The Kennebec Estuary Land Trust is heading in an unusual direction. This year, the staff has created a new focus for the organization by choosing water quality as the theme for the year’s activities. The group was inspired to take on the study of water quality in the estuary, and therefore, of the entire Kennebec River watershed, by what they learned when the Georgetown Shellfish Conservation Committee asked for help in resolving an issue over re-opening their most productive clam flats.
“Working with the clam diggers caused us to re-think our position about water quality,” says Alicia Heyburn, Outreach and Communications Director for the organization. Executive Director Carrie Kinne adds that the organization “needed to pay attention to why the clam flats were closing due to freshwater runoff. It’s part of our mission to preserve the resource.”
As a result, the scale and scope of Kennebec Estuary Land Trust (KELT) changed dramatically. “It’s put us into territory we never anticipated,” says Kinne. “We could easily quadruple our staff time to handle the work.”
The Georgetown clam diggers contacted KELT in early 2009 because they needed help in persuading the DMR to re-evaluate requirements for reopening highly productive clam flats in Sagadahoc Bay and Heal Eddy, areas that are vital for town clam diggers. Kinne says the organization arranged for interested parties, including clam diggers from other towns on the river and representatives from the DMR, to discuss the situation. As a result, DMR agreed it was safe to raise the river discharge cutoff figure at these flats, which open onto the ocean, from 30,000 to 60,000 cubic feet per second. The flats re-opened in February of 2010 after a year of water quality testing.
Heyburn says that for 20 years KELT has focused on protecting the resource by preserving land that borders the river. Now, while continuing efforts to add more land to their 1,738 conserved acres, they are also extending their capabilities to address other threats to the estuary’s health, which has such a great importance for the entire region’s economy. All of the year’s educational and recreational programs each season-they include stewardship of the land in the spring; guided hikes in the summer; an environmental lecture series in the fall; and a reading group as well as snowshoeing in the winter-will in some way be related to the quality of the water in the estuary. So far the land trust has hosted a class at Merrymeeting Fields in Woolwich exploring the importance of maintaining healthy riparian zones as buffers between land and water; and a workshop in June that taught participants how to build bog bridges to protect trails from erosion.
Although the Kennebec estuary is a defined area from Merrymeeting Bay to the mouth of the river at Georgetown and Fort Popham, water quality of the estuary is dependent on the health of the entire river watershed. Extending to Moosehead Lake in Maine and Umbagog Lake in New Hampshire, the watershed drains one-third of the land in Maine and part of NH, and includes the Androscoggin River and four smaller rivers that feed into Merrymeeting Bay.
The Kennebec River’s estuary and marshes, which comprise 20 percent of the tidal marshes in Maine, are the largest concentration of salt marshes in the state and serve as a nursery for multitudes of sea creatures. The river provides habitat for alewife and eels and numerous species of fish, including striped bass, shad and Atlantic and short-nosed sturgeon. Thousands of birds feed in Merrymeeting Bay during fall and spring migrations.
The quality of the water affects all of them, and, as Heyburn emphasizes, even the smallest human practices, like dumping car oil or using pesticides and fertilizers on property in the watershed, will affect the water quality. Having a failed septic system or an overboard discharge, she says, can close down an entire cove’s productive clam flats. Larger scale pollution comes from raw sewage overflows at sewage plants upriver during heavy rainstorms, and from industrial pollution, including agricultural run-off. All have a detrimental impact on the safety of the flora and fauna of the river, especially the delicate creatures of the estuary.
Kinne says that even though the Kennebec River estuary is the largest tidal estuary on the East Coast north of the Hudson River, water quality in the estuary, which is defined by its mix of fresh and salt water, does not have an overseeing state agency. The Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) works with fresh water issues; the DMR with salt water.
To launch its focus on water quality, KELT has reached out to other organizations that are concerned with the river’s health. A regional shellfish group that includes representatives from state, regional and local groups has grown out of the initial clam diggers discussions. “We’re forming partnerships with groups like the DEP, DMR, Time and Tide Resource Conservation and Development Area, and the Androscoggin Soil and Water Conservation District,” says Heyburn. Heyburn hopes that by partnering with other groups, they will be able to pool available information and strengthen their position when applying for grants to fund new programs and research.
One of KELT’s first water quality initiatives, funded by the Merrymeeting Bay Trust, was to hire the firm Biological Conservation of Bowdoinham to compile existing research on the Kennebec Estuary into a comprehensive report, “The Kennebec Estuary: Restoration Challenges and Opportunities.” This summer, a Bowdoin College intern will create a web site for the report, which Heyburn hopes will become an online resource and will be a clearinghouse where research can be added and updated.
Jon Hentz, a Georgetown native who has served as shellfish warden for Georgetown and surrounding towns for 20 years and is a member of the Georgetown Shellfish Conservation Committee, originally connected the Georgetown committee with KELT. He and committee chairman Chad Campbell are the two certified water quality testers for the Georgetown area, and as such, maintain close contact with KELT. “Hentz,” says Kinne, “is a tremendous resource for us. His input has been crucial.”
After 20 years’ work with clams, Hentz sees cleaning up the water as the top priority, and he believes it cannot be done piecemeal. “The whole watershed needs to be involved,” he says. Having observed the “fabulous work” done by groups such as the Friends of Casco Bay, the Friends of Merrymeeting Bay and watershed groups for other rivers, he sees KELT’s water quality work as essential to raising public consciousness of water quality in the Kennebec Estuary.
He would like to see a Kennebec River group made up of representatives of communities from Georgetown to Moosehead. Kinne notes that such a group, the Kennebec River Initiative, now operating as the Kennebec River Network, was curtailed by funding cuts. “I hope it can be revived,” she says.
Inspired by a watershed map of the Androscoggin River, Hentz thinks one way to increase public awareness and interest in protecting the Kennebec’s water quality would be to create a similar map that highlights historical sites throughout the immense Kennebec Watershed. “I’d like to see something that’s suitable to put on a living room wall,” he says. “Print and distribute thousands of them.”
He also hopes for grants for more water testing, so that numbers could be presented to polluters to show the effect of their practices.
Kinne says that for KELT, “This is a long haul project. The watershed is so huge. I hope we can solve many of the problems by having small groups take up one issue, such as overboard discharges, but there is so much to it, I don’t know where it’s going to lead.”
For further information about Kennebec Estuary Land Trust and its programs for the public, visit www.kennebecestuary.org or stop by the office at 92 Front St. in Bath, tel. 442-8400
Muriel Hendrix is a freelance writer who lives in Bath.