Water pollution and our week at Castle Island

Welcome to this week’s blog  we will be talking about how our team spent our time at castle island and how relevant water pollution still is in Boston. This week our team and I had a lot of fun playing games and eating Sullivan's. Our group had to make a video consisting of activities do there, history about Castle Island, how to fish, and about the water quality of the Boston Harbor. 

Our focus of this blog will be about recognizing water pollution and what has our city done to prevent this pollution. First we must know the benefits of clean water and the consequences of dirty water. Water is vital to our health, economy, and quality of life. Boston has made a huge change over these past decades considering our harbor wasn't clean enough to swim in, at one point all sewage waste and human waste was dumped into the harbor without any filtration. In 1972 the clean water act was passed by the U.S to help clean up all heavily polluted waters in the country. In 2012 the BWSC (Boston water and sewer commission) had to pay a civil fee of $235,000 for violating the clean water act. Boston's most notable island is deer island where we built a high tech water treatment plant that converts our waste to fertilizer and energy for all. 

Not only was pollution the problem but our sewage runoff systems were old and not efficient at all. A lot of these sewage systems would get overflown by trash and this extra trash had nowhere else to go but into our harbor. The extra raw sewage and trash would flow into the rivers near by such as the Charles, Chelsea, mystic, and Neponset. This pollution would feed bad bacteria causing a lot of toxic algae to bloom, the bloom would threaten the ecosystems living the water. 

This is all I had for today, I wish everyone a blessed week...

-Alex S.