other waterways are filled in or polluted. A city also produces more air pollution which ends up in our water through the water cycle. The effects of pollution can also be hazy. Pollution affects people in different ways. It can affect our health and it can limit our activities, harm wildlife and habitat, and disrupt the planet’s natural systems
permanently
.
As New Haven has become more populated over the years, there has been a direct effect on Long Island Sound, the Quinnipiac, and other rivers and waterways. Because so many people now live around the Sound—14.6 million live in its drainage basin—demands are intense. Uses include shipping, transportation, electric power generation, industrial use, waste disposal, fishing, boating and other leisure and aesthetic activities.
20 million people use Long Island Sound each year!
Every one of Long Island Sound’s many environmental problems, from sewage and toxic chemicals to overfishing and habitat destruction, stems from its location smack dab in the middle of the most densely populated regions in the world. The Sound is now a cesspool, drainage ditch, trash can, playground and food source to the millions of people who live and play in the region. This vast 16,000 square mile watershed stretches from northern Manhattan to Rhode Island and from Long Island all the way up the Connecticut River to southern Quebec.
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The Long Island Sound Study, working with state representatives from Connecticut and New York, The Environmental Protection Agency and 24 Connecticut towns assessed the level of pollution in the sound in the 1980’s. They looked at oxygen depletion, toxins in the tissues of crustaceans and fish, and basic water quality. The biggest culprit polluting Long Island Sound is the waters from the rivers, including the Quinnipiac River. Waste water treatment plants, urban and agricultural runoff, and power plants all are major contributors to the Sound pollution as well.
For years, signs of the Sound’s decline have been visible: the disappearance of dolphins, collapse of he flounder population, closure of more than on-half of its 120,000 acres of clam and oyster beds.
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By most measures, the Sound is still deteriorating, or at best, holding its own. Reversing the damage will be difficult because much of the pollution is caused by everyday behavior of millions of people—the way we tend lawns and gardens, deal with wastes, build houses, roads and bridges, and commute to work.
Water Pollution: Culprits and Victims
Understanding what causes water pollution is the first step in solving our pollution problems. After examining these causes, we’ll see how New Haven and its residents’ livelihoods are threatened by often unseen pollution perpetrators. These pollutants can affect our jobs, food and health, cost of living and, as oystermen have discovered, our whole way of life!
Water is polluted at the surface, in rivers that fill lakes, bays and oceans, and in groundwater. Groundwater is water that fills the spaces between rocks and soil particles underground. There are a number of materials that get into surface or groundwater.
Water pollution is often defined by its origin and organized as
point-
source or
non-point source (NPS)
. Because non-point source (NPS) is responsible for so much of our water pollution
and
we can control NPS pollution, we will focus on this source of water pollution. Non-point source pollution is any water pollution which is not attributed to any one perpetrator. It is any and all drainage pollution, street pollution that gets washed into the drains, and everyday trash. This is both surface and groundwater pollution, and it all empties into Long Island Sound. We also directly control how much of this pollution empties into Long Island Sound.
We directly or indirectly create all these toxic materials. (Figure 4, Appendix) For example, whenever we rinse something down the drain, flush a toilet, or do laundry, the wastewater goes to a sewage treatment plant to be purified. These plants remove dirt, biodegradable material such as food wastes, and many other pollutants. But remember, water treatment plants are a major cause of pollution in Long Island Sound. These plants do not remove all the chemical pollutants. For example, phosphates that are used in many detergents pass right through sewage treatment plants and go directly into our rivers and the Sound.
During heavy rainstorms, wastewater coming into the plants may back up and overflow directly into surface water without any treatment. Untreated human waste empties into Long Island Sound and spreads disease-causing bacteria, such as dysentery and hepatitis. Beaches on Long Island Sound are often closed because of these problems with water treatment plants. Beaches were already closed once this summer because of problems with wastewater disposal! (June 30 - July 2, 1997)
Untreated waste robs water of oxygen as well. Garbage needs oxygen to decompose. Certain wastes, such as fertilizers and detergents also destroy the valuable oxygen all aquatic creatures need for survival. Pollutants from wastes sink to the bottom of the harbor and creates a black, mayonnaise-like material, sapropelic mud (also called “muck”). This mud suffocates many of our crustaceans, such as clams, mussels, and oysters.
The fish-killing shortage of underwater oxygen known as hypoxia afflicts as much as 30% of the Sound every August.
