By Dr. Robert Thorson

Last Saturday night was a riot of lightning, thunder, tree-toppling gusts and drenching rainfall. By morning, Connecticut had been spared the tornadoes that ripped through much of the Eastern United States. It was not spared the heavy taint of urban pollution flushing into our watercourses and rivers from impervious surfaces.

Sunday morning, I watched a gush of gray-green storm water eroding a gully in Valentine Meadow on the University of Connecticut campus within an Level-A aquifer protection zone. The murky flow continued toward the Fenton River, a highly protected wild trout fishery and a source of drinking water for several towns. For a moment, I was transfixed by the contrast between beautiful landscape and its sad hydrological history.

The Storrs campus is appreciated statewide for its “cow college” roots, being the former pasture of Charles and Augustus Storrs, who donated the land. But to the Mansfield Conservation Commission, it’s an island of urban pollution within the largely wooded town.

Valentine Meadow is an iconic horse pasture fringed by spreading oaks and tucked into a hollow south of Horsebarn Hill. Two centuries ago, it probably was a marshy red maple swamp similar to those we now protect for their many hidden values. Back then, however, the ditching, clearing and seeding were considered improvements.

Obscured by the meadow’s pastoral image is the compelling reality that it’s a receiving basin for many underground campus drains – the wash water from pavement soiled by the exhaust and oily drippings of automobiles and de-icing salts; the rinse water of dust from roofs; and the nutrient-rich water from fertilized lawns and gardens.

Also obscured is the fact that some of the tainted runoff was diverted to Valentine Meadow to prevent its going elsewhere. The focal point of this diversion is Swan Lake, 2.5 acres of murky water averaging three feet deep.

Originally, it was a wet swale draining west toward the Willimantic River through Eagleville Brook. But during the 1970s, to mitigate chemical pollution, the lake outlet was raised to send flow eastward toward the Fenton. In the works are plans to divert an additional 44 acres of the Eagleville Brook watershed into Swan Lake, much of which will be from the impervious cover of parking lots. This is a case of “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” an extra dose of urban storm water is being routed away from the more impaired Willimantic into the less impaired Fenton.

Though hardly swimmable, Swan Lake does an OK job as a reflecting pool for nearby trees and buildings. This visual effect helped inspire the exterior architectural design for the adjacent chemistry building. Swan Lake was seen as a mill pond missing its 19th-century mill. The massive chemistry building became that mill.

This design made perfect sense to UConn planners, who saw chemistry building as the gateway to its science and technology quad. Symbolically, it helps bridge the institution’s agricultural past to its modern role fostering emerging technologies. So compelling was the exterior design, it won a national award from the American Institute of Architects.

Though I agree that it’s a beautiful building, it’s also one facade upon another. Imposing 19th-century mills were built against large rivers in lowlands underlain by extensive aquifers. Manchester, Stafford Springs and Willimantic are good examples.

In Storrs, the faux mill of the chemistry building was built against a glorified seepage puddle straddling the bedrock watershed divide. There, the mill stream is underground and flows in the wrong direction, away from the mill into a drained wetland that’s lost much of its natural ability to mitigate pollution.

UConn is trying to do the right thing. But being an intensely urbanized campus on a bedrock plateau, it has no choice but to suck water up from the town and flush it back down.