The state’s new requirements for towns like Wellfleet with coastal waters threatened by increased nitrogen pollution involve heavy financial burdens. It is important to understand why these new requirements are being imposed.
Nitrogen from fertilizers, road runoff, and especially from cesspools and septic systems leaches into the aquifer and eventually seeps into estuaries. This excess nitrogen feeds algae blooms that kill fish and shellfish and increase eutrophication. Dying algae take up oxygen, which reduces the amount of dissolved oxygen in the water and leads to the death of aquatic life, particularly aquatic animals on the sea floor. Increased nitrogen in our estuary is a direct threat to our oyster industry.
Some people in Wellfleet have questioned whether this is an immediate threat. They argue that tidal flushing will mitigate the effects of nitrogen overloading or that the oysters themselves will clean our waters of nitrogen. Science indicates otherwise.
Oysters do take up nitrogen, but the nitrogen does not disappear unless the oysters are removed. And even if the oysters are all removed, there is a limit to the ability of oysters to take up the excessive amounts of nitrogen flowing into our estuary.
At the turn of the 20th century, Bostonians believed that tidal flushing would take care of the sewage they were dumping into Boston Harbor. What they did not realize is that nature is far more complicated. It is true that tides bring in more oxygenated water, but tidal flushing does not work the way they thought it did.
Coastal topography and ocean currents determine what happens to waste that gets dumped into tidal waters. And even if tidal flushing worked as simply as Bostonians wanted it to, the sheer volume of waste can be overwhelming. We now know the consequence of Boston’s simplistic vision of tidal flushing as the solution to pollution: a eutrophic harbor requiring billions of dollars to restore it to health.
Wellfleet is not at that stage of eutrophication, and we’re nowhere near having to spend hundreds of millions to clean up our estuary. But we are headed in that direction. The longer that we fiddle with our watershed plan and put off dealing with the problem of nitrogen overload in our estuary, the more expensive the remedy will be.
We could hope that the state backs down and allows us to continue pretending the problem is in the distant future or can be solved on the cheap. The consequence of that approach could very well be dead oysters and floating islands of dead fish in our harbor.
The state has money at this moment to help towns alleviate the problems of nitrogen overloads. The future of that money is in question. It is a limited pool, and cuts at the federal level mean there will be other demands on the state budget that will limit the replenishing of the Cape and Islands wastewater fund. The longer Wellfleet delays moving forward, the less state funding it will be able to tap.
Our choices are stark. If we delay and the added nitrogen reduces our ability to meet the state’s nitrogen reduction targets, we may have to sewer the whole town at excessive cost and face property tax increases that will freeze out all but the very wealthy. Alternatively, we could pressure the state through our elected officials to back off — and then let the harbor die of eutrophication.
Another alternative is to quickly implement the Wellfleet board of health’s regulations, on which the select board has been stalling. The select board’s concern is that implementing the regulations now will be an undue burden on our poorer residents. Unfortunately, the board’s delay may result in a dramatically greater burden on all our residents.
John Cumbler is a member of the Wellfleet Conservation Commission.
