Dirty Water: Cleaning The Charles River

Please include the Charles River Cleanup Boat in your discussion.  It is a totally volunteer organization which survives on donations alone.  We remove floating trash in the river between Watertown and the Science Museum.  See the website:  http://www.cleanupboat.org/

The Cleanup Boat and its volunteers are true unsung heroes!

What impact will the proposed dredging of the Muddy River have on the health of the Charles? It seems that the pollution in the bed of the Muddy, particularly the high concentration of fecal coliform is not a great thing to stir up and release into the Charles.

As a member of the BU sailing team from 1978-1982, I sailed on the stretch of river in the picture above almost every day in the fall and in the spring.  I swallowed plenty of river water and it never made me sick, as far as I know.  But, if you turned your boat over in a shallow part of the river and got your mast stuck in the mud, when you righted your boat, the nastiest, stinkiest mud ever would fall off your mast into your boat.  We were also very careful after a big storm when we could see that the Cambridge sewage treatment plan up river from us was overwhelmed and sewage was going right into the river.  Yuck!