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When organoic materials decompose they use oxygen in the water to decay. Nitrogen, which is in fertilizers and combustion engines, and phosphorus, which is in detergents, also contributes to algae blooms. When the algae blooms, it also robs the water of oxygen necessary to support other marine life. When these blooms die and sink in the summer heat, their decomposition consumes virtually all the dissolved oxygen in the bottom waters. Because of years of pollution the oyster population has been eroded to the point where there are not enough beds to eat these blooms and preserve oxygen levels. The absence of adequate oysters, therefore threatens the fish population as oxygen levels are not sufficient.
Factories which produce our increasing demand for paper, medicine, automobile parts , computers and other gadgets create lots of pollutants. Since the early 1970’s many pollution-control laws have been passed to minimize pollution, but not all types of industrial waste is regulated and some experts feel these regulations are not strict enough.
Oil messes are a major problem in New Haven Harbor because of our local storage tanks. 120 million gallons of oil are stored on our waterfront, delivered by an average of 500 ships each year. As New Haven Harbor is the third largest seaport in New England, employing approximately 650 people, our transportation and oil storage issue is one that concerns many different groups of people, including environmentalists and departments of tourism.
The amount of oil spilled in accidents which we read about in the newspapers is only a part of the total amount of oil that contaminates our waters. For example, tankers dump oil into the oceans when they clean out their tanks and oil from the streets washes into surface water. Oil’s effects on wildlife can be devastating. Some animals, including birds, mammals and fish, may be killed by ingesting the oil. Others may die from eating contaminated prey or by getting their feathers or fur coated with oil.
There are more than 65,000 commercially available chemicals in the United States. These chemicals are ingredients in many products we use every day and are used in many industrial processed. Some of these chemicals are dumped directly into our water. But runoff carries tons of chemicals into surface water each year (Figure 5, Appendix).
Chemicals that get into surface water poison fish and other animals directly. They accumulate in bottom sediments as well, contributing to the toxicity of our harbor’s black “muck”. They also accumulate to toxic levels in the tissues of animals Because of two natural processes,
the food web
and
bioaccumulation
these pollutants are spread throughout our ecosystem, harming the food supply of all our animals, ourselves included.
The Food Web and Bioaccummulation
The food web of Long Island Sound begins with dead plant and animal matter and other sediments flowing into estuaries from upland areas. These materials are converted into food by marsh vegetation, marine algae, bacteria, and minute floating plants. The plants are eaten either by small fish, shellfish and other invertebrates, or by microscopic floating animals. Large fish, birds, mammals and man are at the top of the food web, having no natural predators. Other animals feed on dead plants and animals, reducing them into basic chemical constituents. These materials are used by plants, thus completing the cycle. Because all aspects of the biological system are interrelated, disruption of one part of the food web can affect many other parts.
Just as nutrients pass from one aquatic creature to another, so do toxic substances pass through the food web. If toxic substances are not excreted or broken down biologically, they are retained in the tissue of the organism. Over a period of time, if the organism continues to ingest the contaminated food, the chemical becomes more concentrated in that animal. Therefore pollutants that enter the food web become more concentrated by the time they reach the highest consumer in the food chain.
The location of an organism along a food chain is called its tropic or feeding level. A producer is always at the first tropic level. In New Haven Harbor and Long Island Sound, photoplankton, photosynthetic algae, and microscopic animals are at the first tropic level. (Illustration, Figure 3, Appendix). Each of the following tropic levels contain consumers. Energy as well as pollutants flow from the photoplankton to the oyster. The pollutants become more concentrated as they pass from each tropic level. The consumer eats and discharges the mass but the pollutants remain and become more concentrated. A person eats the oyster so the energy and pollutants from the oyster, which is concentrated, pass to the person eating the oysters, which is a greater percentage of total mass than the photoplankton absorbed.
Accumulation is especially pronounced in aquatic food webs, because there are four to six levels of consumers. Furthermore, many of the fish we eat have preyed on small fish and shell fish which have all been exposed to the same toxins, so their diet may consist exclusively of concentrated toxic materials. As human eat from the upper levels of aquatic food webs, we run the risk of ingesting large amount of toxic substances. The level of toxins in our waters, and these natural processes, the food web and bioaccummulation, have resulted in total bans on fishing, crabbing, claming and oystering in our harbors in our rivers. Again, this year, like the closing of Long Island Sound beaches, we have witnessed firsthand the effects of pollutants in our local waters. This Spring (1997) parts of the Quinnipiac River were closed to fishing because of pollutants