By Dr. Robert Thorson
To drive or not to drive; that used to be the question when it came to ice-glazed roads. Today, however, lots of us have quit asking. We assume that we can drive no matter how miserable the winter driving conditions are. We know we can count on vigilant, even heroic, road crews to dispense plenty of sand and salt to make our passage safer.
The threat of litigation has made this all possible. One spinout on black ice can now be blamed on someone else — usually some unnamed member of a public works crew who didn’t lay it on thick enough. Poor traction begets sand, which begets more traffic, which begets more sand. In the thick of winter, paved streets temporarily become sand and gravel roads, with the binder being ice rather than asphalt.
Then the sun comes out. Melting begins. Ice-cold saltwater flushes into gutters and drains into streams. Being slightly heavier than normal water, it moves with more force and power, carrying loose sand more easily. Between each winter storm, our streams and wetlands are getting buried alive. Safe in our cars, speeding along dry roads, we don’t give it a second thought.
Those of us who walk to work see it differently. My pedestrian commute takes me through the Alfred E. Moss Wildlife Sanctuary, a tiny corner of the University of Connecticut dedicated to the memory of a lifelong conservationist. Its streams and swamps are suffocating under an excess of sand and salt. Something similar is happening to a stream near and dear to your heart.
The idea for this essay took root last spring, just as the skunk cabbages were doing the same. For weeks, I had been observing the regular doses of sediment pollution into one of the sanctuary’s (supposedly protected) streams. I poked around the place with John Woike, a Courant photographer. It was on one of those picture- perfect mornings last April, one accompanied by the sight of daffodils, the sound of traffic on nearby state Route 195 and the scent of earth awakening from winter.
Our plan was to document the effects of road sanding, then publish it as a photo essay just as the first ice storm of the 2003- 2004 winter was approaching. Our project was to expose the hidden harm done by everyone’s favorite punching bag: the Connecticut Department of Transportation. Little did we know that other culprits shared the guilt.
The unpolluted “control” for our study was the headwater fork of Hanks Brook, which cascades crystal clear out of an old millpond. Completely surrounded by woodland and walking trails, it’s the perfect spot for families, reminiscent of Walden Pond.
The polluted fork of the stream, of almost equal size, enters the Moss Sanctuary as an underground drain beneath state Route 275. I was prepared for the sand and Styrofoam coffee cups just below the culvert. I wasn’t prepared for the disposable diapers and sand- engorged condoms. After a moment of revulsion, I followed the stream to boulders so buried in sand that only their saltencrusted tips protruded. Beyond, the stream flattened out, then disappeared, its floodplain smothered beyond recognition. In place of the stream was a fan of sediment braiding through the trees, covering more than half an acre of wetland. Skunk cabbages, a diagnostic species of our wetland flora, were somehow managing to keep their heads above the influx.
A tributary to the polluted fork enters the Moss Sanctuary through a sand-plugged culvert that drains beneath the sidewalk on which I normally walk. Beyond the culvert was a sediment-retention basin. Designed to protect the tributary from an onslaught of coarse sediment, the retention basin was filled with a pickup truck’s worth of muddy gravel. Just downstream stood a second line of defense, a silt fence built across the normally dry channel to catch whatever fine-grained particles made it through the retention basin. It stood like a forlorn lighthouse amid a slurry of sandy mud.
The sand above the silt fence contained red pebbles, which could have only come from the Jurassic sandstones of the Connecticut River Valley some 15 miles away, probably from a gravel-pit excavation in Manchester, where the small stones are found above town aquifers. In other words, the cost of road sanding in Storrs — and probably in your town as well — includes the cost of removing materials that buffer our groundwater supplies.
There’s a political side to this story as well; a neighbor- against-neighbor story with a lesson for us all. The main campus of UConn is a geographic, economic and environmental colossus within the town of Mansfield. A few Mansfield residents consider this “elephant in the bedroom” to be a permanent “big bad neighbor.” To most of us, however, the pendulum seems to swing back and forth — good neighbor, bad neighbor — with respect to the university’s environmental record.
At one point, UConn was seen as a good neighbor for building a classy Environmental Research Institute to help protect public welfare. Then UConn was a bad neighbor when it was identified as the source of groundwater pollution from old leaky landfills and chemical waste pits. Good-neighbor UConn funds an environmental manager to make sure things go well. Bad-neighbor UConn fills the position with an attorney formerly linked to the nuclear industry. UConn becomes a good neighbor once again when the guy turns out to be OK. Then it’s a bad neighbor when the data on its groundwater pollution becomes part of the probe into scientific misconduct involving the research institute.
These swings of the pendulum confuse me because they swing in my face. I work for UConn as a faculty scientist. I live in Mansfield with my family and volunteer for the Mansfield Conservation Commission.
On the issue of road sand and salt in wetlands, however, UConn is the one being dumped on. The DOT is the largest contributor of sand. But I also traced the source of diaper-bearing effluent to Mansfield’s new recreation center, the parking lots and sidewalks for the town office complex (which include parking for the state police) and to a large swath of pavement owned by E.O. Smith High School, most of it reserved for faculty and staff parking. Every construction worker, trooper, town employee, town-hall visitor and more than a thousand faculty and students walked on sand that now chokes the wetlands of the Moss Sanctuary.
My point is not to suggest that we compromise on road safety. All of us who travel through this area do so safely because of the commendable work done by public employees at the town, the high school and the state highway department. What I do suggest, however, is that all of us, at every level, examine more closely the hidden costs of driving, salting and sanding. Only then can we get down to the work of protecting our environment carefully and efficiently.